This article reports on research that investigated how students’ critical thinking skills can be developed through images. The research was located in New Zealand, a country whose national curriculum and assessment systems stress ‘thinking’ as a key competency and place emphasis on developing visual literacies. The research was underpinned by a critique of the impact of images on students living in an image-saturated world and the importance of them being visually literate. It involved examination and documentation of strategies used by two teachers to foster the critical thinking of year 13 students in visual arts education and their responses to those experiences. The research was positioned within an a/r/tographical framework, a method which links art, research and teaching, and privileges both text and image. The findings, presented as an integration of participant and researcher ‘voice’ and the ‘visual’, illustrate the profound effects of critical looking practice through an enquiry framework.

A study in three secondary schools in Aotearoa New Zealand explored students’ critical thinking and how that was articulated in visual arts education. The research was motivated by the influence of everyday visual experiences on young people’s lives and the national curriculum’s call for encouraging critical thinking in the context of the students’ cultural milieu. This inquiry entailed multiple methods that included policy analysis, focus group interviews with teachers, interviews with students, classroom observations, photographic documentation and researcher engagement with the art of collage. A/r/tography allowed for the reconciliation of art, research and education and the exploration of liminal spaces through a relational inquiry. The collage process provided insights into how art making can be used as a relational device between researcher and participants that evoked findings in innovative ways. The findings are presented as entanglements of meanings aimed to provoke the imagination and open conversations.

This article reports on a research that explored students’ critical thinking in visual arts secondary education. The study was underpinned by an appraisal of the effects of the visual on students’ lives and the importance for them to critically navigate these experiences. Aotearoa New Zealand’s bicultural educational policies – based on Māori and European views – and flexible curriculum emerged as a rich conceptual vantage point from which to examine critical thinking. In this context, the curriculum underpins dialogical pedagogies and visual arts students engage in unique arts‐based projects driven by their personal interests and visual culture. The research was framed by a/r/tography, a methodology that enabled the interconnection of the fields of art, research and education in response to what emerged from the data. Through verbal and artistic means, the findings show the critical potential of Indigenous knowledge, dialogical pedagogies and arts‐based research methodologies.

This is the result of a collaborative and creative experiment, a process in which six scholars—Garcia Lazo, Locke, Rupcich, O’Connor, Yoon and Longley—agreed to co-author an article through written and/or visual pieces of work. The emphasis taken in the article is to perform a methodology of fragmentation. The article is to be read as a series of ‘folds’, where collages or fragments of text are contained and while each fold is numbered, the reader is invited to read any fold in any order. Using fragmentation as method in writing also inspired our interpretation of a body of work made up of multiple ‘folds’ from the collaborative parlour game played by the surrealist movement. Known as cadavre exquis, surrealists enjoyed the strange juxtaposition created by each artist’s contribution as they drew part of a body onto a folded piece of paper without seeing the previous drawings in each fold. While often referred to in the context of psychoanalysis, we instead emphasise the fragmentation and hybridity of this form of collaboration in order to critique of universalising narratives about education (and writing) that we consider to be at odds with the post-capitalist realities of contemporary education and life.