Interpreting Students' Spatial Experiences in the Contemporary Visual Media World
  Beatriz Tomsic Cerkez

The proliferation of new technologies has affected almost all aspects of our lives and resulted in a revolution in the world of visual media. The "pictorial turn" is now in progress. The ways we deal with the plethora of visual information the world of visual media offers today open an inevitable number of very interesting and highly-significant inquiries applied to the field of education in general--and of (visual) art education in particular, since it deals mostly with visual images of all kinds.

Especially worth note in today's school are those students who are in daily contact with television or video with its colorful, fast-moving sequences of images, and of course, computers, which provide a wide range of possible uses and experiences. Scanning and combining images, experimenting with tools offered by different programs, exploring the possibility of multiple printings, and the divergence between printed and screen images are only a few possible areas to consider. These changes do not only imply increasing speed of passing images, mechanical simplicity, and wide possibilities in the resolution of different technical processes but perhaps most of all a specific experience of space perception and representation, which every student carries with him/herself to the classroom and is essential to education in general, and to art education in particular.   full text

Editor's Note:
  Karen Heise

The View From Here:
Lynne Fukuda

Who are this issue's contributors?

On the Road Again: Travel Narrative as Comic Relief
  Karen Heise

Perhaps more than any other human endeavor, traveling--widely, freely, and leisurely--best encapsulates and yet enables the human spirit. We cannot fly as birds, swim as fish, swing through vined jungles like monkeys, and dig underground like moles, but we're determined to try, and laugh at ourselves in the process. Our failures are not fatal enough (usually) to daunt our wanderlust; neither are treacherous roads, lost-ness, nearly rotten food, and disappointments at the end of the journey's goal. We still press on, looking for that "Holy Grail," usually unaware until the last possible minute whether its origin is inside worth the pursuit we religiously give it.   full text

Fiction: Astrid
  Peter Pierre

When Overwhelmed by Students, Go Virtual
  R. Thomas Berner

Until my last semester at Penn State, I never taught a class larger than 25 students. The courses were "skills" courses focusing on learning professional journalism skills rather than theory. In such courses, students write a lot and instructors are expected to promptly return papers--heavily edited. Individual conferences are frequent, especially with students who are having problems.

It is those conferences where the struggling student suddenly has a revelation and learns something he or she was not grasping in classroom discussion. Clearly, the best form of instruction is one to one but it is impractical in some courses.

The pressure on class size is ever upward, limited only in some cases by the lack of physical space. How long that limitation will continue remains to be seen. This problem of increasing class size is not going to go away, so what can faculty reasonably do in the face of this mounting problem? This is what I did.  full text

Call for Papers