Learning and Teaching Art through Social Media

Abstract

Social media practices are increasingly woven into the everyday lives of teens and adults, becoming a significant part of how they relate, know, and learn. In this article, I present findings from a design-based research study that explored how the dynamics of learning and teaching art shift through social media. Learning and teaching through social media has been described as a form of participatory culture, and I expand this further by drawing upon complexity thinking to better understand the reciprocal dynamics of learning and teaching. Learning art through social media can be characterized as encounters with difference, both in ideas and contexts. Subsequently, the dynamics of attention shifts and distributes across collectives. From this, I infer a conceptualization of the art teacher as an identity that is not fixed but one that shifts throughout social media.