Temple University cherry "T" logo

Tyler School of Art & Architecture

Search Keywords

David Herman Jr., PhD

David Herman Jr., PhD

Associate Professor Art Education

Email davidhermanjr@temple.edu

Direct 215.777.9262

Office Location Tyler B90

Website davidhermanjr.com

David Herman sitting at a table outside in Tyler's courtyard.

Photo by Joseph V. Labolito

Dr. Herman is a lens-based exhibiting artist, educator, and scholar whose work explores the relations between perception and the social as a political endeavor. Their arts-based research and scholarly interests are grounded in the belief that the social is inherently political, and that art education offers critical opportunities to engage the affective dimensions of social life as a means of understanding meaning-making and relational being.

Herman’s ongoing research in early childhood perception examines the perceptual conditions through which relational attunement and co-emergent meaning arise in early learning and beyond. Drawing on a phenomenological framework they term the Perceptual Rite of Passage (PRoP), this work investigates how perceptual experiences operate as formative thresholds shaping learning, subjectivity, and relational life.

Over the past two decades, Herman’s teaching and social practice in art education—within and beyond public school contexts—has been closely connected to their work as co-founder of Preservation LINK, Inc., an arts education nonprofit dedicated to developing visual literacy curricula and professional development initiatives that position art as imaginative inquiry and self-actualization.

They are also the founding member of The Learning Line, a collaborative research initiative focused on transdisciplinary conceptions of learning as embodied perception. Through this work, Herman’s more recent research engages emerging questions of artificial intelligence and posthuman involvement, exploring how learning and meaning-making emerge through relational encounters among human, material, and other-than-human actors, and how technologies participate in shaping perceptual life, attentiveness, and agency.

Herman has served in multiple editorial and leadership roles, including Media Review Editor (2023–2025) and Review Board Member (2022–2025) for Studies in Art Education; Review Board Member for the Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education (2019–2023); Commission Member of the National Art Education Association’s Commission on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (2019–2022); Committee Member of the NAEA Research Commission’s Professional Learning Through Research Working Group (2019–2021); and Executive Board Member of the International Visual Sociology Association (2018–2021).

Selected Work

Herman, D., & Kraehe, A. M. (2018). Toward a Counter-Visual Education: Cinema, Race, and the
     Reorientation of White Visuality. In A.M. Kraehe, R. Gaztambide-Fernandez, & B. S. Carpenter (Eds.),
     The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education (pp. 227-245). London, UK:
     Palgrave-Macmillan.

Herman, D., Kraehe, A. M., Bartholomee, L., & Lewis, T. (2017). Creating the City: An Interview with
     Antonia Darder and Pepón Osorio. Policy Futures in Education, 15(6), 790–802.
 
Herman, D. (2017). Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Queering of Southern Lines. In S. Travis, A. M.
     Kraehe, E. Hood, & T. Lewis (Eds.), Pedagogies in the Flesh: Case Studies on the Embodiment of
     Sociocultural Differences in Education (pp. 127-132). London, UK: Palgrave-Macmillan.

Education

  • PhD, Art Education, College of Visual Art and Design, University of North Texas, 2018 
  • MA, Interdisciplinary Studies/Visual Sociology, University of Texas at Dallas, 2008 
  • BA, Media Communications, Florida A&M University, 1994

Publications

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Herman, D., Jr. (2025). The Spaces Between Us: Reviews as Sites of Dialogue and Being. Studies in Art Education, 66(4), 543–545. 

Hood, E. J., Travis, S. T., Brown, K. J., Herman, D., & Yoon-Ramirez, I. (2025). Dialogic praxis and racialized embodiment in art education. Journal of Social Theory in Art Education. 

Herman, D. (2024). Children as icons and agents: Visual representations and realities. Studies in Art Education, 66(1), 129–131. 

Herman, D. (2024). The optics of race and new understandings of literacy in art education. Studies in Art Education, 65(3), 398–400. 

Herman, D. (2024). A belonging to place: Affective intersections of art, identity, and the urban milieu. Studies in Art Education, 65(2), 260–262. 

Herman, D. (2024). Stepping into a legacy: Charting the course as media review editor for Studies in Art Education. Studies in Art Education, 65(1), 106–108. 

Herman, D. (2022). A perspective on antiracist thinking. Art Education, 75(5), 55. 

Herman, D. (2020). An ethics of participation: Spatial research with young children in urban spaces. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 1–17. 

Herman, D. (2020). Partiality and the art education researcher. Studies in Art Education, 61(3), Special Issue. 

Kraehe, A. M., & Herman, D. (2020). Racial encounters, ruptures, and reckonings: Art curriculum futurity in the wake of Black Lives Matter. Art Education, 73(5), 4–7. 

Herman, D., Kraehe, A. M., Bartholomew, L., & Lewis, T. (2017). Creating the city: An interview with Antonia Darder and Pepón Osorio. Policy Futures in Education, 15(6), 790–802.

Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters 

Herman, D. (accepted / under review). Collage as creative research praxis. In G. Wilson, V. Lopez, & M. Bae-Dimitriadis (Eds.), Handbook on critical arts-based methods. Routledge. 

Herman, D. (2023). Esculent identities: A spatial politics of be/longings in Black visuality. In C. Cambre, E. Barromi-Perlman, & D. Herman (Eds.), Visual pedagogies: Concepts, cases & practices. Brill. 

Herman, D., & Kraehe, A. M. (2018). Toward a counter-visual education: Cinema, race, and the reorientation of White visuality. In A. M. Kraehe, R. Gaztambide-Fernández, & B. S. Carpenter (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of race and the arts in education. Palgrave-Macmillan. 

Herman, D. (2017). Compulsory heterosexuality and the queering of Southern lines. In S. Travis, A. M. Kraehe, E. Hood, & T. Lewis (Eds.), Pedagogies in the flesh: Case studies on the embodiment of sociocultural differences in education (pp. 127–132). Palgrave-Macmillan.