Art Education

ISSN: 0004-3125 (Print) 2325-5161 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uare20

Creative Agency: Empowerment in Art and Design

Education

Amelia M. Kraehe (Senior Editor)

To cite this article: Amelia M. Kraehe (Senior Editor) (2018) Creative Agency: Empowerment in
Art and Design Education, Art Education, 71:6, 4-8, DOI: 10.1080/00043125.2018.1514835

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00043125.2018.1514835

Published online: 16 Oct 2018.

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 C
Editorial

reativity has long been

the battle cry of the arts
in education. This started changing
Creative some time ago, and now almost

Agency:
everyone thinks creativity is a good idea.
School mission statements embrace
creative thinking. Economists consider
creative industries key growth sectors of
economies around the world. And more
locally, public officials race to refashion
once neglected urban landscapes into
hip creative cities.

On the surface, the broad-based enthusiasm for creativity

looks like a positive development. Yet the arts in schools
are not necessarily seeing additional support. Just this
summer, Carol, a K-8 art teacher, wrote on the National Art
Education Association’s digital forum, Collaborate, about her
school’s junior high art program that was cut due to shifting
curricular priorities. Responses poured in from around the
country. I personally was moved by the encouragement
Carol received. It included words urging her not to lose sight
of her own creative agency in this situation. The conversation
that unfolded generated concrete strategies she could use to
improvise.
Carol’s story is just one example of how creative agency is
fostered in art and design education. Agency commonly is
defined as the capacity to reflect upon and direct one’s own
thoughts and actions. When we talk about creative activities,
humans typically are given the starring role to play. A few
examples help illustrate this:

Empowerment in Carlos chose the red marker, not the blue one.
Eve wishes to draw a boat using charcoal.

Art and Design

The Art II students complete their clay pieces today.
The tour group interpreted the photographs.

The red marker, charcoal, clay, and photographs—are cast

Education as passive objects, mere things controlled and acted upon by

people. Carlos, Eve, the Art II students, and the tour group
are the sole agents of creative thought and action. Over the
last few decades, developments in creativity studies suggest a
need to reconsider such person-centered beliefs about what
creativity is and how to generate more of it.

4 Art Education
Figure 1. Rasquache is the art of making do, creating more with less. Screenshot by Amelia M. Kraehe.
Social psychologist Vlad Glăveneau (2014) is one of my favorite
writers on this topic. He and others (e.g., Clapp, 2017) say that
creativity does not come from ideas inside a person’s head, as
many tests for creativity assume. Nor is creative agency exclusive
to humans. Instead, creativity, or the making of something new,
is a distributed phenomenon, which is to say it emerges from the
interplay between a person and all the affordances found in one’s
context.
The distributed perspective says that context is integral to the
creativity of artists, authors, students, and inventors because
the efficacy of a person’s creative agency is entangled with and
dependent on the assistance (and sometimes resistance) of other
elements external to the person. An good analogy is the way a
constellation emerges in between stars and not by the power of
one star alone. In much the same way, creativity emerges from the
collaborative relationship between person and context and not
from the creative person alone.
There are at least four elements of context that intervene to
enable and constrain human creative agency (Glăveneau, 2014).
They are:
Social recognition and validation through feedback from an
audience or other public. We might call this the co-creative
power of people.
Material affordances of nonhuman things (for example, the
color saturation and linear quality of Carlos’s red and blue
markers) that enable the human imagination to extend beyond
the person and take form in the world. We might call this the
co-creative power of things.
Cultural practices, symbols, and meanings that already exist
collectively within a community and empower the creative
person to reconfigure new practices, new symbols, and new
meanings. We might call this the co-creative power of culture.
Historical development of creative practices over centuries
and smaller increments of time (years, weeks, or minutes) that
enable the person to imitate and learn skills, improvise with
materials and methods, and develop new conventions. We
might call this the co-creative power of time.
These contextual elements point to the importance of other people,
things, culture, and time in any creative process.
November 2018 5
 Figure 2. Domesticana art shares some of the sensibilities of rasquache art but brings to it a feminist sensibility and critique of
patriarchy. Images by Karen Gilmore (2016). Frida.

Context enables and constrains the personal choices and
possible outcomes of creative activity. As many art teachers know
already, the structure and guidelines in an art project or design
challenge are limits on creativity that simultaneously can provide a
context that catalyzes learners’ agency (Fendler & Hamrock, 2018;
Graham, 2009). Without any context or structure for artmaking,
many students find themselves without ideas for how to begin.
Context, therefore, plays a significant co-creative role in artistic
and other creative processes, both limiting and extending what
individuals can achieve on their own.
In situations in which there are excessive constraints—too little
time and material support or outright suppression of creative
agency—people nonetheless find ways to create with and within
(and sometimes against!) the contextual limits imposed on
their lives.

SENIOR EDITOR: Amelia M. Kraehe
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT: David Herman, Jr.
INSTRUCTIONAL RESOURCES EDITOR: Sarah Travis
Social Media Editor: Eli Burke
EDITORIAL REVIEW BOARD: Amanda Alexander, Jaehan Bae,
Judith Briggs, William Charland, Sheng Kuan Chung, Shana
Cinquemani, Cala Coats, Stephanie Danker, Tyler Denmead,
Carissa DiCindio, Leslie Gates, Hsiao-Cheng (Sandrine)
Han, Joana Hyatt, Andrea Kantrowitz, J. Célèste Kee, Dana
Carlisle Kletchka, Aaron Knochel, Carrie Nordlund, David
Pariser, Mara Pierce, Natasha Reid, Jennifer Richardson, Lynn
Sanders-Bustle, Julie Sawyer, Ross H. Schlemmer, Sara Scott
Shields, Borim Song, Justin Sutters, Juuso Tervo, Gloria J.
Wilson, Christine Woywod
NAEA BOARD: Kim Huyler Defibaugh, Thom Knab, Jessica
Burton Aulisio, Jeffrey Broome, Peter Curran, Jennifer
Dahl, Joshua Drews, Michelle Grohe, Bob Reeker, James
Rees, Meg Skow, Elizabeth Stuart Whitehead, Diane Wilkin,
Deborah B. Reeve
NAEA EDITORIAL CONSULTANT: Lynn Ezell
NAEA PUBLICATIONS MANAGER: Janice Hughes
NAEA EDITORIAL ASSOCIATE: Corine Sprigle
Art Education is the official journal of the National Art
Education Association (NAEA).
Manuscripts are welcome at all times on any aspect of art
education. Please submit double-spaced files, in accordance
with the Publication Manual of the American Psychological
Association, to the journal’s Editorial Manager site:
www.editorialmanager.com/uare/default.aspx. For other
correspondence, write to Amelia M. Kraehe, Senior Editor,
Art Education, at arteducationjournal@gmail.com.
Authors are encouraged to submit 4-6 photographs with
their manuscripts. To facilitate the process of anonymous
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and not on the manuscript file itself.
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6 Art Education
 For instance, rasquachismo and hip-hop aesthetics emerged
from Chicano and African American communities living under
oppressive conditions in the United States (Barnet-Sanchez,
2005; Cobb, 2007).1 Rasquache and hip-hop represent the art of
making do, the practice of improvising with whatever elements
are at hand. Artists appropriate cultural references and invent
new uses for old or undervalued materials (including sometimes
their own bodies). Each aesthetic has its own forms and styles of
expression, but rasquachismo and hip-hop share an irreverence
toward dominant cultural sensibilities, an attitude of spontaneity,
a connectedness to the past, and a resistance to discriminatory
policies and practices that have adversely affected communities of
color over generations.
The articles in this issue of Art Education feature research
and ideas about how art and design education fosters creative
agency. In “Art Studio as Thinking Lab: Fostering Metacognition
in Art Classrooms,” Julia Marshall and Kimberley D’Adamo
investigate reflective practices that are integral to enhancing art
students’ creative capacities and sense of agency. They describe
how an art class used individual and collaborative arts-based
inquiries to foster high school students’ metacognition—
the ability to observe and reflect on one’s own thinking and
learning—and its implications for increased student autonomy,
agency, and ability to persist through complex creative
processes. Teri Evans-Palmer discusses how she structured and
implemented artist journals as a tool to support reflection on
personally held beliefs and development of creative self-efficacy
among generalist preservice educators in “Teaching and Shaping
Elementary Generalist Perceptions With Artist Journals.”
Creative agency is also cultivated through practices of cultural
critique. Matthew Etherington shares his experience teaching
a lesson on fashion in which middle school students learned how
Figure 3. A segment of hip-hop photography takes as its subject matter the poses
and imagery of b-boying and b-girling. Images by Nate Bolt (2007). B-Boy.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode.
Figure 4. Critic Sally Banes defined hip-hop dance as
physical graffiti. Images by Nate Bolt (2007). B-Boy.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
legalcode.
to critically analyze and creatively respond to ideologies embedded
in everyday visual culture in “Criticizing Visual Culture Through
Fashion Design and Role-Playing.” Jennifer Katz-Buonincontro
examines art education inequalities in “Creativity for Whom? Art
Education in the Age of Creative Agency, Decreased Resources,
and Unequal Art Achievement Outcomes,” and she provides
curriculum recommendations for developing creativity within the
context of social justice art education.
Other art educators turn to contemporary art
practice as way to encourage creative agency.
In “Socially Engaged Art as Living Form:
Activating Spaces and Creating New Ways
of Being in a Middle School Setting,” Lynn
Sanders-Bustle wonders whether socially
engaged art, a contemporary art practice
that invites audience participation and uses
conversation as a medium, can be successful in
schools. She offers a description of the process
of setting up an art encounter in the school
hallways and explores how creativity emerged
relationally, in the novel ways students moved
through the physical space and new kinds
of social interactions between students and
teachers.
Stephanie Harvey Danker looks at a
series of contemporary artworks by socially
engaged artist Charity White that addresses
hostile architecture and built environments as
experienced by people who are homeless or
displaced by gentrification. In “Art Activism
Through a Critical Approach to Place: Charity
November 2018 7
 White’s Prescriptive Space,” she outlines how one might go about
designing a place-based art lesson that exploits the power of place
in our lives and in the making of our identities. The Instructional
Resources, “Power and Control: Responding to Social Injustice
With Photographic Memes,” by Amanda K. Arlington offers
teaching ideas centered around the photographic meme, a
relatively new creative form and critical art practice with historical
beginnings in protest photography of the civil rights era and
the later influences from the work of conceptual artists such as
Barbara Kruger and Lorna Simpson.
Thinking back on Carol’s situation reminds us that the contexts
of art and design education are varied and always changing.
Though change can be scary and stressful at times, creative agency
as a collective capacity means that each of us is not alone in
References
Barnet-Sanchez, H. (2005). Tomás Ybarra-Frausto and Amalia Mesa-Bains: A
critical discourse from within. Art Journal, 64(4), 91-93.
Clapp, E. P. (2017). Participatory creativity: Introducing access and equity to the
creative classroom. New York, NY: Routledge.
Cobb, W. J. (2007). To the break of dawn: A freestyle on the hip hop aesthetic. New
York, NY: New York University Press.
Fendler, R., & Hamrock, J. (2018). Feeling free? Learning and unlearning in
the enabling constraints of an art education summer program. Art Education,
71(4), 22-28.
Glăveneau, V. P. (2014). Distributed creativity: Thinking outside the box of the
creative individual. Cham/Heidelberg, Germany: Springer International.
Graham, M. (2009). AP studio art as an enabling constraint for secondary art
education. Studies in Art Education, 50(2), 201-204.
Endnote
Chicano was first used pejoratively to describe lower status brown-skinned
1 

navigating the unknowns. Creative potential exists everywhere in
every context. To see creativity in this way might just open up new
and empowering ways to face whatever may lie ahead. n
Mexican Americans. During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the term
was imbued with pride as people of Mexican origin living in the United States
began to self-identify as Chicano and Chicana. Today, Chicanx is preferred
since it is gender neutral.

—Amelia M. Kraehe, Senior Editor

Amelia M. Kraehe is Associate Professor of Art and Visual
Culture Education at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Email:
arteducationjournal@gmail.com

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

August 21, 2018

Dear Art Education:

I recently had the pleasure of coming across the article Making Connections: Collaborative
Arts Integration Planning for Powerful Lessons (Vol. 71, No. 4) by Tara Carpenter and Jayme
Gandara. As the Director of Education and Programs for Young Audiences of Louisiana and a
member of the leadership team at Young Audiences Charter School (YACS), I was thrilled to
see that Tara had gained some inspiration during her visit to YACS during the 2015 National
Art Education Association Conference. The focus of the article beautifully supports our
arts-integrated school model, which relies on collaboration between classroom teachers
and teaching artists to create and deliver arts-integrated curriculum featuring deep
learning in both the arts and the connecting content area. At YACS, we believe deeply in the
power of arts integration to ignite student learning and are encouraged to see that Tara
and Jayme are disseminating this approach to teaching through their networks.

Collaboratively planning and implementing high quality arts integrated lessons can be
more challenging than using traditional curriculum. Co-planning requires unpacking at
least two sets of standards and analyzing them to ensure true connection. Co-teaching
requires open communication, trust, and delineation of teaching roles. All of this takes time
and energy, and we appreciate our faculty’s perseverance. In recognition of this dedication,
it is important to acknowledge their efforts, expertise, creativity, and authorship. The
water mandala project that Tara observed during her visit to YACS, the project that spurred
her and Jayme’s creation of subsequent curriculum, was conceived by teaching artist
Valorie Polmer in collaboration with her 3rd grade co-teachers, Monica Byrne, Monica
Fontova, Chris Salerno, and Temetra Christian. I would very much appreciate if they could
be credited for this work in future publications. Without them and their colleagues, our
students would not have access to such high quality arts-integrated learning.

Kudos to Tara and Jayme for making arts integration accessible to teachers and students
across the country. The doors at YACS are always open to other aspiring arts integrationists
who would like to visit New Orleans to learn about our work.

Sincerely,
Jenny James
Young Audiences/Louisiana Wolf Trap
New Orleans, LA

8 Art Education