Conceptualising visual learning as an embodied and performative pedagogy for all classrooms

The challenge for arts educators is to find language and conceptual framings for visual art education that resonate with the transformative and literacy aims of mainstream education and position visual learning as core and visual proficiency as essential. The unique value of visual knowing is now an imperative in our ocular-centric culture where new technologies, consumerism, and unprecedented mobility impact on all students in the twenty-first century. Visual creative adaptability and its culturally located critical and generative understandings draw from our sense-rich world of human experience. Grounded in the theories of communicative knowing; becoming as the experience of performing self; experience and creativity as personal agency; and informed by socio-cultural inquiry, visuality, and art practice as research, the research connects explicitly to socio-cultural values. This paper presents a conceptual model of Visual Embodied and Performative Pedagogy, as a renewed language for visual arts education. The paper argues that deeply felt and enacted visual experience, as art-making, is central to personal socio-cultural inquiry and subjectivity insights. The paper will foreground the theory behind embodied art-making as it informs an individuals’ understandings of self with empirical Australian visual education research, between 2004–2007. The research centres the significance of images in society and the need for all students to develop visual communicative competencies. The benefits of working with images as socially embedded and embodied visual inquiry are argued. In so doing it calls into question the established primary role of images in learning as illustrative. It argues that learning through imaging acts is now an essential conduit for knowing and the mediation and communication of ideas and feelings in the new image-oriented society