Based in Yogyakarta, Dr. Shei-chau Wang is collaborating with faculty members in art education department at Fakultas Bahasa dan Seni at Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta (UNY) to adopt the concepts of visual culture, STREAM, and art-based inquire in pre-service teacher training curriculum. Specifically, he will work with art education faculty and graduate students to apply these concepts to develop pedagogical strategies that highlight the values of local wisdom embedded in Javanese cultures. With the teaching materials collected from an in-depth study of selected communities in Yogyakarta, he will help to build a visual culture database for teaching unique to Yogyakarta local cultures. By establishing close connections with local communities, Shei-chau plans to collaborate with art education colleagues at UNY to engage in an oral history project in which selected retired public school art teachers will be interviewed for their pedagogical practices and contributions to enriching children’s aesthetic education with art making. Other than the practical aspects of education, collected data will be analyzed for their sociocultural meanings contextualized within the complex political history of Indonesia in the 20th century. He will also lead a study group consisting of faculty members and graduate students to help increase their visibility art education scholarship at the international level.
Shei-chau is an associate professor of Art and Design Education at Northern Illinois University, USA. His research interests include studio pedagogy and cross-cultural and interdisciplinary education through the arts. He has conducted many international studies on children’s visual cultural learning to promote intercultural collaboration and global understanding. He has published articles in both English and Chinese and presented numerous papers at professional conferences in Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. Shei-chau taught studio art, design, visual culture for general education, and art education in colleges and universities in Taiwan before joining the NIU faculty. He is also a practicing visual artist. In 2022, he was selected to join three artists from the Netherlands, Ukraine, and the US in an artist-in-residence program, A.I.R. in Vallauris, France, resulting in three exhibitions: two solos held in Paris and Taipei, respectively, and one group show in Vallauris.
