Educational Growth (Asynchronous)
The Veil in Art School: A Dialogue on Vagueness, Materiality and, Infection View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kathleen O'Hagan, William Platz
The word 'veil' infers the act of covering and uncovering at once. In Western art, the veil performs as a material device that articulates, enhances, and controls space; and as an epistemological metaphor for expressing the revelation of knowledge. In this way, the veil functions to both reveal and conceal truth to gain greater understanding. This investigation of the veil intersects with scholarship on vagueness in tertiary art education in order to gain insight into the dynamics, pathologies, and potentials of studio teaching. Within a contemporary Fine Arts education, there is an important divide between discursive and conceptual responses rooted in abstract thought and the vagueness associated with analogical visual learning. By leaving space for vagueness, art school teaching staffs negotiate the pedagogical veil as an instrument of control as well as a path towards transcendence. Likewise, students construct their own material veils – their interactions mediated by gaps in expectations and understanding (e.g. cultural, social). Thus, the studio environment becomes a permeable medium through which students are exposed to and infected by heterogenous knowledge and experience. This paper argues that art students’ experiences of veiled learning are inextricable from revelation and infection. Through a narrative dialogue between two artists – teacher and student – the paper considers the productive nature and impact of vagueness in studio pedagogies. The dialogue is supported by practice-led research into the veil’s symbolic and material qualities.
Embracing the Tangle: The Generative Uncertainty of Creative Pedagogy with Young Children in a Contemporary Art Museum View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Amanda Palmer, Clare Britt
The Art & Wonder: Young Children and Contemporary Art Research Project is a collaboration between the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia, and Macquarie University, working with children, families and teachers from Mia Mia Child and Family Study Centre, and Lalor Park Kids Early Learning (Blacktown City Council). Our research explores how very young children encounter contemporary art in a gallery space, and how rich pedagogy might emerge from these encounters. There is an emphasis on revisiting and returning over time – building connections and establishing relationships with spaces, materials, artists, artworks, and exhibitions. The reflexive reshaping of pedagogical approaches and work with/in early childhood pedagogy has also transformed the ways in which other educational programs with older school groups and adults at the gallery are now designed and facilitated. In this paper we focus on the effects of very young children’s visibility in a public cultural institution; their participation rights as cultural citizens; notions of reciprocity (revisiting, returning, establishing reciprocal relationships with artists, educators, materials, artworks…); and pedagogically, the ways physical and metaphorical open spaces can be created in the context of a large contemporary art museum, within which very young children’s embodied responding to complex aesthetic experiences can take flight in generative, rich, and unexpected ways.
The Storied Lives of Primary and Secondary Art Teachers: Narrative Inquiry and Voices from the Field View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jeffrey Broome
Historically the voices of primary and secondary art educators have been underrepresented among narratives associated with the fields of visual art and education. This research uses narrative inquiry methods to share meaningful stories of practicing art teachers throughout North America. The purpose is to provide a realistic portrait of the day-to-day lives of select art educators; the intent is to amplify their voices and experiences in locally-specific contexts, yet inspire global reflection on what it means to be an art educator in the 21st century. In this project, a pair of researchers consulted with the National Art Education Association in selecting participants with an aim for inclusivity. Elementary and secondary art teachers working in various geographic locations, socio-economic sectors, and instructional contexts were included. Interview-based narrative inquiry methods and observations were used to collect stories from participants. All data sets were analyzed and synthesized into corroborated stories of practice. In this paper, one member of the research team shares the stories he collected from instructors working in the following contexts: (a) with digital media, (b) at a fine arts school, (c) in a migrant farmworkers’ community, (d) with students with disabilities, and (e) in Advanced Placement programming. Data analysis revealed that (a) various approaches may be used to cultivate effective instruction, (b) proactive problem solving toward overarching goals is beneficial, and (c) even successful teachers face daily frustrations. The implications suggest that the sharing of professional stories may be useful in searching for meaning in collective experiences for art educators.
Facing the Past Through Art and Community Engagement: A Multi-method Approach to Teaching Social Justice Through Service Learning View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Joseph Cory
The Equal Justice Initiative's (EJI, Montgomery, AL) Remembrance Project invites communities across the United States to memorialize victims of racial violence by claiming monuments for permanent reinstallation in their community. Despite the popularity of EJI's National Memorial for Peace and Justice, many remain unaware of the project or its connection to their community's history. To increase student awareness of the project and learn more about the topic of social justice, Samford University art and design students partnered with the Jefferson County Memorial Project through a community-based learning course titled "Art and Community Engagement." In the course, students used a multi-method approach to study the south's history of racial violence, learn about the importance of memorials to restorative justice, and work collaboratively with a community partner to make creative work around this topic. This paper considers the course, learning activities, partnership with the JCMP, and demonstrates how the experience encouraged students to examine their personal histories to learn about restorative justice within their home community. This study argues classes such as this can be a compelling model for how community-based scholarship provides a basis for building healthier communities through collaboration, experiential learning, and engagement with diverse populations across the local and global community.
Teaching College-level Photographic Manipulation through Epistemology
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yi-hui Huang
This study proposes an innovative pedagogy that incorporates epistemology in teaching photographic manipulation. Specifically, students explore their views of reality and infuse their contemplation into the production of assigned photographic projects. With readings and class discussions on the philosophical object/subject relationship, I first invite students to identify their individual views of reality, whether it is objectivist or subjectivist, or a position in between. By relating to the close connection between accomplished artists’ views of reality and their digital composite works, students better clarify their own notions of reality and how to go about creating their own photographs. While contemplating their worldviews, students complete photographic assignments that are based on various epistemologies to identify their views. This paper explains the concepts behind this pedagogy, details a variety of methods I employ, and cites students’ views and photographic work that resulted from their philosophical exploration. Implications of this study include how the digital technology can be more meaningfully taught in college classrooms to strengthen students’ conceptual processes and to anchor their artwork philosophically.
Structurelessness and Artistic Myths in Art Schooling/Higher Arts Education: How Art Schools Perpetuate Ongoing Tensions, Conflicts, and Contradictions in Artists’ Careers View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sarah Scarsbrook
This study investigates visual artists’ experiences and views of their undergraduate fine art education, focussing on encounters of professional development in London art schools between 1986-2016. I foreground artists’ voices, analysing their motivations behind attending, their participation in professional pedagogies, what was accepted, rejected, and incorporated into professional practices, and the effects of art schooling since graduating. Unique insights are presented into art schooled artists’ identities, myths, freedoms, and professionalisation. Through social scientific methods of Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM), with arts based/informed methods, including drawing, making, speaking, filming, editing, and performing, I analyse interviews with twelve artists, covering graduate exit points in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. This approach embedded reflexivity and performativity, bringing new methods to GTM, and expanding GTM’s set of recommended methods to include creative interpretation of what artists said of their art schooling, in developing the themes I present. Art school’s structureless pedagogies are revealed as being inequitable, dependent on students’ capacities to engage, and only workable for those able to participate in this accepted single choice study model. Structurelessness is shown to heighten the circulation of artistic myths, generating misconceptions of freedoms, which embed tensions in art schooled artists’ identities, practices, and careers. Art schooling is found to cause lasting tensions, conflicts, and contradictions in artists’ identities, myths, freedoms, and professionalisation. The implications question the longevity of structureless learning in higher art education, and asks if art schools can recognise their complicity in perpetuating the myths which underlie this in shaping artists’ careers and lives.
The Institutionalisation of Street Performers’ Activities in the Context of Cultural Entrepreneurship: Social, Cultural and Structural Aspects of Informal Organization in Polish Cities View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marta Połeć
The paper presents the results of PhD dissertation, concerning the informal organisation of street performers in the context of cultural entrepreneurship and the humanistic trend of management. Its main theoretical and conceptual framework is that of neo-institutional theory. The research problem concerns the institutionalisation of street artists’ activities in the context of cultural entrepreneurship. This process is considered in relation to the social, cultural and structural aspects of activity of street performers, which constitute patterns of such activity.The paper is based on the interpretative paradigm and the researcher employs qualitative research methods, in particular ethnography and organizational ethnography. The following methods have been used to explore the research problem: participant observation and anthropological interview. The fieldwork was carried out from 2012 to 2019, mainly in the urban area of Polish cities: Gdansk, Lublin, Cracow, Warsaw and Wroclaw. Street performances are a varied phenomenon with a rich history, but so far insufficiently investigated, or even marginalized. The ambition of this paper was therefore to analyze and explain the process of organizing informal street performances. The originality of the work is demonstrated by three key conclusions concerning the posed research problem: the patterns of construction of street performers’ cultural roles and activity, the structure of the activities that compose it, and the institutional logics that shape it. The contribution to knowledge made by this paper concerns an innovative approach in management studies to informal street performances as cultural entrepreneurship, demonstrating the structuring-institutionalising dynamics of this activity within their respective institutional logics.
“A Golden Opportunity for Us to Come Together”: Gallery Educators’ Professional Learning through the First Wave of COVID-19 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Emily Grace Keenlyside
From reflective practice to training workshops, professional learning among educators in art museums and galleries is a career-long endeavour. Self-initiated or directed, individual or collective, formal or informal, it supports the range of competencies required to facilitate learning with artworks – competencies that evolve with ever changing circumstances and priorities. In 2020, the abrupt switch to digital engagement, precarious working conditions, and renewed calls for racial justice were all shaping the what, how, and why of art museum and gallery education. In this context, questions regarding gallery educators’ professional learning – what it looks like, what motivates it, and how it informs or responds to change -- began to carry new and more complex weight. This presentation will offer a portrait of professional learning through the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. It draws on my recent doctoral research with gallery educators in Scotland, which sought to better understand what a critically informed practice meant to them, with particular attention to how their professional learning fit into that understanding. Highlighting what informed their professional learning and the different contexts in which it happened, it considers the challenges and possibilities of the current moment. Discussion will focus on how significant and destabilizing shifts in both day-to-day practice and the field of art museum education itself have shaped both the possibilities and priorities of professional learning in its myriad forms and, by extension, educators’ relationships to curatorial authority, institutional change, visitor experience, and each other.
