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How do we conceptualize transdisciplinary curriculum development and what might be the curriculum theory that is driving it? In the following I pursue the development of an object-oriented curriculum theory that assembles material agencies that form praxis in curriculum development. I am particularly interested in the potential of a science, technology, engineering, art and math (STEAM) curriculum that allows arts educators and their disciplinary counterparts an opening to think curriculum anew. I focus on various graphics software from a range of STEAM practices by following their material agency as boundary shifters so that we might come to know the accumulations, translations and mediators doing things important to studio and laboratory practice. In building an object-oriented curriculum theory, I offer three theorems: looking for the immutable image, gathering the materiality of data-bodies and per(form)ing three-dimensional thinking.

Art education faces significant curricular challenges through the confluence of two contributing innovations that are transforming learning in the art classroom: networked digital technologies and shifts in curricular focus to a visual culture pedagogy. These shifts present forms of visual research in student’s learning that may involve crowdsourcing a community of users, analysis of the social practice of tagging, or assembling image collections that allow students to engage in understanding visuality. Visuality, as a central construct of critical thinking in visual culture, assembles social constructions of images that are often invisible to understand the performativity of visual culture in constructing our social worlds. Efforts to augment the curriculum of a university-level art education course to explore the opportunities social media provides to build students’ critical thinking skills in their relationships to images in a visual culture are reviewed. These investigations in visuality and social media provide an indication of the ways that the field of art education, through a visual culture pedagogy, may contribute to critical thinking in a participatory culture.

Visual technologies are important in art education learning spaces, but are too often seen as value-neutral instruments that accomplish visual techniques and graphic manipulations. Using actor-network theory, this research investigates the non-human pedagogy of Adobe Photoshop software. Non-human pedagogy is perceived through actant agency where symmetry between humans and non-humans in the actor-network generates translations that are durable over time. Durable translations are analyzed as expressions of pedagogy in the ways that they create access hubs in how learners understand, become informed, and create with Photoshop. Actant agency and non-human pedagogy are framed through concepts such as modest designers and the live image to ask critical questions pertaining to visual arts pedagogy and the use of software.

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