August 11:
PT 2.00pm
MST 3.00pm
CST 4.00pm
CDT & EST 5.00pm
ADT 7.00pm
August 12
AEST 7.00am
ACST 6.30am
AWST 5.00am
August 12:
PT 2.00pm
MST 3.00pm
CST 4.00pm
CDT & EST 5.00pm
ADT 7.00pm
August 13
AEST 7.00am
ACST 6.30am
AWST 5.00am
August 13:
PT 2.00pm
MST 3.00pm
CST 4.00pm
CDT & EST 5.00pm
ADT 7.00pm
August 14
AEST 7.00am
ACST 6.30am
AWST 5.00am
Please note: the presentations and timeslots are subject to change. Please check the conference program again to ensure the most up to date details.
The transformation of an in-person dance education practicum to an online dance education practicum
In the Spring 2021 semester, one full year after the official start of the COVID19 pandemic, I was tasked with teaching an online dance education practicum for undergraduate students. This was my third time teaching Children’s Dance II at a college in Upstate New York. However, I was now living in Central Vermont, remotely teaching students who resided in Upstate NY, and was without access to the elementary school I had collaborated with in previous years. In my presentation I will share my approach and outcomes of redesigning this previously in-person practicum course towards an online practicum environment, which involved inviting local Central Vermont families to participate in a seven-week online children’s dance program facilitated by a small group of university students. The primary purpose of the course was to provide students in the Interdisciplinary Arts for Children program practical experiences for designing dance education curricula for elementary aged children. The focus of the course was fractal: we emphasized the small scale of building and implementing our dance education curriculum with children and families and how that mapped towards affecting transformative change in dance education more broadly. My students’ motivational needs and interests and the needs of children in society guided the redesign of the course. Through collaboration, design workshops, and community outreach, my students composed and implemented a child-centered, culturally responsive online dance education curriculum in a nontraditional educational setting. Students developed justice-oriented pedagogical proficiency in dance education through implementation of their cotaught curriculum, embodied reflections, and pedagogical documentation. This session, related to the conference theme “case studies of successful online arts teaching methods,” poses questions as to how this experience informs others’ creative ideas and how such an approach might be reconsidered as one strategy for increasing accessibility for a broader range of children, families, and university students.
No real time connection? No problem! Accessing the asynchronous void with recorded strategies simulating ‘in the moment’ music education.
The growth of higher education offered via online delivery is a global phenomenon. Online offerings provide relatively low-cost access to learners from diverse socioeconomic circumstances and disadvantaged backgrounds in that these learners can ‘attend’ without having to relocate or pay commuting costs (Macken et al., 2021). The move to online learning has impacted on degrees that are primarily praxis-based such as the Arts and Physical Education, through which collaborative learning is embodied and relies on sensory exploration (Cain et al. 2024; Davis & Phillips, 2020). A more recent addition to online offerings has been the introduction of fully asynchronous online (AO) teacher education programs with no synchronous components or real time connection, and where learners, their peers and teachers are separated by time and space. This presentation details successful strategies for teaching music through AO learning including a range of ‘how to’ videos demonstrating practical applications for a range of classroom scenarios. The presenters researched the experiences of undergraduate and postgraduate students at one Australian university. These preservice teachers (PSTs) are practicing musicians and were studying music ‘methods’ courses to become qualified classroom and specialist music teachers at Primary and Secondary levels. Although they have strong self-efficacy as musicians, these PSTs struggle with how to develop lessons for a variety of age groups, in areas such as aural skills, melodic dictation, chord progressions, and teaching secondary students with no musical background. A ‘pre’ survey gained PSTs’ self-efficacy levels and greatest areas of need. After undertaking methods courses with videos created specifically to address these needs, a ‘post’ survey assessed any changes in self-efficacy. Results demonstrate that recorded practical demonstrations that simulate probable classroom scenarios increase PSTs’ self-efficacy levels significantly.
In Tune: Trauma-Informed Online Music Instruction
When students' lives are impacted by trauma, changes to behavioural patterns may occur. Summarizing my dissertation research conducted in an American special education setting for in and outpatient elementary music students and applying findings surrounding attunement as a facilitator of a trauma-informed online music learning environment, this research is presented from my duel roles as a trauma-informed education specialist and online music instructor. In this session, we will discuss trauma-informed behavioural interventions and tie them directly to online instruction. Informed by my experiences at Pennsylvania's largest cyber institution, I aim to present ways online music educators might leverage attuned, trauma-informed practices to support students' posttraumatic growth. Educators will leave the session with instantly implementable strategies for increase access for online music students and will be challenged to remove emotional barriers to instruction and attunement.
Sustaining the Art Teacher Profession: The Art Education ColLab as a Cross-Institutional Collaborative Community of Practice in Virtual Spaces
There is increasing demand in California for qualified arts teachers resulting from the passage of Prop 28, which adds billions in funding to K12 arts education. Due to the current teacher shortage in the US, many new teachers are entering the field as interns, creating a strong need for content-specific mentorship to retain them in the profession (Carver-Thomas, Burns, Leung, & Ondrasek , 2022).The Art Education ColLab’s mission is to combat the high turnover of new teachers by providing enriching professional development opportunities and mentorship. Now in our fourth year, beginning visual art teachers (BVATs) from our pilot study were invited to return as mentors, creating a cyclical mentoring community of practice. Meeting monthly online with additional in-person opportunities, this cross-institutional collaborative project between two universities strives to build community with arts teachers in virtual spaces while engaging in content-specific professional learning. This session highlights impacts of the ColLab on participants’ retention, job satisfaction, and mentoring experiences over time. This qualitative study is rooted in social constructivism (Vygotsky, 1978) and the conceptual framework of communities of practice (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002.) BVATs and mentors learn from and with each other by sharing lived experiences through inquiry and reflection. Through visual journaling, Photovoice, questionnaires, and focus groups, this research study seeks to understand the impact (if any) that the ColLab has on participants’ job satisfaction, retention in the field, and individual teaching/mentorship practices. Data collection is ongoing and will be analysed in July 2025 for a holistic overview of work from the past four years. As part of a 23campus system, our goal for 202526 is to expand to sister campuses with strong Art Education programs to increase support for BVATs throughout California to promote retention, job satisfaction, and a sense of community to alleviate feelings of professional isolation.
Where is my 2010’s art educator tech optimism now?
In the 2010’s, a global technological optimism in education sectors prevailed, primarily driven by the rapid development and implementation of digital tools in classrooms and educator collaboration on social media platforms like Twitter (henceforth referred to as X). My six-month study of art educators on X during this time examined reiterative meaning-making and the complexity of difference in the virtual habitat that was developing. A continuous transmission on X exposed the complexity of art educators collaborating online. Art educators claimed this pedagogical space on X as contextualised, connected and sensory. Generative actions such as documenting art processes highlighted synergetic learning affordances. Accordingly, I examined these art educator processes by drawing on Barad’s theory of diffraction to challenge how art educators posted (previously referred to Tweets) on X, as an ongoing process of non-linear meaning making and intra-action. I argued that the contribution to learning at the time, located X as a generative and transmissible platform that art educators themselves were developing. While the early 2010’s were marked by enthusiasm for technology’s potential to bridge educational gaps and foster global collaboration, challenges such as the digital divide, data privacy concerns, and questions about the effectiveness of these tools in improving learning outcomes surfaced. More recently, I moved my art education intra-action to Bluesky which is a developing social media platform in comparison to the more dominant social media platforms like X. The following discussion and artwork draw on spacetimemattering as theorised by Barad to weave through various time stamps of online collaboration on X, including the origin story in the 2000’s beginning with Noah Glass, Jack Dorsey and others. Barad argues that time, space and matter are not separate entities but convergent, which supports the following dynamic analysis of an art educator/art educators on X and beyond.
DIY ZINES for the Virtual Classroom
Join artist educators Jennifer Wiebe and Christina Thomson for a virtual ZINE workshop! Zines (short for “fan-zine”) are self-published low-cost booklets with a subculture history of lifting marginalized voices dating back to the 1930s and 40s and an excellent tool for community building in the online studio art classroom. Our hybrid approach to zine-making utilizes both online learning platforms and tactile, hands-on techniques with materials accessible to most learners at home. Participants will engage in a multifaceted experience, learning to conceptualize, design, and assemble zines using readily available online tools alongside traditional materials like paper, collage, and hand-drawn elements. This workshop aims to introduce online educators to the dynamic pedagogical potential of zine-making for use in the virtual art classroom and beyond. In this forty-five-minute session, participants will gain first-hand experience by creating a zine and participating in a virtual “zine fair” with our international class collective. We will share some of our favourite online tools and resources for using zines in the virtual classroom, including Padlet and Google Classroom for collaboration. In addition, we will share anecdotes from our recent experience with this innovative pedagogical tool in the context of a post-secondary colour study class at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. Materials needed include copy paper, drawing/collage supplies, scissors, and a scanner or camera to create a shareable PDF file.
Designing for Access, Inclusion, and Agency: Adaptive Teaching in Virtual Art Classrooms
This practice-based presentation offers innovative approaches to virtual studio instruction and adaptive teaching strategies for diverse learners, drawn from my experience teaching high school art (grades 7 11) at the Quebec Virtual Academy. In this role, I worked with learners whose circumstances prevented regular in-person attendance—such as students with disabilities, chronic illness, anxiety, students living in rural or transient environments, student-athletes frequently traveling, and students navigating unstable home situations. Some students had varying abilities based on their health circumstances each day—arriving some days with sight and others without. Some students had inconsistent access to materials. My teaching strategies thus involved planning for uncertainty—creating lessons that could be suspended between states of possibility that would become or manifest as the class unfolded, with my students. Part of this involved preparing a variety of resources ahead of time—using both synchronous and asynchronous methods such as live demonstrations using a document camera, captioned instructional videos, slides with visuals and minimal bulleted focus points, and handouts that provided more detailed written breakdowns with visuals. This enabled students to participate according to their own pacing, interests, and circumstances. I would also prepare iterations for a variety of materials—basing myself off of not only what I expected students to have based on their school supplies, but also what they might be able to use if they did not have access to these materials. I prepared a variety of prototypes in advance, and sharing these helped even for those who did have access to expected materials, in providing examples of ways that they could approach their work differently. In this presentation, I would like to share some of these teaching strategies and more, along with examples from some of my lessons and classroom activities.
What Can We Learn from Young Creators? Insights from the Digital Visual Learning Networks Study
What can art educators learn from how young creators engage and learn online? Drawing from the forthcoming book and three-year study Navigating the Online Networks of Young Creators (2025), this presentation explores specific insights from a comprehensive qualitative study involving over 70 young creators from Canada and the United States. Through a socio-materialist approach emphasizing Actor Network Theory (ANT), we examined the nuanced processes by which teens and young adults assemble and utilize Digital Visual Learning Networks (DVLNs) to support their creative practices. The methodology we used in this study brought together visual research methods within multiple comparative case studies. We conducted semi structured interviews primarily through Zoom. Our data included detailed participant observations, analyses of digital artworks, textual materials (e.g., interviews), and online interactions. After our initial analyses, a second round of interviews with select participants allowed for deeper exploration. This methodological approach, grounded in ANT, could account for, through thick description, the dynamic interactions between human participants and nonhuman actants such as images, social media platforms, digital devices, and software. Our findings describe how young creators adeptly assemble diverse digital resources such as YouTube tutorials, community, and resources through social media platforms like Instagram and Discord and direct interactions with peers and family members to facilitate autodidactic, iterative, and experimental learning. Young creators consistently articulated the importance of observation, trial and error experimentation, and peer and professional feedback as critical elements of their creative growth. They highlighted the emotional complexity of sharing artwork online—balancing the desire for validation with concerns over public exposure. From our findings, we propose that incorporating the practices of young creators where teachers are not at the centre but rather active participants alongside students can lead to more engaging learning environments across human and nonhuman relationships both online and offline.
Beyond Zoom: Creating Artful Digital Places for Learning
The purpose of this presentation is to share a variety of critical, conceptual, and technical tools for creating digital learning environments, and provide illustrative exemplars of digital curricular placemaking by undergraduate preservice teachers. The intended outcomes are twofold: One outcome is for practicing K12 teachers to walk away with new conceptual and practical tools for creating digital learning experiences beyond the standard Zoom room and Google classroom environment. The other is for higher education instructors of preservice teachers to walk away with ideas for prompting thoughtful digital placemaking with the future teachers they are working with. Attendees will be engaged with narratives and visuals of student creative production with the tools and concepts shared, and there will be time scheduled at the end for attendees to ask questions about implementation, concepts, and strategies. This presentation is designed to meet a variety of 21stcentury teaching needs. For teachers who are still teaching remotely during a persistent pandemic time when remote teaching is more common than pre-COVID (though not as common as under lockdown), this presentation is designed to provide suggestions for novel and effective ways of creating learning environments to serve their students. For the majority of teachers who are now teaching in-person, this presentation introduces a variety of free and accessible digital creative tools for creating digital environments, which can be leveraged either as activity-spaces during in-person teaching, or as art materials for digital media projects on worldbuilding, game design, architecture, and environmental storytelling. Specifically, the tools and projects shared in this presentation provide art teachers with new creative tools for meeting content standards related to creative uses of digital technology, as well as critical engagement with youth culture.
Teaching Art through Engaging Decolonizing Viewpoints: Privileging an Indigenous Lens
Art teacher educators have obligations to prepare preservice art teachers and researchers to be culturally competent, to understand how to respectfully and knowledgeably include silenced voices into the classroom, and to consider incorporating diverse methods of contemporary technology in the classroom. Our purpose of engaging this work was to explore a method for changing the narrative by inserting multiple Indigenous artists' voices into the classroom conversation. In this presentation, we share the collaborative project we engaged across two preservice Art Educator student groups at two universities in different states, as well as the four contemporary Native American Artists who were also a part of the work with the classes via Zoom. We applied qualitative and Art-Based Research methods at the two locations toward art learning from a decolonizing perspective using the lens of an Indigenous Pedagogy. We will also explain the Anti-Racist teaching cycle we incorporated that begins with cultural competency aspects and leads to Art Educator cultural relevancy, as well as the development of resulting lesson plans for a museum exhibition that utilized recommendations shared by the four artists.
Teaching Tea Online: Facilitating Reflection and Meaningful Connections in an Asynchronous Online Class
We present a course that we co-teach on Chado, the Japanese Way of Tea, as a case study of a reflective arts curriculum delivered in an asynchronous online modality. Initially adapted from a popular in-person course over a decade ago, we have been redeveloping the curriculum to align with the sensory and relational elements of traditional tea pedagogy and tearoom experience. Making the often-isolating experience of asynchronous learning more experiential and communal has presented some limitations and creative challenges. To achieve this pedagogical goal, we have designed a number of activities that encourage students to reflect and to apply tea aesthetics and philosophy to their daily lives. Such activities include hands-on art-based activities and small discussion groups that meet in real time to facilitate personal connection. Throughout the semester, students are asked to document observations of nature and overlooked aspects of their daily lives to support the development of an open-ended final project and an original reflective statement. Connecting tea concepts with students’ daily lives is important because it both draws from tea tradition’s emphasis of finding beauty in the everyday, but also helps the practice to feel more relatable and less exotic. We have found that students have expressed an appreciation for the slower, reflective pace of the course and how it encourages connection with their own lived experiences. Many students have expressed that the class has helped reduce stress and give them a deeper appreciation of Japanese culture. Many often find that their final project work helps them feel more connected with others in their lives. In adapting course assignments and activities to better embody tea concepts (doing, rather than thinking about), students are better able to develop more meaningful connections both with the course material and with each other.
A/r/tography in practice in online initial teacher education
The shift to online learning has intensified long-standing challenges in Initial Teacher Education (ITE), particularly for the Arts. In response, a national collective of Australian Arts ITE educators formed an online community of practice to explore and reimagine how we teach, learn, and research the Arts in online spaces. This 45-minute interactive workshop offers a brief overview of our collaborative project, grounded in the methodology of A/r/tography—an approach that interweaves our identities as artists, researchers, and teachers. Through this lens, we have developed and tested innovative strategies for delivering Arts education online that maintain the integrity of creative practice and critical inquiry. Participants will be introduced to the theoretical foundations of our work and invited to engage in a series of short, practical provocations that exemplify how A/r/tographic thinking can inform and transform online Arts pedagogy. These activities are designed to spark reflection on the possibilities of collaboration, creativity, and community in virtual classrooms. By sharing our processes, insights, and the evolving nature of our work, we aim to inspire fellow educators to consider how arts-based methodologies can support meaningful, affective, and authentic learning experiences in online ITE. This session is ideal for teacher educators, curriculum designers, and Arts practitioners seeking to enhance their online teaching practice through collaborative, research-informed approaches.
Gifting an Artistic Licence: Creating space for becoming radical art educators
Spurred by an observation that ‘student art teachers don’t want to be radical teachers’, this workshop will share how gift-giving by a lecturer of a hand-printed ‘Artistic Licence’ to a new cohort of pre-service teachers, gave permission to imagine new futures. Through sharing a dialogic image-exchange the authors will bring their radical manifesto for art teachers/teaching as performative autoethnography where they imagine new forms of teaching through small acts: printing, walking and talking, and being parents and artists. The workshop will bring these acts to the online space inviting participants to join the journey that the authors took the students on and take it in new ways through gifting an artistic licence to those in the virtual space. The act of giving projects materiality into the future and is transformative both for the giver and the gifted. The object (an artistic licence, an artwork, a photo) is an autonomous vessel that has its own agency and affect as it moves from one person to another, shifts and accrues meaning. When times are hard, art teaching can run the risk of becoming too outcome-led, working backwards from a preconceived notion of what art should be, not what art could be. This workshop draws on the imagination to counteract the internalised negative pull of art as part of a neoliberal system. We hope that from gifting to the participants, we give them the potential to give themselves permission to imagine their art practice and artist identity as integral to situating themselves within the exchange of value and meaning in the human and post-human world. We have created lino-printed boxes with the words on letter-press printed cards from the Artistic Licence that can be virtually manipulated to create intra-action between the participants, the words, the art and the potentiality for becoming/being radical teachers.
Artificial Intelligence During the Height of COVID19 Concerning Art Students’ Visual Online Social Media Usage
The presentation is about the book chapter concerning artificial intelligence (AI) and students’ visual online social media, published in the recent book entitled, “ Navigating the Online Networks of Young Creators: An Investigation of Digital Visual Learning Networks" by Springer Publications (2025). The research was conducted from 2020-2023 during the height of COVID-19, in which we examined art students working within networked environments. Our data collection began before generative artificial intelligence (GAI) mainstream exposure (November 2022), in which we present findings about young secondary school and university art students’ cultural creative practices, specifically analyzing their awareness and use of AI in their offline and online learning. Discussed will be ways in which educators might design AI-integrated learning experiences and implement teaching strategies in online arts education that respond to the challenges identified from the research findings.
Supporting primary teachers with arts learning activities that address the personal social capability
Children learn to socialise and work with others in a process largely considered a part of learning undertaken by schools. The Personal and Social Capability in the General Capabilities included in the Australian curriculum recognises the development of social, emotional and communication skills. Children’s school attendance and subsequent socialisation with peers was impacted by COVID-19 lockdown periods in 2020 and 2021. This Australian government-funded ‘Emerging Priorities Program’(EPP) research explored teacher, parent and student reflections of online arts learning experienced during the lockdowns. This paper reports upon this three-stage mixed method study, drawing upon literature from the field of learning in the arts to identify if and how arts learning, and examples of online arts learning, contributed to students’ well-being, engagement and socialisation. Findings specific to the online learning context in each of the five arts subjects demonstrated the transformative potential of the arts, and resulted in the development of online teaching resources for primary teachers presented as ‘micro-credentials’. These resources provide professional learning for generalist primary teachers. The micro-credential provides background on school refusal, school return and the signature pedagogies developed by Dinham (2024). This paper will show how the learning activities for each of the five arts subjects model the signature pedagogies for teachers. The learning activities use the Personal and Social Capability sub-elements to frame the development of primary students’ personal and social management and awareness in each learning activity.
Unlocking Hybrid Arts Education: Cultivating Relational Pedagogies in a Master of Education Subject
This presentation explores the design, delivery, and impact of a hybrid arts-based education subject within a Master of Education at the University of Melbourne. The subject is not limited to arts specialists; instead, it invites all practitioners and educators to critically engage with creativity, culture, and arts education as vital components of human flourishing. Underpinned by Arts-Based Educational Research (ABER) and delivered in both online modules and in-person studio sessions in studio-Five, this subject nurtures relational, responsive, and culturally sustaining pedagogies through a/r/tography and researcher-based theatre methodologies. It was designed to invite students to think with/in an onto-epistemological space, integrating practice-based and material led inquiry with contemporary educational research and multimodal creative practice. The hybrid structure allows for embodied and art-full encounters in both Canvas as an online studio with on campus creative studio environments in studio-Five - reimagining what online arts education can become. Students are invited to ask: What does it mean to be in relation to education, creativity, culture, and the arts? How might we teach with others, not simply to them? We have taught in hybrid arts learning environments for many years in studio-Five and know they can foster equitable access to creative, critical, and collaborative learning. For students with diverse artistic, educational and language backgrounds, this design scaffolds new ways of knowing, making, and researching. Activating culturally responsive pedagogies, enabling students to co-create possibilities for educational change through arts integration and interdisciplinary practice. Implications for online arts education include the need for platforms and pedagogies that prioritise embodiment, play, and relational learning. In a time when the arts are increasingly marginalised, this subject offers a dynamic model for hybrid delivery that is equitable, artful, and deeply connected to practice and place.
Creative Collaboration: Building partnerships through an online community of practice
Collaboration among arts educators, their communities, and arts peers is crucial for effective delivery of creative teaching. However, opportunities for arts educators to regularly meet and exchange ideas, creating innovative learning experiences for their students, are often hindered by time constraints, a lack of professional development, and feelings of isolation. This project investigates how regular online collaboration between a group of arts educators can flourish and lead to the development of quality teaching material that can enhance virtual community building. This presentation reports on the collaborative online efforts of a group of arts educators from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada during phase one of a research project called Creative Circles. The international collaboration resulted in the creation of a series of high-quality units of work for the teaching of the arts in schools and higher education. The presentation discusses the collaborative process, highlights the benefits and challenges, and introduces the Collaborative Creative Circle model that facilitated this process. A post-structural rhizomatic approach was used to analyse data. The findings from the initial stage of the research revealed that networks between writers, teaching materials, and creativity were established, constructing an assemblage that supported the delivery of quality arts learning experiences. This suggests that this model of collaboration fosters a community of practice with arts colleagues, which can be transferred to teaching online arts learning in ITE. This presentation is relevant to educators interested in enhancing their collaborative efforts and working creatively in the online space to create high-quality arts learning experiences for their students.
When online drama learning mirrors the real world: inclusive options using an Arts Immersion approach
In 2020, as a tertiary arts educator, I was required to adapt my performing arts unit to an online format due to COVID restrictions, include a second language in class activities, and support the needs of a deaf student in that cohort of pre-service teachers. I developed a creative application of online technologies through a Zoom class in real time which used a responsive pedagogy to address these needs. An Arts Immersion approach was chosen to support the development of subject-specific skills and knowledge in drama as well as the capacity to use the language of drama across the curriculum to facilitate interdisciplinary learning. In this Arts Immersion drama practice, a collage drama was adapted to suit an online delivery where the needs of the deaf student were addressed through the inclusion of an AUSLAN interpreter and an EAL/D student had an opportunity for their first language to be used in combination with character portrayal as a mode of expression. This presentation includes video footage of this segment of the collage drama, recorded during the class, demonstrating how an Arts Immersion approach was creatively adapted to address inclusion in action. Outcomes showed that the online format of the drama class supported a real-world context by reflecting a media news format in which all students present in the class were enabled to contribute as an online community of learners. The contributions of the deaf student and the EAL/D student enhanced the learning of the class and provided an opportunity for these students to take a leadership role in the class by demonstrating expertise that was unique to them. This contributes to the field of online arts education by demonstrating how creative online learning modes can provide inclusive learning and student leadership opportunities through adaptive arts strategies that reflect real-world contexts.