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Research in Arts and Education
This paper analyzes the socially engaged art project Au milieu des bureux empilés and investigates if it can be possible to create open discursive spaces within schools for students to collectively develop conversations about the education system and their experiences of schooling. The article outlines one possible framework to do so and focuses on investigating the repercussions of these open discursive spaces in schools were students shared instances of lack of care. It explores how the developed conversations might have the potential to foster a certain sense of agency and of community within participatingstudents.
The article examines the planning, development, and outcome of an experiential learning project that brought together undergraduate studio art students and the workers of a power plant about to shut down. As one of the instructors for the project, I reflect on how our emergent pedagogical methods interfaced or conflicted with students interests and plant employees. Principles of phenomenological research inspired my early steps to the study. However, its operative conceptual framework follows the thoughts of socially engaged artists Suzanne Lacy (2010) and Pablo Helguera (2011), guiding an analysis of the relationships between students and workers with instructors as observer-participants. I investigate how these roles and relations developed through different modalities that ranged from familial sentiments to memorializing impulses, including the industrial conditions that inspired various sensual and aesthetic student responses. I argue that the production of artwork as autonomous objects, which constituted the self-evident outcome of this community-focused experience, contributed only a transactional materiality to the project, and that the relational exchanges from which transformative experiences originated, offered unrivaled creative possibilities.
The Future of Social Innovation Design: Design As Strategy, 2022
This paper describes the shifting approaches to student and teaching experience on the MA Art and Design programmes at the University of Salford, (North West of England), in the wake of the global covid19 pandemic. The paper offers a series of case studies from both staff and students, which seek to employ socially engaged approaches to their practice. Each case study focuses on how individuals navigated their way through delivering projects whilst physically separated from each other and the communities they wished to engage with. The projects discussed were delivered both during and in the wake of the pandemic in the UK-which has left an indelible mark on the discourse students want to raise through their work. Case studies cover themes such as the role of creative technology as a democratized learning tool, visual communication as a powerful enabler of access and inclusivity to culture, and projects at the intersection of art, environment and health. The paper addresses conflicts, creative solutions and any emerging ethics of practice involved as a result of these projects. Ultimately the paper seeks to champion and argue how embedding socially engaged approaches to higher education (HE) pedagogy is crucial, even more so since the pandemic, to support staff and students to create art and design work which is not simply for society but work which is made with society. The paper also questions where and how art and design can exist in the world today.
Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis, 2017
The article discusses the ways of integrating contemporary art and educational institutions (from children’s art schools to universities), asking what an artist can add to existent educational contexts besides teaching as such, and vice versa, what she and her art projects benefit from them. From a brief discussion on the educational turn in arts and both positive and negative approaches towards it among art critics, artists and educators, the article proceeds to analyse several case studies: the art practice by Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, Kristina Inčiūraitė’s projects with children’s art schools, and the Alytus Art School as a phenomenon. All these cases tend to be easily dismissed from the scope of the educational turn, as they use existing educational environments as their starting point and resource, instead of appropriating educational formats into the gallery context; so the article investigates what resources and challenges a permanent educational environment offers to artists in compare to temporary school, workshop, etc.
2021
On a field trip to UP in 1995, I visited a school in a remote area. At the time it was being rumoured that a big World Bank scheme that had funded infrastructure development of schools was being discontinued. Everyone was worried, afraid that once the funds stopped flowing, the school’s infrastructure would ‘fall apart’. However, a teacher said something that completely changed my view on education. ‘I’m not worried for my school at all,’ he insisted, ‘because my school is not in the building or the furniture or the supplies – it’s in what happens between my children and me. People can come and remove the doors or even the bricks, but they can’t destroy my school
Britain is in the early stages of a wave of school building which many hope will be much more participatory than previous programmes. This is centred on the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) initiative, through which the government intends to rebuild or refurbish every secondary school in England and Wales over the next ten to fifteen years. An important part of the BSF scheme is the consultation of users (DfES 2002, p.63), with the participation of users in the design process being recommended by many in the field of school architecture (e.g. Curtis 2003, p.27). This parallels a movement within education more generally for the student voice to be heard and considered. Ideas about pupil consultation and pupil voice are driving many initiatives and policies, as well as the process of school development and evaluation (Flutter and Rudduck 2004). Putting these ideas about participation into practice within the design process, however, may not be straightforward. A fundamental decision is over who gets included in the process (see Woolner et at. 2007), since excluding certain people may well make the resulting participatory process inherently flawed (Richardson & Connelly 2005). Within a school, it seems important to involve teaching and non-teaching staff, students, parents and the wider community. However, the involvement of such a wide range of individuals, with their differing relationships to the school, may raise further problems in deciding how to proceed. Applying ideas from the more general are of pupil participation to the issue of school design Burke argues that real participation is based on genuine dialogue which is “more than a conversation” (2007, p.361). Such dialogue could be termed a learning conversation, where shared meanings are established among the diverse group of participants, allowing knowledge to be exchanged and learning to be achieved for both the individuals and for the school community as a whole. This paper describes and assesses a consultation exercise undertaken in a secondary school which is going to be rebuilt under BSF. It considers whether the activities and organisation used with the school community may be said to have supported learning conversations about the premises needed by that school and, perhaps, about the learning environment more generally. The consultation was approached from a perspective of pragmatism, where the activities chosen were seen as tools through which to develop the discussion necessary to build a complex understanding of how the school is currently used and perceived by its various community members, together with their needs, desires and aspirations, to inform the rebuilding process. The participants comprised a total of 38 teachers, 28 support staff and 107 students. The teachers represented a variety of subject areas and ranged in seniority from NQT to Assistant Head. The support staff included SEN learning supporters, teaching assistants, administrative staff, technicians, lunchtime supervisors, cleaners, the caretaker and the groundsman. Although parents and other members of the local community might appear not to have been included, a number of the staff lived locally and often spoke from the perspective of a parent, resident or community-user of the school facilities. All the year groups (Y7-Y11) were represented among the students. A range of visual and spatial activities were used to mediate the encounters, providing something to talk about, and also intended to allow more opportunity than would answering questions for participants to initiate and influence the resulting conversations. These took place in approximately homogenous groups of 3-6 participants, where it was anticipated that some shared assumptions and experience might make it easier for people to engage in constructive dialogue. In each group, a researcher guided the activities, engaged in discussion with participants and noted any comments or ideas which were not recorded elsewhere by the participants themselves. These notes, together with the products of some of the activities, were used to inform the writing of a report for the school, which drew together the experience of the consultation. It is necessary to question whether this consultation achieved its underlying aim of developing shared knowledge and understanding to be taken forward by the school to support continued participation in the design process. In such an evaluation it is useful to consider the contribution of the particular approach to the consultation and, specifically, evidence of learning conversations taking place as a result.
The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 2013
International Journal of Art & Design Education, 2019
This year's iJADE conference, entitled 'Creating Spaces: Inclusivity, Ethics and Participation in Art and Design Education', was a collaboration between Glasgow School of Art and Goldsmiths, and held at Goldsmiths, London, on Friday 22 and Saturday 23 February 2019. Creating inclusive spaces for learning and thinking becomes more pressing as we face major political, social and environmental upheavals that threaten every aspect of social and cultural life as we currently understand them. Education, globally, is being challenged in these uncertain times and we need to remind ourselves of the importance of organising and sharing our experiences and understanding. There is a requirement to explore new ways of configuring our educational spaces in art and designtheoretically, practically and ethicallyto enable the development of critical citizenship. Creating democratic spaces can help educators and learners to come together to develop ways of being in the worldto contemplate, debate, interrogate, feel, connect, reciprocate, create, problem-solve, feel appreciated and develop insights in ways that allow the flourishing of selfhood and self-efficacy. These papers were selected for publication based upon a process in which delegates were invited to nominate their top papers for publication. The editorial team then reviewed the nominations and a final selection was made. One of the aims of the special conference issue is to provide an opportunity for early career art and design practitioners and researchers to publish their work alongside more established writers. Wewiora's article focuses on a collaboration involving a Liverpool school in an area of high socioeconomic deprivation. The project supported students' photographic and digital skills using co-authoring approaches to raise young people's aspirations. It is a pioneering approach between school and cultural organisations seeking to champion photography for increased visual literacy. Stevens explores 'Design Domain', a course where students are exposed to different ways of thinking, making and doing with an emphasis on pushing boundaries beyond their discipline. She draws the conclusion that it is more appropriate to focus on ways of thinking rather than prescribing ways of doing.
1981
“Schools for Action,” an article in the journal democracy in 1981, was the first main theoretical statement of free spaces. It drew on experiences which Boyte and Evans both had in the American civil rights movement. It also built on a 1972 essay by Harry Boyte in Radical America ("The Textile Industry: Keel of Southern Industrialization") which argued that the absence of "autonomous social spaces" in Southern textile mill communities was the main reason for the failure of unionization. This essay prefigures the later book Free Spaces: The Democratic Sources of Change in America by Sara Evans and Harry Boyte (Harper & Row, 1986; University of Chicago Press, 1992). The concept of free spaces in both the essay and the book was advanced to challenge the assumption, widespread in social and political theory, that democratic, bold, transformative action emerges from "modern" settings which are uprooted and atomized. The education and learning themes in both the book and the essay also anticipated later elaboration of the theory and practice of free spaces as democratic learning spaces and also of their “action” dimension, elaborated in the concept of citizenship as public work, collaborative work across differences with a civic or “commonwealth” purpose. These ideas developed through partnerships of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship (especially the youth civic education initiative Public Achievement and the Jane Addams School for Democracy, with new immigrants in the Twin Cities) and through a long partnership with the education unit of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, Idasa, directed by Marie Ström. Today, free spaces and public work can be usefully contrasted with conventional education. Free spaces as learning spaces differ from teacher-controlled learning sites in our times. These include "safe" spaces, where young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are protected from discomfiting experiences. They include as well educational experiences where the teacher has a tacit or explicit view that “calling out” biases and micro-aggressions is the way to counter them. Such experiences are often called “bold” or “brave” spaces. In contrast, in free spaces, educators are citizen teachers who are co-creators of education, not external experts. Their work begins with a focus on building respectful relationships, not a focus on what is "wrong" with students’ beliefs. Citizen teachers co-create environments of publicness and pluralism with their students, where all voices and views are understood to grow from lived experience and merit respect. Citizen teachers understand that overcoming biases is a process of development and change, a largely self-directed process which educators can help to facilitate but do not dictate. Finally, citizen educators who co-create and sustain free spaces have an expansive and generative understanding of power developed through learning, power as civic agency, power "to," not power "over." In such power all involved -- including educators themselves - grow and develop through a learning process which is collaborative public work that builds a democratic commonwealth of knowledge, to use a phrase of the educational philosopher John Dewey.
Bridging Communities through Socially Engaged Art, 2019
Contemporary Social Science, 2017
This research explores the educational experiences from a qualitative perspective with in-depth interviews and focus groups with disadvantaged young pupils. The research takes place in two secondary art schools in Milan. I define art in the space of educational choices, in a Bourdieusian perspective. This type of school is an ambivalent practical lyceum. I study the meanings of this choice, the educational representations and attitudes of the students as well as the ambitions for the future. I investigate the school choice, the learner identity and the creative aspiration as classed concepts by means of cultural capital and habitus tools. The social class determines the way in which students orient themselves towards creative educational routes and professional future careers. A research of mediocrity and modesty characterises their dispositions towards school and art. The educational artistic experience is considered as a merely autotelic practice without value and relevance to their life. The disadvantaged young students are incomplete neo-liberal subjectivities and their life projects are undefined in terms of tools, aims and trajectories. In sum, I examine the role of secondary art school to reproduce the social disadvantages in terms of educational and professional aspirations.
International Journal of Education and the Arts, 2020
This article seeks to share the experience gained in the expository project Atmospheres for Educational Change, a curatorial proposal focused on education that took place at Normal, the cultural intervention space at the University of A Coruña, aimed at criticizing the position of contemporary art in education and society. Atmospheres reflected on the life and routines of individuals in collectivity. It invited IJEA Vol. 21 No. 6 http://www.ijea.org/v21n6/ 2 the spectator to an interaction between the aesthetic artificiality of the created environment and the naturalness of the sensations generated within. These were environments that invited discomfort, with artistic installations that functioned as social agitators—politically incorrect and educationally transformative.
Students’ voices in schools have been historically associated with the chaos of the irrational, immature and irresponsible: to be quietened, curtailed and disciplined. This chaos has been “hidden” through the reinforcement of discursive habits and models of recognition (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994/2009, p. 216) that block, prohibit and invalidate students’ speech and affects. “‘New wave’ student voice” (Fielding, 2004a) has emerged in the past twenty years, framed by its proponents as a “radical collegiality” (Fielding, 1999) that might provide the conditions for “radical interruption[s] to the normal asymmetries inherent in school relations” (Mockler & Groundwater-Smith, 2015, p. 54). In student voice work, students are re-positioned to research issues surrounding teaching and learning. ‘Student voice’ encounters where students, as those “directly concerned” with the practices of schooling, “speak on their own behalf” (Deleuze, in Deleuze & Foucault, 1977, p. 209) in “collective elaborations” (Guattari, in Rolnik, 2004/ 2008, p. 9) might manifest new subjectivities, social relations and environment-worlds in the striated spaces of schooling. At the same time, ‘student voice’ is concept that “zigzags” and passes “through other problems or onto different planes” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994/2009, p. 18). ‘Student voice’ has proliferated in recent years in school improvement literature as a mechanism by which to increase engagement and school ‘effectiveness.’ In the movement of the concept of ‘student voice’ through the terrains of education, ‘student voice’ has been de- and re-territorialised by capital, sedimented into formations that encourage students to self-style their speech to become diplomatic and their subjectivities to become enterprising (Bragg, 2007; Foucault, 1991, 2007; Rose, 1999). However, these discursive critiques of student voice marginalise the affective, sensory and material movements of student voice work that exceed and escape molar relations of power. This paper maps discursive, affective and material currents as the concept of ‘student voice’ was animated in a low socioeconomic high school during a four-year period where ‘student voice’ was employed as a reform strategy. In processes of participatory schizoanalysis in the final year of the reform, the students and I formed and re-formed collective assemblages of enunciations to create concepts, produce art and analyse the (scientific) variables that constitute and re-constitute the “micropolitical vitalit[ies]” (Rolnik, 2004/ 2008, p. 9) of student voice work. The students’ and my collective theorisations are schizo-analytically intersected with flows of signs and machinic flows in social, political and economic machines beyond the school that shape how ‘voice’ is perceived, interpreted and evaluated. Artistic and philosophical collective assemblages of enunciation about ‘voice’ are juxtaposed with the school’s documented evaluation of the ‘effectiveness’ of the student voice work. It is argued that the molar lines that construct social faces and project specific forms of subjectivities of ‘student’ and ‘teacher’ might be (momentarily) suspended and redirected, even while smooth spaces will not suffice to save us (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/ 1987).
Educar em Revista, 2021
To rethink the clichés that surround both the school space and the environmental education field, we ask ourselves: what are the potentialities that flourish in what we could call the school-environment? By proposing an intersection of boundaries between the terms "environment" and "school", we refer to a school environment that exists in its diversity of affections, encounters and events. Schools are currently the target of ultraconservative discourses that aim to suppress their inventive potential of creating other spaces and temporalities. In the course of this research, we opened ourselves up to the possibilities of inventive environmental forms of education and we also moved towards a resignification of the school space, while we experience the narratives, poetics and differences that inhabit it. In a municipal public school located in Florianópolis (SC), we invited ninth grade students and a group of workers to participate in workshops that enabled experimentations in environmental education on the following questions: what narratives and poetics populate this school-environment? How do these narratives relate to the differences and multiplicities present in this school-environment? The field diary was an important device for delineating these issues. In a collective process of creating other ways of relating to such a space, we carried out different experimentations with narratives and poetics along with this diversity of collectives that exist inside a school.
2014
My autobiographical research focuses on creating digital heterotopias through social media platforms, providing safe spaces which allow art teacher candidates the opportunity to reflect upon their practicum experiences and question the status quo of institutional myths and inherited discourses in teacher fieldwork. Functions of heterotopic space link together and reflect other pedagogical sites, including institutional spaces. Heterotopias are often designed to be temporal and hidden from public view but are necessary enclaves for exploring non-hierarchical paradigms. Such temporary communal spaces can lead one to a personal praxis in uncovering what sometimes is never fully explored, our own autobiographical narrative of teaching. By creating a digital space utilized by art education student teachers in the midst of their practicum, I recalled my forgotten autobiography of student teaching, where memories of inequities and suppression of difference emerged. Through the lenses of cr...
The educational question in cultural production is a focus for debate that has come up recently in a range of contexts and reflections in the field of contemporary culture; in both theoretical and practical terms. This emergence is a demonstration of how educational concerns have also had a significant impact on current artistic practices, and not as a supplementary element or in a secondary role, but rather as one of the keys to the production of knowledge and work on cultural politics. The situation has made education 'fashionable' in the public arena. Or more specifically, a range of debates in the world of contemporary production have begun to analyze, and place emphasis and importance on the pedagogical factor. At this time, there are already examples that show us how exhibition centres and cultural production are taking educational proposals into consideration. In order to review the wide range of discussions and debating forums on pedagogy, we can look to the fact that pedagogy is starting to become the leitmotif for a series of exhibitions and platforms of thought such as Radical Education 2 (Gallery of Modern Art of Liubliana, Slovenia); the previous Manifesta in Cyprus (cancelled in the end), with the curatorial motive of the school; the last Documenta in Kassel , with education and the question: What to do? as one of the 3 guiding themes of the macro-event; the exhibition Academy-Teaching and Learning (Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven); and lastly the processual exhibition Pedagogical factory. Exploring strategies for an educated city, 3 organized by the Stockyard Institute of Chicago in the Hyde Park Art Centre, with a continuous series of workshops and work coordinated by AREA. There are also publications that have either echoed this movement, such as Zehar (taking up the education debate held at Documenta XII to state level), or are interdisciplinary editorial projects, such as AREA 4 in Chicago (describing the intersections between art, activism, research and education on a local level since 2005). Other events held in tandem were also emerging, such as the Summit conference: non aligned initiatives in education culture, 5 from the 24 th to the 28 th of May 2007 in the city of Berlin (setting up forums for debate and action on multiple fronts for action in autonomous and non-aligned practices). All the above-mentioned examples show the pedagogical factor has moved beyond a school and teaching question and has become the central theme in the discussion of relations between democracy, culture and society.
The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 2016
This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the name of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text...Space as inventory, space as invention. (Perec, 1974, p. 13)What might it look like to move into potential/transitional spaces as educators and hold school there? (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 62)Jack Watson (2012), a high school art teacher working in Chapel Hill, NC, offers a curricular example of high school students using school space as a site for collaborative, interventionist art making. In his article "We Turned the World Upside Down," Watson describes what occurred in his classroom as he was teaching a unit on "the contemporary practice of interventionist artists who seek to creatively transform spaces and disrupt the ritual of the everyda...
This chapter is a narrative of arts education advocacy in the midst of a bureaucracy that misunderstood the purpose of art education at the launch of a new elementary school. Contemporary visual arts education practices overlap a unique period of change in neighboring social science disciplines, a turn of the tide that involves the embrace of narrative methods to rewrite prevailing working models and paradigms of social science practice. Here at the start of the 21st century, art education continues to be practiced in the thrall of a scientific paradigm that misunderstands the greater potential of the arts in education, often imposing a ceiling ill-fitted for arts praxis, arts-based research, or arts pedagogy. The author argues that art education is also at a turn of the tide and surmises some of the unexpected outcomes when a “pedagogy of possibility” is more thoroughly explored, allowing practitioners to fully rethink an art education practice without taxonomic ceilings and as a site of resistance.
stated introspection reveals a "…vulnerable, muddy, and ambivalent process of making ethical decisions in qualitative research" (p. 3). Our shared reflection and dialogue is a form of introspection as we take up this practice as co-authors and co-researchers involved in a shared process of making meanings of our collaborative public practices. Being able to reflect on each other's projects in this way, in the spirit of introspection, helped us view what we did not or could not see and make relational connections that strengthened our research process within our own projects. Similarly, we use a dialogic format in this chapter to explore community development, dialogue processes, and lessons learned through introspection. Our process in our two projects is a means to build learning communities that support the lifelong successes and achievements of participants through practices that question social problems, policies, and ethical dilemmas. We wrote our separate stories and exchanged them. Next, we chose places where we wanted to respond and sent back our responses. We then analysed what the other stated and made additional comments, responses, and additions. The resulting stories and histories embrace new perspectives about local governments, the environment, cultural and historical practices, and the human rights and the human condition. In doing so, these new perspectives enable opportunities to rethink, rewrite and re-right our purposes as educators and the ways knowledge is produced through shared dialogue. What is apparent to us are the ways these two projects share similar structures that rely on interactions among participants and facilitators to engage in collaboration, dialogue, and partnerships.
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