Based in Yogyakarta, Dr Shei-chau Wang is collaborating with faculty members in the Department of Art Education at the Faculty of Languages and Arts, Yogyakarta State University (UNY), to integrate the concepts of visual culture, STREAM, and art-based inquiry into the pre-service teacher training curriculum. Specifically, he is working with art education faculty and graduate students to apply these concepts in developing pedagogical strategies that highlight the values of local wisdom embedded in Javanese culture.
Drawing on teaching materials collected through in-depth study of selected communities in Yogyakarta, he is helping to build a visual culture database for teaching that reflects the uniqueness of local cultures. By establishing close connections with local communities, Dr Wang plans to collaborate with colleagues at UNY on an oral history project in which selected retired public school art teachers will be interviewed about their pedagogical practices and contributions to children’s aesthetic education through art making.
Beyond the practical dimensions of education, the collected data will be analyzed for their sociocultural meanings within the broader political history of Indonesia in the twentieth century. He will also lead a study group of faculty members and graduate students to strengthen the international visibility of art education scholarship at UNY.
Dr Shei-chau Wang is an associate professor of art and design education at Northern Illinois University. His research focuses on studio pedagogy and cross-cultural, interdisciplinary education through the arts. He has conducted numerous international studies on children’s visual culture learning to promote intercultural collaboration and global understanding. He has published articles in both English and Chinese and presented widely at professional conferences across Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America.
Before joining the Northern Illinois University faculty, he taught studio art, design, visual culture for general education, and art education at colleges and universities in Taiwan. He is also a practicing visual artist. In 2022, he was selected to participate in an artist-in-residence program, A.I.R., in Vallauris, France, alongside three artists from the Netherlands, Ukraine, and the United States. The residency resulted in three exhibitions: two solo exhibitions in Paris and Taipei and one group exhibition in Vallauris.
