7. Negotiating Shared Understandings of Our Work Through a Collaborative Curriculum: Exploring the Experience of Creativity in Cross Discipline Visual Arts Projects

Abstract

In 1994, the National Arts Education Association created a research agenda to address major research issues in the field of visual arts education for the purpose of examining, negotiating, and modifying commonly held beliefs in the field of art education. Research by arts educators has done much to inform visual arts education theory and practice, but largely through studies by individuals with few collaborative efforts. In 1991, Neil Owen Houser proposed a collaborative processing model for arts education, which reflects the experiential or constructivist nature of instruction. In this paper, we present our reflections on our shared work where we explored the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration, the role of play in the process of problem solving, and how experiential learning strategies and techniques could be applied to the teaching of various subjects through visually-mediated arts projects.