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- Volume 5, Issue 1, 2016
Visual Inquiry - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2016
Volume 5, Issue 1, 2016
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Making sense of research
More LessAbstractIn this article I write performatively in order to engage in the very practices that I have come to find valuable in my professional life of being a researcher. Rather than draw from my past experiences – a remembered past – as a means to explain my present interests, I write about personal sensory and embodied encounters in order to bring them into the present moment; to present them as unfolding experiences that are entangled with my theoretical and research interests in emergence and movement. In this way, I write with an orientation towards process and unfolding experience, underscoring the ways in which phenomena are always on the move within the field of relations that constitute research as an act of creation.
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Spectral reverberations: A history of the present
More LessAbstractIn the article that follows, memory and cultural history are folded onto the present to expose their reverberations, their yet unseen and unknown ideational encounters and alliances. In thinking and writing present and past events through one another constitutes fabulation, a parabolic telling that acts on and reverberates the hauntings of the foundational knowledge again and again, yet differently. A past event that repeats differently in the present constitutes time-out-of-joint – that is, a history of the present. The truth and accuracy of such a paradoxical account reverberates virtually as a newly created and different life in which one is no longer held hostage by the hauntings of memory and history.
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Can latitudes become forms? Unveiling purpose in higher education practice
More LessAbstractMy praxis as teacher/scholar and the journey that led me here is marked by the political dimensions of education and visual art. For me, this relationship between education and politics is rooted in the Brazilian context of the mid-1960s, a time of great upheaval. Then and there, education and art provided strategies of resistance, with the arts articulating protest in veiled and codified language and transformative education methodologies providing tools to displace oligarchical assumptions about knowledge and society. This manuscript explores the motivations shaping my higher education work and its trajectory from my formative experiences in Brazil, and my professional training in the United States, to a global career.
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Multiple entry points to the arts and culture of China
More LessAbstractTwo ostensibly unrelated journeys are recounted with photocollage and essay in two voices (italics and roman). In one, the author rambled along as a child, acquiring an education in Singapore while exposed to the cultural forces that shaped her educational values and beliefs. She ultimately transformed them into the curriculum design for a new course culminating in a travel-study to China. In the other, she accompanied several US college students on an intellectual and creative trek to explore how art-centred learning can actualize experiential education in travel-study. The co-constructed learning experience was reciprocal and facilitated the author’s personal, cultural and professional identity quest.
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Beautiful uncertainty: The art of breaking and making
More LessAbstractFalling into art-making by accident introduced me to an image-world of symbol, metaphor and meaning. As a practising artist, I have been able to explore openended possibilities, and discover the deep beauty of ambiguity and the unknown. As a teacher of mostly non-art majors, I have been given the opportunity to share this fragment of my autobiography, and have discovered a diverse audience of students hungry for complex and nuanced challenges that develop their abilities to see, feel and intuit. My classroom acknowledges and explicitly values these fundamental human qualities, and for many students offers an antidote to an education that otherwise appears to value only quantification and instrumentality.
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Teaching artfully: On encountering the unknown in higher education
More LessAbstractIn this contribution I address the challenges and rewards that are brought by teaching creatively in higher education. By looking auto-ethnographically at my own practice as educator at undergraduate and graduate programs in Denmark, I describe a number of creative educational tools: metaphor-building by means of artefacts, integrated use of visuals in lectures, and dramaturgical structure in educational design. My objective in teaching creatively is to inspire my students, who are educators-to-be or facilitators of educational processes and are used to problem-based-learning approaches (PBL), to (more) critical and original thinking. The aspiration of the present contribution is to disseminate my thoughts, reflections, experiences and engage in a conversation with a scholarly field, to whom academia is much more than logical-verbal transmission of knowledge.
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Visual culture as a way of life
More LessAbstractThe teacher and researcher journey presented in this article results from the convergence of two great desires. The first desire is related to action as a remedy against boredom. It is still the main motivation for my involvement in active, participatory, democratic teaching methods based on practical and concrete projects embedded in social life. This desire for action led me to oppose the school considered as a sanctuary and to rethink it as a place to share curiosity, knowledge, research and practices; to dare to act individually and collectively to improve the world. The second desire is about new technologies as medium and tool for action. It results from an irrepressible curiosity and willingness to communicate and create with pictures and share the iconic universes by learning how to master the new technologies. In a sense, learning by doing, acting and sharing visual media and technologies are my credos.
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Teaching the unknown to facilitate the emergence of a pedagogical event
More LessAbstractI have organized this article into two parts. First, I present some of the main concepts that illustrate the praxis of my teaching and research. These are concepts that help me build my positionality in order to cope with the unknown and move through the disturbances of the pedagogical relations at the university. In the second part, to illustrate how these concepts are performed in a collaborative teaching and researching process, I present a case study developed with a group of undergraduate students in a course on arts-based research. Sharing and analysing some of these disturbances help me to review my teaching position, notions about learning, assessment strategies, relationship with the students, uncertainties that emerged from the practice and certainties that sometimes immobilize me in teaching activities.
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Being a human being and how art can help
By Janeke WienkAbstractBased on the author’s experience, this Interlude explores the different ways in which art can help reflect on artistic, pedagogical and existential key questions that are relevant to both personal and professional contexts. The lived experience of how being in touch with art helps one to be in touch with one’s own humanity can be a powerful starting point to art education. This Interlude aims to bridge the gap between an instrumentalized arts curriculum and the natural ability of art to connect us to the very base of human existence.
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Attention on the edge: Ability to notice as a necessity in learning, teaching and survival
More LessAbstractThis text reveals the process of my growing awareness about how attentiveness relates to learning, teaching and beyond. My research with young children uncovered their extraordinary abilities to be present and engaged in the moment. The children, my young co-researchers as well as my son, constantly challenged my understanding. The newly gained insights shaped my commitment to search for ways to cultivate mindfulness in my students. On the other hand, my experiences in research and teaching motivated explorations in my personal life where my selfawareness was truly put on test. Attentiveness is an embodied ability, nurtured in the arts where personal experiences matter, but often underestimated in school in general. Knowing that my students will be influencing new generations of children in the decades to come, I feel obligated to help them become attentive, responsible and affectionate teachers.
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The spaces between: Children, teachers, researchers, artists
More LessAbstractDirect engagement with children, teachers and the curriculum that brings them together in pedagogical relationships figure prominently in my work with beginning teachers and researchers. A dialogical approach to teaching, celebrating the contingencies of each class and each situation, leads to a vital and constantly challenging engagement with the process of educating as reciprocal and open-ended. Grounded in philosophies of reciprocity and relationship, this way of being in the university respects the rhizomatic nature of knowing and becoming, eschewing the overly determined and stratified spaces of pre-ordained and standardized curriculum in favour of the emergent and unpredictable.
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