Juan Carlos Castro, PhD

I am a Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Art Education at Concordia University, where I have been a faculty member since 2010. Growing up, I did not have much interest in school. It was not until a friend invited me to help build puppets and paint sets at a local community art centre that I experienced what art could do: connect people, give purpose, and create new possibilities for understanding the world. I was lucky to find two committed art teachers in high school who pushed me to think in new ways and make work I cared about. I went from someone who contemplated dropping out to completing a BFA, and from there to becoming an art teacher myself. Art education changed the course of my life, and I have spent the past 25 years asking how it can do the same for others.

That early experience shaped everything that followed. When I was teaching visual art and photography at Towson High School in Maryland, I tried to enact a pedagogy that followed my students' interests and ideas, co-constructing a place where students and I could participate in and through art making. On my way to the University of British Columbia to begin my doctoral studies in 2006, my former students invited me to join a new platform called Facebook. They had formed a group of people who had attended my art classes, and I was struck by how readily they self-organized into a community of artists, mentoring and sharing their work with one another. I never intended to study social media. I was compelled to follow my students into that space. That impulse, to follow what young people are actually doing in their creative lives, take it seriously, and ask what it means for art education, has defined my research program and my pedagogy ever since.

My research has developed across three phases. The first examined the teaching and learning of art through social media, establishing the theoretical and methodological foundations for what followed. The second, supported by a SSHRC Insight Grant, produced the MonCoin project, a mobile media arts curriculum developed with and for at-risk youth in Montreal-area secondary schools. MonCoin ("my corner" in French) was designed to connect visual art practice with civic engagement through smartphones and social media, giving young people tools to examine and represent their own communities. That research resulted in the edited volume Mobile Media in and outside of the Art Classroom: Attending to Identity, Spatiality, Movement, and Materiality (2019). The third phase extended MonCoin into a pan-Canadian study, Investigating the Creative Practices of Youth in Digital Visual Learning Networks, conducted with research partners in Montreal, Winnipeg, and Vancouver, and supported by a second SSHRC Insight Grant. That work is now published: Navigating the Online Networks of Young Creators: An Investigation of Digital Visual Learning, co-edited with Dr. Joanna Black (2025). My current SSHRC-funded project (2026–2029), Choosing or Refusing the Machine: Investigating Young People's Creative Practices with Generative Artificial Intelligence, extends that work by examining how young people take up, adapt, or resist generative AI image tools as they create and circulate work within their digital networks.

I am also a practicing artist. I have exhibited photography and collaborative work in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and I served as a contributing photo editor at a rock climbing magazine for several years in the early 2000s. Making has always been connected to my thinking about art education. The relationship between artistic practice and pedagogy is foundational to my courses, supervision, and research.

My leadership contributions at Concordia reflect the same investment in the institution that I bring to the classroom. I served as Chair of the Department of Art Education from 2017 to 2022, leading the department through a full curriculum renewal, a CAPFE reaccreditation, and the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and as Undergraduate Programs Director for nearly a decade before that. I am currently the Graduate Program Director. Nationally and internationally, I served as Chair of the National Art Education Association (NAEA) Research Commission from 2018 to 2020, as NAEA Eastern Region Director of the Higher Education Division, as Media Review Editor of Studies in Art Education, and as a founding Steering Committee Member of the Art Education Research Institute (AERI). These roles have given me a sustained view of what the field needs and where research can speak directly to the concerns of practitioners and policymakers.

In 2023, I was named a Distinguished Fellow of the National Art Education Association, one of only three people in the sixty-year history of Concordia's Department of Art Education to receive it. I was also awarded the NAEA's National Higher Education Art Educator of the Year Award in 2022 and the NAEA's Manuel Barkan Memorial Award in 2013 for an outstanding research publication in the field. These recognitions and others confirm that careful attention to what young people do, where they go, and what they make produces knowledge that the field takes seriously and that practitioners can use.

Teaching and teacher education have been central to my career at every stage. I was a National Board Certified Teacher, a recipient of two U.S. Presidential Scholars Teacher Recognition Awards from the United States Department of Education, and a recipient of the Concordia Faculty of Fine Arts Distinguished Teaching Award. I spent six years learning, in a public school classroom with adolescents, what curriculum and pedagogy actually do and do not do. That experience is what I bring to my courses, my supervision, and my thinking about the field. To date, I have supervised 11 completed doctoral dissertations and 16 master's theses, and I am currently working with 6 doctoral students. My graduates have gone on to faculty positions, leadership roles, and research careers, and their work has been recognized by the field: one doctoral graduate received the NAEA Elliot Eisner Doctoral Dissertation Award, the most prestigious doctoral prize in art education; another was a runner-up; a master's graduate received the Canadian Society for Education through Art Master's Thesis Award. The research my students have pursued reflects the breadth of the field: curriculum theory and design, digital and mobile media in art education, generative AI and art education, youth creative practices, art museum education, teacher professional development, assessment, affect and learning, civic engagement, community arts, girls' engagement with science through art, access justice, disability, and anti-ableism. I welcome graduate students working in any of these areas and in adjacent questions about what art education is for and who it serves.

Selected thesis supervision

M.A.
Cann, Stacey E. (2012) The Identity of the Curator and Educator: A phenomenological analysis of the curation of Postcards From Home. Masters thesis, Concordia University.

Lalonde, Martin (2013) Éducation artistique et technologie de la mobilité : des moyens d'engagement civique et académique pour les jeunes à risque. Masters thesis, Concordia University.

Carlisi, Tina (2013) École libre: Visualising a Social Pedagogic Movement. Masters thesis, Concordia University.

Milliken, Christopher (2013) In Search of Reciprocity Across a Standards Based Assessment Reform Network in Maine. Masters thesis, Concordia University.

Akbari, Ehsan (2014) Soundscape Compositions for Art Classrooms. Masters thesis, Concordia University.

Viens, Marie-Pier (2016) Voyage humanitaire scolaire et enseignement des arts : La photographie comme outil d’intégration et d’échange culturel.Masters thesis, Concordia University.

Moreno Bustamante, Lina María (2016) Talking About Images; Possible Conversations in Art Education. Masters thesis, Concordia University.

Lee, Somi (2016) Advantages and Limitations of Mentoring Students Online in Building their Art University Entrance Portfolios. Masters thesis, Concordia University.

Moore, Allison Cicero (2016) Heirloom Jewelry: An Actant of History and Identity. Masters thesis, Concordia University.

Forget, Bettina (2017) Converging Art and Science: Considering the Conditions in which Women and Girls enter STEM Subjects. Masters thesis, Concordia University.

Bórquez Schwarzbeck, Marcela (2018) Investigating the Relationship between Materiality and Meaning in Art Education Settings. Masters thesis, Concordia University.

Ph.D.

McMaster, Scott R. (2016) Crowdsourcing Global Culture: Visual Representation in the Age of Information. PhD thesis, Concordia University.

Salvador Edmundo Valdovinos Rodríguez (2016). A comparative study of research-for-design:
Teaching and learning in two undergraduate graphic design programs in Canada and Mexico. PhD thesis, Concordia University. 

Freire, Manuelle (2017) What is new in new media art education? A critical discourse analysis of the mythologies of media art education at the university. PhD thesis, Concordia University. Co-supervised with Dr. Lorrie Blair

Gillespie, Jethro (2018) Rethinking and Remaking a High School Art Foundations Curriculum. PhD thesis, Concordia University.

Lalonde, Martin (2018) Approche des médias sociaux mobiles basés sur l'image en éducation artistique : une étude sur les affects adolescents et sur la complexité des systèmes d'apprentissage. PhD thesis, Concordia University.

Etheridge, Julie (2020) Exploring How Teachers Apply Art Museum Professional Development to Their Practices. PhD thesis, Concordia University.

Akbari, Ehsan (2020) Spatial and Collective Learning through Mobile Sensory Photography and Creative Cartography. PhD thesis, Concordia University.

Labrie, Marie-Pierre (2024) Corps mobiles et connectés : design pédagogique pour la création multimodale dans les réseaux sociaux.PhD thesis, Concordia University.

Cann, Stacey Elizabeth (2024) Collaboration in the Studio Art Classroom: Making Meaning Together. PhD thesis, Concordia University.

Courses Taught

ARTE 220: Foundations in Art Education

ARTE 354: Time-Based Media

ARTE 498: Special Topics in Inter-related Media and Technologies. Topics included: New and Social Media in Art Education, New Technologies in Art Education, art technology education.

ARTE 422 Art Education in the Secondary School I

ARTE 884 Doctoral Seminar