Herron School of Art and Design Works

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Articles, proceedings, posters and other works by Herron School of Art and Design faculty members.

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Moments of becoming artist-teachers
(Seminar for Research in Art Education, 2023-12-18) Kulinski, Alexa R.; Herron School of Art and Design
In this article, I re-present the findings from my arts-based dissertation that examined the ways five preservice art teachers (two graduate and three undergraduate students) perceived and used matter in their responses to studio prompts, reflective visual journals, and PK-12 art curriculum they created within the context of an art education curriculum course. After providing a brief overview of the study and arts-based methods, I re-present each of my findings by means of excerpts from original found poems, brief narrative summaries, and mini visual essays comprised of images of participants’ artwork and visual journals. This article, therefore, provides a glimpse into both the process and product of my dissertation as well as my attempts to continually make sense of it as I search for ways to share portions of it with the world. Ultimately, this study, including the results, presentation, and now re-presentation, reveals the nuances of a brief moment along preservice art teachers’ journeys of becoming artist-teachers. These findings and re-presentation carry implications for PK-12 art education, art teacher preparation, as well as arts-based research as a methodology.
Finding My Way: Using Visual Journals to Forge a Path of Resilience and Resistance
(Penn State Libraries Open Publishing, 2023-09-06) Kulinski, Alexa R.; Herron School of Art and Design
Over the last four years of my K-12 visual arts teaching career, I faithfully kept visual journals, filling them with stories of my experiences in the classroom. What initially began as an experiment as I searched for a tool to help me navigate new challenges within a public school system, eventually led me to realize that my visual journals were a valuable resource to better understand myself as a teacher, my place within the system, and a resource for resilience. In this article, I use narrative and arts-based approaches to explore the ways I leveraged visual journals as a tool for resilience by integrating humor, fostering a sense of accomplishment and self-efficacy, as well as retaking ownership of my journey to fight back. Through sharing this narrative I hope to illustrate some of the ways visual journals can help arts educators find resilience and strength to resist during challenging times.
Stories We Live By: Exploring Graphic Novels With High Schoolers
(Taylor & Francis, 2023) Kulinski, Alexa R.; Herron School of Art and Design
This article explores the graphic novels that emerged within the context of a pre-college course for high school students. After providing an overview of comics and graphic novels within education, I highlight pedagogical strategies and approaches for making comics and graphic novels. I then examine student work from the course with a particular focus on the final graphic stories they told, why they chose to tell those particular stories, and how they went about doing it. Examination of student work revealed that the self was a starting point for their narratives, students continually explored and pushed conventions of the artform, and students remixed dominant narrative arcs. The stories and artmaking strategies that emerged as a result of the course highlights how comics and graphic novels provide students the space to explore and voice what matters most to them, making them a valuable component of K-16 art education.
Art Therapy Impact on Aging Adults’ Quality of Life: Leisure and Learning
(T&F, 2022) Misluk, Eileen; Rush, Haley; Herron School of Art and Design
Quality of life (QoL) is influenced by physical and psychological health, but includes subjective qualities that are inherent in social and cognitive processes necessary for healthy aging and overall well-being. A quantitative study analyzed the effects of art therapy for 14 aging adults utilizing the Brunnsviken Brief Quality of Life Scale (BBQ) at pre, mid, and post 32-week study. Regression analysis showed significant positive changes in two areas: Importance of Learning and Leisure. Participating in art therapy increased the importance of learning and leisure, that are influential factors in QoL for aging adults. This demonstrates that art therapy has the potential to support healthy aging.
Adaptive Resumes in Disrupted Futures
(Cumulus Association, 2022) Ganci, Aaron; Herron School of Art
As the impacts of the climate crisis continue to unfold, more and more workers will become displaced (International Labour Organization). While the bulk of disruption will be felt by the working poor in the third world, every part of the economy will eventually be impacted. Within the United States, millions of people will face dramatic changes to the environment because of rising temperatures, widespread fires, flooding, and more. In response, there will be an increased need for workers at all levels to migrate or switch employment sectors. As a design researcher, I am specifically interested in how design artifacts play a role in worker cross-sector mobility. There is one crucial artifact that plays a facilitating role within this dynamic: the resume. The resume is a seemingly innocuous player in the job-seeking process. However, when viewed as a narrative artifact, it becomes obvious that the resume has untapped potential. As workers seek to enter new and unfamiliar domains, they will need better tools to help them construct relatable narratives about their unique blend of experiences and skills. Over the last two years, my team has been examining the space of worker adaptability through the development of a solution called Real CV. This project seeks to help workers articulate their strengths and translate domain-specific abilities and experiences into narratives that can be understood by a wider audience. Put another way, I seek to update the format of the resume to help workers become more adaptable to their evolving surroundings. This paper will identify weaknesses with the CV through a critical intersectional lens (Booysen, 2018) and will detail the use of a constructive design methodology (Bardzell et al., 2015; Dorst, 2013) to examine an updated resume system. In the end, a concept for a Real CV application is presented which showcases the necessary criteria in a more inclusive and adaptable resume format.
User Personas to Guide Technology Intervention Design to Support Caregiver-Assisted Medication Management
(Oxford, 2022-11) Linden, Anna; Loganathar, Priya; Holden, Richard; Boustani, Malaz; Campbell, Noll; Ganci, Aaron; Werner, Nicole; Herron School of Art
Informal caregivers often help manage medications for people with ADRD. Caregiver-assisted medication management has the potential to optimize outcomes for caregivers and people with ADRD, but is often associated with suboptimal outcomes. We used the user-centered design persona method to represent the needs of ADRD caregivers who manage medications for people with ADRD to guide future design decisions for technology interventions. Data were collected through virtual contextual inquiry in which caregivers (Nf24) sent daily multimedia text messages depicting medication management activities for seven days each, followed by an interview that used the messages as prompts to understand medication management needs. We applied the persona development method to the data to identify distinct caregiver personas, i.e., evidence-derived groups of prospective users of a future intervention. We used team-based affinity diagramming to organize information about participants based on intragroup (dis)similarities, to create meaningful clusters representing intervention-relevant attributes. We then used group consensus discussion to create personas based on attribute clusters. The six identified attributes differentiating personas were: 1. medication acquisition, 2. medication organization, 3. medication administration, 4. monitoring symptoms, 5. care network, 6. technology preferences. Three personas were identified based on differences on those attributes: Regimented Ruth (independent, proactive, tech savvy, controls all medications), Intuitive Ian (collaborative, uses own judgment, some technology, provides some medication autonomy), Passive Pamela (reactive, easy going, technology novice, provides full medication autonomy). These personas can be used to guide technology intervention design by evaluating how well intervention designs support each of them.
Designing from the Core: Facilitating Core Thinking for Sustainable Development in Design Education
(Cumulus Association, 2022-10) Napier, Pamela; Lettis, Gwen; Herron School of Art
How might graphic designers identify and clarify their personal values and identity so that they might develop a responsibility mindset in their design process? This has been a central question in the research of the authors Napier and Lettis, two design educators who have been collaborating across the world from the United States and Ireland, through Master’s thesis and Ph.D. work, from first-year graphic design students to senior visual communication design students, and from in-person to online teaching. Our research is driven by a deeply vested interest in personal or core values and how they relate to making sustainable or responsible design decisions. We believe that design students must be able to develop a personal awareness of their individual values and goals to not only benefit their design process and practice, but also to benefit sustainable development. “Value thinking” is a central mode of thinking encouraged in education for sustainable development, which “develops and strengthens the capacity of individuals, groups, communities, organizations and countries to make judgments and choices in favor of sustainable development” (UNECE, 2009, p. 15). Within our research, we acknowledge that value thinking also involves thinking of oneself, and the direct correlation between the “personal” and sustainability. We termed this personal value thinking or, as Lettis has termed it since, core thinking. Ann Thorpe (2007), an educator of sustainable design and author of The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability, states: Many of the issues confronting us in the landscape of sustainability are those that feel more personal than professional, for example, your connection to nature, your politics as a citizen, or your willingness to put your personal resources toward ecological sustainability. We have found that in the context of sustainability in graphic design education (GDE) and design education generally, many programs are exclusively available to postgraduate students. Additionally, while some undergraduate education does aim to foster the development of personal values, it is unclear which processes are used to help students clarify and integrate those values into their identity and practice. This paper will describe the processes, methods, and tools that Napier and Lettis have developed to facilitate core thinking for sustainable development in different courses, at varying levels of graphic and visual communication design education. It will discuss the theoretical background of value thinking and include a high-level look at the ongoing efforts of evolving materials aimed at supporting design educators to foster sustainability-minded design students. Additionally, this paper will discuss both students’ and educators’ reflections on this ongoing work. It is the hope of the authors that a more inclusive approach to fostering sustainability-minded students and graduates will impact the role that designers can play as responsible citizens.
Portable Prototypes: Canterbury Badges and the Thomasaltar in Hamburg
(MDPI, 2021) Lee, Jennifer; Herron School of Art and Design
Pilgrims’ badges often depicted works of art located at a cult center, and these cheap, small images frequently imitated monumental works. Was this relationship ever reversed? In late medieval Hamburg, a painted altarpiece from a Hanseatic guild narrates the life of Thomas Becket in four scenes, two of which survive. In 1932, Tancred Borenius declared this altarpiece to be the first monumental expression of Becket’s narrative in northern Germany. Since then, little scholarship has investigated the links between this work and the Becket cult elsewhere. With so much visual art from the medieval period lost, it is impossible to trace the transmission of imagery with any certainty. Nevertheless, this discussion considers badges as a means of disseminating imagery for subsequent copying. This altarpiece and the pilgrims’ badges that it closely resembles may provide an example of a major work of art borrowing a composition from an inexpensive pilgrim’s badge and of the monumental imitating the miniature.
Rhetorical Questions and Ruminations: Examining Early Career Faculty Experiences through Found Poetry
(University of Alberta Library, 2021-09-04) Willcox, Libba; McCormick, Kate; Herron School of Art and Design
Transitioning from graduate student to early career faculty can often provoke uncertainty and questioning. This study explores the rhetorical and revealing nature of such questioning (i.e., Am I really this lost? Am I in the right place?). Utilizing methods from arts based research (Barone & Eisner, 2012), specifically poetic inquiry (Prendergast et al., 2009; Richardson, 1992), we created found poetry around rhetorical questions from our existing collaborative autoethnographic journal. We frame our findings with a selection of poems to provide insight into our lived experiences of transition. The question poems illustrate that our first year as assistant professors were preoccupied with managing tasks, balancing work, avoiding burnout, building relationships, and discovering how to belong in the new context. While rhetorical questions do not necessarily produce answers, questioning in a collaborative space allowed us to explore the struggle, complexity, and ambiguity of academic identity construction as early career faculty.
Hiroshi Sugimoto Transforms the Motionless
(2022) Spence, Shannon
While the average contemporary photographer creates a snapshot in time, Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948) is unique in his ability to create life where there is none. Sugimoto photographed scenes of dioramas from natural history museums across America. Through his technical and artistic skill, as well as his ability to play off of the viewer’s expectation of photography, Sugimoto’s series, Dioramas, 1976-2014, are full of life even though the subjects themselves are not alive. From its inception in 1839, photography has been a tool to document the world as it is known and typically captures the image of a person, place, or object in situ. Sugimoto takes advantage of the viewer’s pre-conceived notion that the photograph must have been taken as it happened. The way Sugimoto frames the scene along with careful, intentional viewpoints creates an image that puts the viewer at the scene at what seems to be the actual moment in time. The artist’s use of black and white creates contrast and starkness within the images, which drifts towards timelessness, reckoning back to the early days of photography before color photography was introduced. In real life, the visitor experiences a fabricated scene, but Sugimoto’s photographs make the scene seem more alive than in person. In Dioramas, Sugimoto creates a sense of movement within the photographs by using a snapshot aesthetic with the edges of the scene cut off, by choosing to print in black and white, and by playing off viewers’ assumptions that a photographer is a documentarian.

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