Expanding avenues in art education: Engaging the curatorial

Guided by this special issue theme of ‘Curating as a Condition of Art Education’, I will discuss how curating, and art production more broadly, increasingly operate directly as expanded educational praxes. The educational turn in professional curatorial and art practice has been prompted by consideration of pedagogical models within various curatorial strategies and critical art projects. In this article I speculate on curatorial practice as a form of artistic investigation by art students. My research engages with theories of public curation, the artist-curator, and material culture art education, and I illustrate this discussion by presenting a case study of a collaborative art project initiated in Canada’s largest education archive. By enfolding theory and practice, I was able not only to envision and implement a project with students, but also to reorient my role from art teacher to ‘teacher-curator’ and address the non-traditional pedagogic thinking required to facilitate these kinds of projects at the high school level.