Art and Design Education for Equity and Inclusion

Dear Colleagues,

While art and design education at the K-12 levels has been interrogating its curriculum and pedagogical approaches for several decades, encompassing varied and evolving perspectives (e.g., the Getty Center’s Celebrating Pluralism (1996); Olivia Gude’s “Postmodern principles” (2004); social justice and art education (Dewhurst, 2014)), how have critical reflection, interrogation, and productive change occurred in postsecondary art and design education? How have art and design educators from around the world sought to develop equitable curriculum and inclusive pedagogical approaches in higher education? What are the leading conceptual frameworks, and, importantly, what are the evidence-based outcomes we can identify?

While there is an expansive literature on equity-minded and inclusive approaches to curriculum and pedagogy generally, how is the field of postsecondary art and design education encountering, debating, adapting, or revising these approaches to develop equitable and inclusive art and design education? How are these efforts providing increased access to art and design education? How do they impact a student’s sense of belonging, which research has demonstrated has a positive effect on student persistence and graduation (Brown McNair, Albertine, Cooper, McDonald and Major, 2016)?

Relatedly, art and design education for social justice builds on a long tradition of activist art and design practice (Dewhurst, 2014). How do these practices inform the development and impact of an equity-minded art and design pedagogy with meaningful student learning outcomes in higher education?

This Special Issue welcomes articles taking up these questions (and the myriad possible questions not articulated here) through theoretical papers exploring promising conceptual frameworks, literature reviews and meta-analyses, program evaluations, and empirical studies employing qualitative, quantitative, arts-based methodologies, or mixed methods.

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

Brown McNair, T., Albertine, S., Cooper, M., McDonald, N., & Major, Jr., T. (2016). Becoming a student-ready college: A new culture of leadership for student success. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Chalmers, F. G. (1996). Celebrating pluralism: Art, education, and cultural diversity. Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for Education in the Arts.

Dewhurst, M. (2014) Social justice art: A framework for activist art pedagogy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Gude, O. (2004). Postmodern principles: In search of a 21st century art education. Art Education, 57(1), 6–14.

Dr. Tracie Costantino
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• equity
• diversity
• access
• inclusive pedagogy
• art education
• design education
• higher education