Please use this form to submit instructional resources to the portfolio.
All submissions that pass through the review process and are published on the online resource will receive a $100 honorarium and be eligible for the CSTAE Curriculum Award.
CSTAE will award a maximum of one stipend per author per calendar year. Current elected and appointed CSTAE Board members, as well as the Editor, Associate Editor, and Past Editor of JSTAE may submit, but are ineligible for the stipend or award. Submissions with multiple authors will have the stipend split evenly between (eligible) authors.
Having your curricular work published in this professional online resource may count toward professional development credit in your locality. CSTAE is happy to provide any documentation (e.g. letters, certificates) you need to be credited for your work.
CSTAE Digital Submission Guidelines
Caucus of Social Theory in Art Education Digital Curriculum PortfolioCaucus of Social Theory in Art Education
Goal and Mission
The goal of the CSTAE Digital Portfolio is to develop, share, and activate curriculum that promotes our mission, which is: to promote the use of theoretical concepts from the social sciences; to study visual/material culture and the teaching of art; to inform art educators about theory and practice in the social sciences, thus acting as a liaison between social scientists and art educators; to encourage research into the social context of visual/material culture and teaching art; and to develop socially relevant programs for use in teaching art.
What Does it Mean For Art Education to Engage Social Theory?
CSTAE supports art educators making connections with social theory through critical interdisciplinarity that draws from a wide spectrum of social sciences (usually described as disciplines concerned with society and human behavior). CSTAE brings critical, social justice consciousness to a broad spectrum of integrated thought, theory, and practice. Interdisciplinary connections may include: anthropology, archaeology, criminology, economics, education, history, linguistics, communication studies, political science, international relations, sociology, human geography, psychoanalysis, and psychology. Other fields, such as law, cultural studies, environmental studies, and social work are also relevant to social theory and art education.
Criteria for Curriculum Submission
- Interdisciplinarity - Connects to and engages with interdisciplinary study.
- Visual and Material Culture - Examines critical social, cultural, and political issues in art education using visual and material culture.
- Research- Encourages forms of inquiry through making, studying, investigating and discussing the ways in which art and society shape one another.
- Social Action - Activates creative and artistic interventions to critically question social issues in contemporary culture
For Example…
1. Interdisciplinarity: Resources engage students in investigations that draw from multiple disciplines so that the visual features and aesthetic appeal of objects that are studied are valued and explored in a social context.
Rather than formally imitating other work, lessons that study artifacts from geographically distant locations and small scale societies include perspectives from critical anthropology that help students consider the role of colonialization, cultural invasion, late capitalism in globalized economics of “fair trade” and the gaze on “the other.” For example, young children creating molas after extensive study of the Kuna community of Panama would research the history of molas prior to colonization, which depicted geometric artwork on the body, and then post-colonization, when European colonizers or tourists sought blouses or wall hangings for purchase that evolved from geometric patterns to representational narrative (animals, botanicals, contemporary symbolism). From this study, students could choose narratives that are current in their lives for depicting artworks,which echoes the traditional Kuna transition from skin to cloth. Students would then be taught about the contemporary practices of appropriation and recycling of imagery, and would be taught to refer to the work as their own, but inspired by this traditional practice
2.Visual and Material Culture: Resources enhance student understanding of visual and material culture by expanding perspectives on what counts as art.
Resources include references of new media, installation, mobile technologies, human-built environment, community intervention, as well as what has traditionally been considered art media. For example, third grade students may illustrate their original stories with pencil and tempera paint, make digital video animations of those drawings, and discuss the effects of each medium in the understanding of each other’s stories in an expansion of digital literacies and art-making literacies. Middle school students engaged in a study of “spaces and places” may play Minecraft and study one another’s virtually built worlds and methods for staving off monsters while considering the role of community collaboration. They then might study and design shopping mall architecture, addressing questions such as: Which spaces facilitate community? What qualities of the architecture and available products contribute to health and economic justice? What actually takes place in malls? Why?
3. Research: Resources encourage forms of inquiry through making, studying, investigating and discussing the ways in which art and society shape one another.
For example, fifth graders involved in an investigation of Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, might discuss of the iconography of the image, which is a fictional portrayal supporting mythological perspectives. Students and teacher might address and discuss the exclusion of artwork by underrepresented communities such as women, people of color, and transgendered people in museums, texts, and PK-12 art curricula. This act can be transformative, reshaping perspectives.
4. Social Action: Resources draw attention to, mobilize action towards, or attempt to intervene in systems of inequity or injustice (Dewhurst 2010). Resources identify and intervene social inequities in society through identification and action.
For example, a lesson utilizing recycled objects might contain a component on environmental racism (identification) and a component addressing and implementing sustainable practice changes in the art room/school/community (action).
How Will Submissions Be Evaluated?
Three of the four criteria must be addressed. Submissions will be evaluated on a scale of 1-5 points for each of the criteria, totaling at least 10 to be considered. Submissions may be individual lessons, projects, unit plans, or program-based and include syllabi or semester themes.
Parts of the submission include: general project/unit description with connections to clearly identified social theory, process sequencing, reference images such as slideshows providing historical and/or contemporary contexts, assessment criteria, supporting ideation or reflection exercises, and student examples (if possible). Referential images illustrating the making or engagement process must be included, as a resource for future implementation.
Submissions will be evaluated on the following attributes:
- Thorough and well-developed content
- Clearly articulated connections to the CSTAE mission and criteria for curriculum submission
- Clarity and quality of design and writing
- Quality of Images and supporting resources
Digital Submission Information
- Please save all files as follows:
your last name_type of resource_lesson title_year (type of resources refers to the list above, i.e. lesson, presentation, student work) - Please save text documents and slideshows as PDFs, 10 MB or smaller (APA or MLA format).
- Your image, video, or audio will be shown at most 500px wide.
- Label artworks: artist, title, year, media, size (if applicable), source (if photographic documentation)
- Images will be resized to fit within this dimension, preserving their original aspect ratio.
- File size limit: Each file must be 20MB or smaller.
- The following file types are accepted:
Single Images: bmp, gif, jpeg, jpg, png, tif, tiff
Audio: mp3, wav
Video: avi, flv, mov, mp4, mpeg, mpg, swf, wmv