Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Critical pedagogy theorist Paulo Freire described an effective and anti-oppressive pedagogy as “dialogical and problem-posing.” This method of centring real-world problems for students to address, with teachers as facilitators and partners in dialogue, is also a strategy for interdisciplinary inquiry, uniting disciplinary knowledges and methods to address a problem that could not be solved by one discipline alone. As postsecondary educators informed by critical pedagogy in the interdisciplinary Fine Arts, we grapple with the implementation of these methods in the classroom: how might we frame problem-posing in such a way that it does not only validate concrete and instrumentaliz[ed/able] acts of creative inquiry but also leaves space for the unresolvable, unknowable, and failure? We are currently engaged in teaching and leading a redesign of “Keywords: Reading the Arts Across Disciplines,” a year-long interdisciplinary core-requirement course tasked with introducing students to critical theory and interdisciplinarity in the Fine Arts, organized around keywords as foci for interdisciplinary critical inquiry. Using “Keywords” as a case study, and drawing from the work of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Caroline Woollard, and others, we consider the question of what problem-posing might look like in the interdisciplinary Fine Arts. Informed by Donna Haraway, we rephrase the ‘problem’ as ‘the knot,’ and frame each keyword as such. This suggests a convergence of disciplinary methods and tools to untangle a complex keyword: shifting the emphasis from finding a single ‘solution’ to examining many threads of diverse knowledge, opening up space for nuance, failure, and lack of resolution.

Presenters

Molly Claire Gillett
Scholar-In-Residence, Interdisciplinary Studies and Practices in the Fine Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University, Quebec, Canada

Sandra Huber
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University, Quebec, Canada