Viewfinding: Perspectives on New Media Curriculum in the Arts (Minding the Media)

This is a collection of essays on the arts, new media, popular culture, and technologies as they influence practices of curriculum development and teaching. The authors – artists, educators, scholars, and researchers with both scholarly and practical expertise – share their teaching practices and curriculum knowledge, and reflect upon challenging issues in contemporary art, popular culture, new media, and technology. Each chapter proposes pedagogical structures and curriculum resources that can be adapted to diverse school contexts and technical resources. The perspectives gathered in this book reflect ideas drawn from several disciplines, including contemporary art, histories of the arts, culture and technology, cultural studies, and media studies, as well as various approaches to the study of technologies; authors also incorporate a range of educational theories and instructional practices, mainly from the visual and performing arts. At times explicit and at others implicit, these wide-ranging conceptual influences inform the varied curriculum and teaching practices described here. Together, these essays and their companion DVD, which illustrates many of these diverse perspectives, provide a comprehensive and thoughtful look at arts-based approaches to new media.

The Editors: Cathy Mullen’s teaching and research has focused on curriculum development and teaching in photography, light-based media, and digital arts. Mullen is Professor Emerita of Art Education in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, where she taught undergraduate and graduate courses for art educators and supervised numerous M.A. and Ph.D. thesis students researching new media art and education.
Janice Rahn is interdisciplinary in her research and teaching, focusing on the poetics and politics of popular culture. She is author of the book Painting Without Permission: An Ethnographic Study of Hip Hop Graffiti Culture (2001), as well as articles on media and the social construction of identity and on video as a research tool and art material. Rahn has exhibited her audio/video art installations throughout Canada. She is Associate Professor of Art and Education at the University of Lethbridge.