Gaming computer part

As computer literacy is increasingly considered an important component of teacher education, interactive computer environments offer the possibility of being effective supplements to art talk in the classroom.

In my art education classes for preservice teachers, students explore interactive computer technology through a "MOO" (Multi-user domain, Object-Oriented). Community and public arts are emphasized as objects of study, with particular focus on the relationship of these arts to community. The class develops a website of local public art and a series of exercises to explore meaning in the artworks and their relationship to community themes. The preservice teachers use these tools to teach local high school ceramics students involved in a public arts project.

The goals of the class fit within the definitions of community-based art education in that they are "attentive to possible relationships between the arts and communities" (Bastos, 2001, p. 70). In "Moving the Mountain," Dean (1999) argues that university art educators need to reconfigure what they do to connect community, art, and education and that doing so helps the field meet the demands of a changing world. Locally produced art is studied, and connections between art and the life of the community are emphasized (Jeffers, 1995; Krug, 2002; Ulbricht, 2002). I hope that by identifying, examining, and teaching about locally produced art, the student teachers increase their understanding and involvement in their communities and the breadth of social life therein, perhaps even seeing themselves as agents of social change (Barbosa, 1992; Bastos, 2001; Freire, 1970/1993).

Public art has different functions within a community and, as noted by various authors, has been co-opted by cities for a variety of functions that are not central to community-based purposes. In Toward a People's Art, Cockcroft, Weber, and Cockcroft (1977) noted two salient directions in mural art: murals as social communication and murals as personalistic or nonobjective decoration. The latter direction holds what the authors term an "urban-environmental" orientation, which "emphasizes making art available to the general public, improving the looks of the city, and supporting artists" (p. 29). They also note that some murals serve as advertisements-e.g. "Chew Tobacco" on roadside barns, or the bounty of the earth on a restaurant-and that graffiti can be considered a genre of murals. Community-based murals are based in the community- "working for the local audience around issues that concern the immediate community, using art as a medium of expression of, for, and with the local audience. They involve artists with community issues, community organizing, and community response to the artwork" (p. 30). They are often thematic and "a form of symbolic social action [that]... implies further social action" (p. 73). Such murals bring a sense of political awareness and community pride; symbolize place, community defense, and identification; and are often controversial.

When Cockcroft, Weber, and Cockcroft wrote their book Toward a People's Art in 1977, community-based art and the values they supported were not important themes in the art world. For the time being, things are radically different, evident for example in the republication of Toward a People's Art, in 1998. In noting that many contemporary artists focus on "social creativity rather than on self-expression," Gablik (1995) also notes that the locus of their creativity is on dialogical process rather than on the autonomous individual. She proposes that the art world is in a "sea change" (p. 76). Similarly, judy Baca (1995) argues against public art that promotes "cannon-in-the park" themes "meant to inspire an awe of our great nation's power to assert its military will and prevail over enemies" (p. 131). Rather than follow this impulse, or what she sees as the impulse behind Christo's work, "man over nature," Baca (1995) proposes, "Would it not have been more beautiful to shelter people in need of shelter, a gesture and statement about our failure as a society to provide even the most basic needs to the poor?" (p. 135). Baca also argues that public art must be a part of creating "a public memory for a many-cultured society," telling the stories of a diverse range of people (p. 137). This theme is central to most of Baca's own art projects, including the well-known Great Wall of Los Angeles, which depicts historical vignettes of diverse people living in Los Angeles, completed in the 1970s with the help of at-risk area youth. Community art, as thus defined, was the focus of our own study in my preservice classes.

Incorporating interactive technology into preservice education is not without precedents in art education (Galbraith, 1997; Gregory, 1995,1996; Heise & Grandgenett, 1996; Keifer-Boyd, 1997a; Tomaskiewicz, 1997). For example, in "Interactive Hyperdocuments: Implications for Art Criticism in a Postmodern Era," Keifer-Boyd (1997b) described teaching interactivity in art criticism through the use of hypertext and multi-media. She argued that interactivity in art criticism and varied situated or contextualized interpretations are relative to learning in a postmodern era. Her project, called "the multivocal art criticism project," involved critical thinking, nonlinear learning, and multiple interpretations of an art object in learning about art criticism through hypermedia. Parallel to our class, in Keifer-Boyd's approach, art's relationship to life through cultures and history was a key learning goal. In her class, students shared interviews, data, and discussion about public art and the designed environment through a local high school's interactive television, kept logs of questions they felt were important to interpreting art, and interpreted one artwork extensively according to their questions and the socio-cultural context of the work.

Krug has been another leader in the meaningful integration of technology into art education, and a person to whom my work with technology owes a debt. he has explored concepts of community formation and past research on electronic learning communities (Krug, in press), and community formation and critical inquiry through social justice pedagogy in an online course (Krug, 2002). His work with technology in a "life-centered approach" (Krug, 1999) is directed towards developing a dialogic approach to teaching art with technology that involves "the ability to interpret visual culture in relationship to social and cultural contexts, and to make art that articulates meanings that are important to a larger society" (n.p.).

Description of the Class and Setting

In this article, I focus on teaching with a MOO in an art criticism and aesthetics class. The final assignment-a class project-is to design a website with related art criticism and aesthetics activities using an interactive computer environment. The audience is students at a local high school working on a public art project. ' The website was first designed when field trips were no longer possible. This approach remains useful because it brings together a variety of art works that range great distances across the city.

The class website, designed in part as a teaching tool, includes web pages that present background information on various controversies in the arts, such as Richard Serra's Tilted Arc, Chris Ofili's Black Mary at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and local controversies.2 One of the latter, for example, arose when the Mexican government presented an equestrian statue of Pancho Villa as a gift to the city of Tucson (see Figure 1). Although much revered as a revolutionary hero in Mexico, the memory of Villa in the U.S. is more often that of a bandit.3 The gift inspired many heated conversations and letters to the newspaper about issues of cultural diversity and politics. Most of the controversies we discuss in class-including the Pancho Villa statue-arise from puzzles written by the students. Once students are introduced to the interactive computer technology, (the MOO, described below), it, is used to engage in our discussions.