Educational Dynamics
Jagiellonian University
Alert! Knowledge Unreadable: Legibility of Dance-Based Knowledge Production in Empirically-Oriented Academic Institutions
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Angela Schöpke Gonzalez
In this project, I characterize the types of knowledge that scores – a method common in dance – can produce. As a choreographer in a well-funded Information School that is largely set up to support empirical projects, I have identified challenges that dance-based knowledge production faces to (1) being understood as knowledge upon which to build legitimate research, (2) being understood as offering value, and consequently (3) its ability to access resources. Responding to these challenges, I conducted a study that centers a non-empirically oriented method common in dance – scores – to characterize the knowledge that scores produce. This study finds that the types of knowledge produced via scores are highly situated, contextual, and well-suited to studying dynamic relationships. Further, the subject of score-based research often reveals itself over the course of research, making its outcomes difficult to articulate in advance (often requested by funders). By taking the crucial step of characterizing knowledge produced via scores, this study offers steps towards legibility of dance-based methods within empirically-oriented research institutions and funding infrastructures, without compromising the integrity of the approach to knowledge production that methods like scores can offer. Legibility invites opportunities for academic infrastructures to investigate how better to acknowledge and value knowledge that dance-based methods produce. Building on this study’s findings, future research can ask: what would it look like to offer funding opportunities for dance-based research comparable to those available for empirical research? How can academic infrastructures offer suitable approaches to evaluate dance-based research outcomes?
Object-Oriented Ontology in the College Writing Classroom
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anna Panszczyk
In philosophy, object-oriented ontology (“OOO”) centers inanimate objects along with human subjects as having interest, value, and existence. Such a view of “things” can lend itself to the college writing classroom especially in terms of asking students to practice cross disciplinary writing. By anchoring student work on a specific object, the writing classroom can become a place where students explore a range of genres and disciplines while, at the same time, recognizing how these genres and disciplines are tied to one another. By using OOO in the classroom, students have a sense of feeling securely tethered while at the same time stretching their understanding of how and why to write across academic disciplines.
The Influence of Roleplay in Personal and Professional Learning in Teacher Education Programmes: The Transfer of Drama Pedagogy and Practice
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ruth Forrest, Triona Stokes
This paper explores the influence of arts pedagogy in modules designed for personal and professional learning in teacher education programmes and traces their legacy across other higher education programmes to which the authors contribute. They designed both modules for the inception of the revised Bachelor of Education programme in 2011 at Maynooth University, Ireland, and formerly at Froebel College, Dublin. The module objectives are broad and include personal learning and teacher identity and communication with key school community stakeholders. These include host teachers and other professionals, parents, and peers for a paired school placement which is partly framed by these modules (Stokes and Forrest, 2018). Drama is used widely to offer rich, relatable, authentic learning experiences to prepare society’s teachers. The authors consider the critical role of arts pedagogies in initial teacher education in ameliorating knowledge of the self and other in the development of empathy, endorsing Nossel’s (2016) view of art as having the ability to change minds, inspiring different perspectives and reimagining our worlds. Biffi et al. (2021) are also drawn upon to appreciate how the languages of art enables expression and connection not possible solely through words. This paper offers an opportunity for the authors to reflect deeply upon, and analyse the extent to which, drama pedagogy has influenced and ameliorated practice in developing these modules and in the conceptualisation of further education modules within and beyond initial teacher education programmes.
Eco-Acoustic-Arts meet Socioecology: Teaching Sound Arts, Birds, and Environmental Sensitivities
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ruth Hellier
Composers, sound artists and musicians have long engaged birds as sources of inspiration. These art works specifically compel humans to go beyond humans to more-than-human societies. How can these arts practices address the very real tensions and dynamics of impacts of human societies on, and interactions with, birds? How do these artistic practices enable ways of understanding current human and environmental crises? As a creative artist and university professor I developed an undergraduate course to delve into these issues with students. In this paper, I consider possibilities of this pedagogical model. Discussing course details and student experiences, I draw on subjective qualitative data from participating individuals (analysis, listening, experimenting, creating, sharing) and my interpretation of their art and interactions. The course was embedded in three interconnecting threads: 1. analysis of musical/sonic practices; 2. live deep listening to birds through field (balcony/yard) work; and 3. creative experimental arts practices drawing on fieldwork. I discuss how this model enables multiple outcomes, including: new expressions of art work tackling and responding to human/more-than-human power dynamics; embodied and emplaced knowledge; and new forms of socioecological intervention through imaginative ways of communicating environmental and social benefits of birds. Given that these young adults are the generation who are deeply engaged with the chaos and crises of 21st century societies and are profoundly cognizant of the impact wrought by previous generations, their responses offer possibilities for the poetic-political potential of eco-acoustic-arts for awareness and activism, and for social and environmental justice and resilience.
