Stylianou, Elena

Background: The advent of new and emerging technologies and industries has highlighted the need to equip youth with a unique skillset necessary to cope with a rapidly changing and complex digital era and adapt to modern societies' demands. This need has led to the development of teaching approaches to equip students with creative and innovative skills to help prevent any future skills gap. This shift has fuelled the growth of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) Education worldwide. Objectives: Our goal was to engage in a systematic review of the literature to identify the application and prevalence of emerging technologies within the landscape of STEAM Education. Methods: We engaged in a systematic review of the literature. Following the application of exclusion criteria to 461 studies, 43 studies were extracted and analysed. Findings and Conclusions: Analysis of these studies provides evidence of the fast-growing use of innovative emerging technologies within the STEAM landscape across all levels of education, from early childhood to college-level settings. Our analysis reveals an emphasis on developing STEAM-related disciplinary knowledge and the desire to develop students' 21st-century skills with a notable lack of targeted emphasis on developing understandings in the arts disciplines. We identify the need for carefully designed intervention studies involving collaboration between multidisciplinary STEAM experts that use high-quality measures which support the development of inferences relating to learning outcomes arising from such interventions.

This paper examines how artists employ photography to investigate and challenge the museum. It makes particular reference to the work of three women artists: Louise Lawler, Sophie Calle and Diane Neumaier. Their work is discussed with reference to the concept of the fictional and the ways in which photography can function as a frame within which museum hegemony, the viewing experience and arts commodification are questioned. Finally, digital photography and online manifestations of imaginary institutions are considered, suggesting that perhaps a new virtual frame emerges for the production of fictions that allows us to reimagine both photography and the museum.

Museums and Photography combines a strong theoretical approach with international case studies to investigate the display of death in various types of museums-history, anthropology, art, ethnographic, and science museums - and to understand the changing role of photography in museums. Contributors explore the politics and poetics of displaying death, and more specifically, the role of photography in representing and interpreting this difficult topic. Working with nearly 20 researchers from different cultural backgrounds and disciplines, the editors critically engage the recent debate on the changing role of museums, exhibition meaning-making, and the nature of photography. They offer new ways for understanding representational practices in relation to contemporary visual culture. This book will appeal to researchers and museum professionals, inspiring new thinking about death and the role of photography in making sense of it.

EDucation and DIgital Cultural LABoratory (EDUCLAB) is a project co-funded by Erasmus+ 2018 of the European Commission in the field of early childhood education [grant number 2018-1-IT02-KA201-048316]. The main aim of the project is to develop training material for early childhood and care (ECEC) educators working with an increased number of students (age 3-6) with migrant background, on how to plan, organize and implement cultural and artistic workshops in the classroom in the framework of the European Year of Cultural Heritage. The focus of the project is to prepare children to visit museums, libraries, archaeological sites, theatres and musical institutions, to provide them with a "key" to enjoy such visits and to be able to interpret the art they are going to explore during these visits. In this chapter we present a suggested framework on how educational cultural workshops could be organized and implemented for children aged 3-5 with diverse cultural backgrounds at early childhood education and care (ECEC) facilities. The framework has been developed for the purposes of the EDUCLAB project. The framework is developed on the basis of an in-depth analysis of data collected during focus-group discussions with approximately 50 educators conducted across all five partner countries (Cyprus, Italy, Portugal, Romania, and Turkey); two focus-groups with a minimum of five educators each, for each partner country. The focus-groups aimed at identifying best practices and pedagogical approaches in planning and implementing cultural workshops in early childhood education, as well as the skill gaps of early childhood educators in relation to the use of digital technologies and in the field of inclusive education. The analysis of the data led to the identification of skill gaps and pedagogical approaches, as well as of other emerging themes, including school-parents' relations, characteristics of good practices relating to the implementation of cultural workshops in early childhood education and care, as well as challenges faced by educators across Europe in organizing and implementing cultural workshops. In the last section of this chapter we present guidelines, practical and useful indicators for educators, as these emerge from the analysis of the data collected and supported by references to contemporary literature.

This visual essay examines Sharqi, a collection of 27 polaroid photographs that are the result of Nicos Philippou’s decade-long photographic and theoretical investigation of Cypriot topography. The essay explores the ways in which Sharqi challenges existing photographic representations of Cyprus, produced mainly in the early-to-mid twentieth century by photographers, by travellers and by the state itself, while raising relevant questions about how: (a) Cypriot landscape photography often carries a romanticized and orientalizing gaze that attests as much to the island’s specific colonial past as to photography’s ties to imperialism, and (b) photography has often become a vehicle for perpetuating a Greek-Cypriot nationalism on the island. Finally, the essay addresses the documentary, autobiographical and self-referential nature of polaroid photography by discussing specific photographs from the Sharqi series. This article also looks at Sharqi in relation to relevant historic examples from the work of Ed Ruscha and Walker Evans.

This paper examines the exhibition of everyday war-related objects as ‘real things’ in museums. Specifically, it focuses on the bombed car that the artist Jeremy Deller used for his project It is What it Is: Conversations about Iraq–exhibited in various art museums in the US, then as a travelling show, and finally in the Imperial War Museum in London and Manchester. It also discusses the Alfred Rosenberg Diary, a permanent exhibit at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which can also be seen online. The paper identifies four different, interrelated, spheres of engagement within which to examine these objects: an excessive mediation of trauma, the museum as an ideologically charged space, the visitor’s relation to the object, and the virtual online apparatus. These form a wider interpretive framework that allows us to better understand the war-related objects’ political potential to offer an embodied, transformative experience in the museum.

Background: The advent of new and emerging technologies and industries has highlighted the need to equip youth with a unique skillset necessary to cope with a rapidly changing and complex digital era and adapt to modern societies' demands. This need has led to the development of teaching approaches to equip students with creative and innovative skills to help prevent any future skills gap. This shift has fuelled the growth of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) Education worldwide. Objectives: Our goal was to engage in a systematic review of the literature to identify the application and prevalence of emerging technologies within the landscape of STEAM Education. Methods: We engaged in a systematic review of the literature. Following the application of exclusion criteria to 461 studies, 43 studies were extracted and analysed. Findings and Conclusions: Analysis of these studies provides evidence of the fast-growing use of innovative emerging technologies within the STEAM landscape across all levels of education, from early childhood to college-level settings. Our analysis reveals an emphasis on developing STEAM-related disciplinary knowledge and the desire to develop students' 21st-century skills with a notable lack of targeted emphasis on developing understandings in the arts disciplines. We identify the need for carefully designed intervention studies involving collaboration between multidisciplinary STEAM experts that use high-quality measures which support the development of inferences relating to learning outcomes arising from such interventions.