Pedagogy and Practice
Asynchronous Session
Unlearning the Canon: A More Global and Decolonized Survey of Art History View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Allyson Montana
In undergraduate survey courses, global art is regularly compressed into discrete chapters in textbooks aimed at summarizing cultures and vast expanses of time in a few short pages. At worst, Asian, or African art is highlighted when it has historically influenced a European artist or served as a comparison to Western (read: superior) art. Equally problematic are the ways non-Western art is positioned in art history curricula and museum spaces, mis-categorized as art vs. artifact or grouped according to European standards of time, composition, or material. Often these displays in print, online, or in-person are in deference to the complex non-Western philosophical, socio-political, or spiritual theories that serve as a foundation for both object and maker. In my 2022 literature review I saw three trends emerge drawing from approaches to teaching the course, such as a theoretical approach, a thematic approach and a third category, I call inter/intrapersonal, in which student relevance, narrative or personal connection to the object takes precedence. In the Spring of 2023, I conducted a study in which I interviewed undergraduate instructors who teach survey courses in disrupted ways. I learned that the most important aspect of disruption was not in pedagogy, but in the opportunity for relationship-building, relevance, and meaning-making. Borrowing from gallery teaching and SEL, the survey course is still an important foundation that need not perpetuate the Western canon of art history in racialized ways. Instead, it can be an introduction to a new art history- or hopefully, many art histories.
Law, the Artist, and the Arts Administrator: Applied Learning in the Archive View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jaleesa Wells, Peter Morphew
What constitutes the legal environment surrounding and intersecting artists and arts administrators? In spring 2023, we set out to explore this question through a pedagogical and andragogical collaboration between Berea College’s Janis Ian Special Collection and the University of Kentucky’s Arts Administration course: Legal Environment of Arts Administration. Our overarching perspective was to consider how we could activate, leverage, and connect primary resources to the learning and development of future arts administrators. Our goal was to create an experiential learning environment that challenged students to discover the legal dilemmas embedded within and spanning across the professional career of a successful musician. This real-world legal understanding underscores critical decision making skill development needed by artists and arts administrators today. The Janis Ian Special Collection includes primary records such as contracts, copyright and licensing documents, compliance records, and industry correspondence pertaining to legal practices surrounding her career. During the one-day field trip to the special collection, students audited primary records in order to uncover and evaluate a variety of legal scenarios, provoking discussion around the role of arts administrators in the sustainability of an artistic career. The purpose of our study is to share how we planned, organized, and facilitated the field trip between our two universities, including the co-curricular development of applying archives to the classroom. Our collaborative aim is to develop an open educational resource guide outlining how to conduct these kinds of cross-institutional learning collaborations for other educators, librarians, archivists, artists, and arts administrators.
Social Justice Art Education Practice Issues in Urban Education View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Zartasha Shah
A process of exploring the social justice art education practice issues in urban education informs about the social dimensions, self-awareness, and the public space. Social dimensions are about social interactions, social practices, and social interfaces, and give a chance to students to share their influences through their artworks in their classrooms. Self-awareness gives a chance to share personal choices and preferences through the creativity of art in the classrooms. Public space engages students so they can think about the structures, dimensions, materials, and periods of time and engage with the issues of social justice in art education. The process of making artworks expands knowledge and allows students to use their learnings in the process of making the artworks by themselves. Art educators do not want to give preferences to students by gender, race, color, and ethnicity in education. Social change also has an association with social justice art education, which supports self-confidence, self-expression, and self-awareness in education. Civic literacy supports the self-awareness, self-confidence, and self-expression of students in education by allowing students to find their own space through social justice art education. Social justice art education in urban education also informs about the issues, concerns, and outcomes. Ethnic students are important in urban education. Social justice art education in urban art education also talks about social involvement, social learning, and social equality. The interpersonal, intrapersonal, and cognitive strategies also impact their lives.
Sustenance as an Artistic Theme and Pedagogical Approach: Socially Engaged Art in a Community Art Education University Course
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Natasha S. Reid
Driven by capitalist ideologies of ownership, progress, individualism, and competition, contemporary society often perpetuates a belief that there isn’t enough to go around – not enough food, water, shelter, money, and time. Neoliberal capitalism has left individuals and communities with a sense of deficiency and disconnect rather than abundance and relationality. At the centre of many socially engaged artists’ practices resides a desire to disrupt this contemporary trend by engaging with themes associated with sustenance. In this paper, I explore diverse ways socially engaged artists have worked with sustenance in their practices. This includes how I have infused themes of food as sustenance, connecting to place as sustenance, and relationality as sustenance into my creative practice using artistic research. I explore how I translated these themes into the pedagogical and curricular approaches I employed in teaching an undergraduate course on community art education. This culminated in a lesson focused on sustenance as a theme in socially engaged art and community art education. Food and water, place- and land-based art education, and relational practices in contemporary art were central to the lesson. Engaging in a collective seed-bomb creation session, which ended in a prompt for students to gift these seed bombs to others, students worked with these themes in a hands-on way. Through analyzing this practical example, the study explores how sustenance can be employed as a powerful pedagogical orientation and artistic theme in educational settings, disrupting neoliberal capitalist ideologies.
Immersive Arts: Musical Theater and Its Pedagogical Capacities in Artistic Curriculum
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Qitong Tian
The elements of immersive space can have a positive effect on students' cognitive development. Jackson & Jackson (1993) discussed pedagogical methods to increase students’ development, concluding that educational mediums are at the center of social change in teaching and learning. The current study shows that the drama and theater class and its curriculum aid students’ critical thinking and its development, which aligns with previous studies by Pendzik (2008), suggesting that the emotional resonance of the audience in each space is a key contributor to the students' attention and comprehension of the topic in question. The current study used qualitative methods to survey students and teachers after a completed immersive thematic exhibition on "Verbal Violence" to explore and analyze what factors influenced the improvement of students' attention in the course activity and how teachers of other disciplines dialectically perceive the exhibition in relation to their traditional teaching methods. The participants were international high school students in grades 9-12. The immersive exhibition was a two-day event as part of the drama performance class curriculum. The study aimed to develop a dialectical analysis of the impact of the immersive space theme exhibition on the audience, how to apply immersive space and knowledge of the theatre field as an educational tool for the holistic development of young people's education, and to contribute to the development of spontaneous and dialectical thinking while guiding the students' critical thinking and individual educational development.
