Art Teacher Agency in Technology Integration: Evolving Media Art Practices

Digital technology has revolutionized cultural production in the arts, yet persistent barriers exist to advancing its integration into K-12 art classrooms. While the latest standards now include media arts as a distinct discipline, technology has profoundly transformed practices in all art disciplines. It has reshaped the mediums through which art is created, the ways it is shared, and the dominant aesthetics (Ito et al., 2013; Peppler, 2010). With these evolving forms of cultural production, this dissertation study asked how teachers understood their own agency in making sense of technology integration and in shaping learning conditions to meet their goals. Using 19 interview transcripts from arts teachers in a three-year professional development program for technology integration, I employed grounded theory methods (Charmaz, 2014; Glaser, 1978) to generate a theoretical framework by exploring the following questions 1) how did teachers describe their agency and students’ agency in media art projects? and 2) What tensions and possibilities in agency, if any, were described around technology integration? Art teachers described their agency in expanding their art discipline using technology to increase relevance by bridging in-school and out-of-school artmaking practices, and to support their students to deepen artistic meaning by using more modalities and roles for creative production. Teachers described student agency in how they shifted authority to students to 1) be teachers, 2) source technology-based artmaking tools, and 3) use technological tools to support self-assessment and revision processes. In navigating new disciplinary terrain, teachers drew upon past and future orientations to make sense of how technology has and will continue to impact their discipline. This theoretical framework for how teachers integrated technology offers ways of reimagining art disciplines as evolving cultural practices (Warren et al., 2020) that also belong to students. These concepts will increasingly need analytic attention as new technological tools, such as artificial intelligence, can center efficiency over intention, completion over process, and leave values and bias unexamined. Openly grappling with how digital technology impacts learning and artmaking is a critical part of agency for teachers and students in evolving media arts practices.