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- Volume 5, Issue 3, 2016
Visual Inquiry - Volume 5, Issue 3, 2016
Volume 5, Issue 3, 2016
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Walking together: Shared authority and co-mentorship between two artists on the move
Authors: Kathleen Vaughan and Pohanna Pyne FeinbergAbstractWe invite you to join us as we explore our co-mentorship through walking, artmaking and writing, all core aspects of our practices as artists. While meandering through the rich sensorial environment of Montreal’s waterside Parc-nature de l’Île-de-la-Visitation, our reactions to the surroundings played an influential role in shaping the character of this article. Our ideas emerged through the quiet heat of the early spring sunshine and amidst intermittent remarks about the birds flying by, the directionality of the flowing river, the strength of the wind, the sounds of lapping water, the families enjoying picnics, the demographics of the neighbourhood surrounding the park, and even the roar of a hydro dam we encountered for the first time. Drawing on a posthumanist framework, notions of shared authority borrowed from oral history, methods of call-and-response, and co-mentorship, the authors – a doctoral supervisor and a doctoral candidate in Art Education at Concordia University in Montreal – reflect on their hopes for and experiences of their work together as complementary, convergent, concurrent and symbiotic.
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Educational policy and mentorship: Transforming classroom practice and assessment in the art class
Authors: Deborah N. Filbin and Douglas G. BoughtonAbstractThis paper is a narrative about the ways in which mentorship received by a high school art teacher through her Ph.D. program enabled her to reconstruct student assessment strategies to satisfy the demands of state imposed requirements for the review of teacher effectiveness. The context of the narrative take place in the wake of the PERA legislation (Performance Evaluation Review Act) implemented in Illinois in 2016. The assessment dilemma faced by the teacher was the expectation of administration to provide assessment data derived from inappropriate testing formats. The narrative traces the development of the teacher’s response to these demands and the ultimate resolution of the assessment problem achieved through her engagement with her doctoral program.
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A quest for sacred knowledge: Mentorship to partnership
Authors: Rebecka Black, Elizabeth Garber, Yuwen Eryn Neff and Manisha SharmaAbstractFaced with the challenge of developing a mentorship relationship between faculty and graduate students that would result in a partnership, intrepid scholars Becky, Elizabeth, Eryn and Manisha encounter uncertainty, disillusionment and teaching obstacles. Optimism is followed, in their working process, by a search for a meaningful focus for the collaboration that charts new territory and simultaneously captures the interest of each scholar. Beginning with the broad theme of technological tools in teaching, they move to the educational use of video games and settle on the concept of play. Their persistence leads to a change of mission, one that grows out of their mutual work and discussions together, and commitment to their roles in a supportive partnership that involves a ‘community of practice’ (Wenger et al. 2002). The trust this establishes allows for a questioning of the concept of Sacred Knowledge in Academia during the writing process.
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Chasing ephemerality: Notes on doctoral mentoring and artistic collaboration
Authors: Mary Hafeli and Sohee KooAbstractIn this article, we explore our experiences and shifting positions as doctoral mentor and mentee, co-mentors, and collaborators over the course of one semester. We use duography (Diamond and Mullen 1996) as an analytical approach to reveal the convergence of separate perspectives and voices as we examine both the evolution of dissertation research questions and a shared studio project – highlighting mentoring and collaborative practices that stretch, blur, and morph into one another. Writing together is a transparent way of discovering what we know or have learned, and of mentoring and being mentored within and about the writing process itself. Our account describes both the co-construction of research and the ways in which our collaborative research and studio practices changed, and changed us, over time.
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Psychoanalysis in Build-A-Bear-Workshop®: Lacanian and Kristevan perspectives
Authors: Laura J. Hetrick and Susan B. LivingstonAbstractOne assistant professor and one doctoral candidate discuss their first hand qualitative investigation of a Build-A-Bear Workshop® experience, as well as share the theoretical work that has informed their interpretations of the Workshop as a site of the abject. Two concepts of psychoanalysis that will be employed in this paper are Lacanian desire and Kristevan abject. We begin with quick overviews of desire and the abject and then briefly describe how they help us analyse and understand the phenomenon of visiting a Build-A-Bear Workshop®. These perspectives are cursory and presented as avenues for future research. We conclude with a reflection on the research process and what we have learned from working together.
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Adivasi aesthetic knowing: A duographic account
Authors: Richard Hickman and Pallawi SinhaAbstractUsing the different voices of the mentor and mentee, we engage with the notion of creating and conferring aesthetic significance as it occurs in the everyday lives of everyday peoples. We investigate how the arts empower marginalized ‘voice’ by enabling multimodal expressions and access to information that other methods may not elicit. This article takes the form of a ‘duography’, reporting an empirical study that focused upon an Adi Jan Jaati or Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG) of Jharkhand, in north-eastern India. In particular, we focus upon this indigenous community’s epistemic and aesthetic practices. The article thus offers discussions on how aesthetic experiences and activities are essential means of being, of engagement and communication, and of (re)building trust with the community. We conclude by demonstrating the relevance of everyday aesthetics for the development of sustainable educational systems and future citizenship. Standing back, we acknowledge the reciprocal learning that occurs between the researcher and the ‘researched’, the doctoral student and supervisor.
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Exhibiting co-mentorship: An exploration of a mentor/mentee relationship in academe
Authors: Dianna Huxhold and Lara LackeyAbstractThis article examines doctoral mentorship. A shared research topic, exhibitions of children’s artwork, serves as the conversational vehicle for reflecting on the authors’ mentor/mentee relationship. With this narrative we clarify our collaborative writing process, the evolution of our mentor/mentee relationship, and the joys and tensions that ensued. We gathered data by recording and transcribing a series of open-ended conversations, meeting every other week over an academic year. We use duography to construct a series of vignettes through which we analyze the concept of mentorship. This article complicates the assumption that research ideation moves only from mentor to mentee. It reveals how collaboratively engaging enquiry and writing processes can serve as sources of transformation that inform, feed, and sustain the intellectual curiosity of both parties, shifting the relationship from that of mentor/mentee to one of partnership and co-mentorship.
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Mentoring as a duoethnographic exhibition: Our journey as art museum researchers
Authors: Ann Rowson Love and Victoria EudyAbstractThe study of curation is a growing research area moving away from solitary creative activities such as curating exhibitions into more participatory and collaborative endeavours (Love and Villeneuve 2016; Smith 2012; O’Neill 2012). In keeping with this evolving idea of curation, we employed duoethnographic dialogue to explore and co-curate our mentor-mentee experiences as an exhibition nestled within the cultural boundaries of art museum education and higher education. With objects guiding and rooting the discussion, our exhibition includes such themes including ‘Finding a Comfort Zone’, ‘Co-writing’ and ‘The Emerging Scholar and Edu-curator’. Throughout the article we also encourage the reader to consider his or her own mentor–mentee relationships through the exhibition themes as well as the potential for duoethnographic curation, and encourage participation.
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A transdisciplinary approach to mentoring through collaboration
AbstractAt The Ohio State University, I’ve had the honour and privilege to work with amazing students, both in the classroom and in community settings. We have engaged in collaborative research and service learning activities that created new knowledge and deep relationships. These relationships have supported a pedagogy of engagement that incorporates the tenants of collaboration and mentorship at multi-layered levels. They have also empowered both my students and community partners in the co-creation of knowledge that would lead to solutions of community-identified issues. The collaboration would be three tired and involve faculty, student and community, on equal platforms. The mentorship would navigate a process between my students and myself, equally playing significant roles in informing each other of new ideas and novel directions as we explored the issues, problems and concerns of our community partners. This article focuses on the co-creation of collaborative processes of faculty/student mentorship and collaboration between faculty/students, and faculty/students/community partners in the co-creation of knowledge.
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Mentoring: To ease one into something, something not yet one’s own
Authors: Donal O’Donoghue, Elsa Lenz Kothe, Kate Thomas, Marie-France Berard, Blake Smith and Anna RyooAbstractThis article uses a conversation as the point of departure for considering the nature, qualities and scope of mentorship, and what mentorship does, enables and denies within academic relationships. Six art education colleagues gather to explore concepts, potentialities, places and practices of mentoring in a face-to-face interaction that leads to further musings through a collective writing process. From tweets to personal testimony, this subjective and philosophical unfolding negotiates possible routes for navigating some of the complexities, qualities, emotional landscapes, and interactions of the mentor/mentee relationship. We aim to challenge our own assumptions and expectations by asking critical questions, creating openings for other ways of knowing, and imagining what else might become possible when mentorship helps ease someone into something not yet one’s own.
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‘Kids know about art’: Amplifying under-represented voices in art museums through mentorship
Authors: Natasha S. Reid, Shana Cinquemani and Chelsea FarrarAbstractWithin this article, we share our experiences critically engaging with and elevating under-represented voices in museum spaces via a graduate level course in multicultural museum education. We bring the perspectives of both an assistant professor and two graduate students in order to explore multi-faceted relationships grounded in trust, risk-taking, non-hierarchical dynamics and co-mentorship. Natasha (as assistant professor) explores her experiences developing and implementing the assignment and related course, highlighting how her relationship with these graduate students enabled her to develop a more fluid approach to mentorship. Chelsea and Shana (as graduate students) examine their interpretation and implementation of the assignment, and their reciprocal and non-authoritative relationship with their child participant. Finally, we collaboratively reflect on the experience through a dialogue at the end of the article. We aim to offer readers insight regarding how assignment design, interpretation, and the chosen site for implementation can support dynamic and alternative mentorship opportunities that emphasize the amplification of under-represented voices.
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The nest as metaphor: Reflections on mentoring, growth, and material culture
Authors: Heesung Hur, Ramya Ravisankar, Deborah Smith-Shank and Rebecca Baygents TurkAbstractDragons are natural hoarders of material culture; therefore, the authors appropriate their nest to articulate their conversations about community, mentoring and material culture. In a graduate-level course focused on material culture, bonds were created and developed, which continue to the present time. Sharing research ideas for feedback and supporting one another intellectually and emotionally have allowed the group to develop as a dynamic community of enquiry and led to group presentations at state, national and international venues. We use avatars to personalize and make our voices visible.
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Writing ‘between-the-six’: Mentorship, distance and the co-construction of dissertation research
AbstractIn this article, three faculty members and three doctoral students make visible the mutual construction of dissertation research. Through a collaborative and duographic approach, the co-authors write in pairs to explore the relational, affective, and personal processes surrounding mentoring doctoral research. The pairs of duographic narratives are placed side by side to enable multifaceted interaction ‘between-the-six’ authors. The authors theorize and perform the process and concept of mentoring through affective, embodied, sensory, reflective, and dialogic encounters. They also acknowledge the ways in which all mentoring encounters differ and are therefore subject to how individual awarenesses inform multiple, collective, and reciprocal understandings.
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With relationship at the centre: Shared mentoring as a transformative experience
Authors: Liz Rex and Kryssi StaikidisAbstractThis article explores two perspectives of doctoral advisor and student as mentor and mentee whose decade long artistic mentoring relationship reveals a multidirectional flow through which research becomes interconnected and mutually influenced. Duography is used as a narrative methodology that reframes the mentoring relationship through a series of reflections related to authors’ artistic collaborative research experiences. An intergenerational culturally based mural project becomes a springboard for future research in informal learning contexts undertaken by both scholars. Belenky’s (1997b) empowered and relational ways of knowing are values reinforced and sustained through the intersections of mentorship, teaching, and research examined. The mentoring relationship is viewed as a pivotal and generative site for mutual influence informing key components of mentoring potentially useful for others.
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Cultivating potential-harvesting wisdom: An a/r/tographical illumination of mentorship
Authors: Kathleen Unrath and Amy RuoppAbstractAs artists/teacher/researchers, our collaborative process deeply explores mentorship through a verbal and visual dialogue illuminating a sense of profound trust and its development over time. Our shared artistic process created a space for becoming. The shared experience of co-creating is echoed in the reflective exchanges that evolved as we collaboratively developed our pictorial vision of mentorship simultaneously. Our experience of co-creating, while simultaneously recalling key mentorship moments from our history together, became a site of growth, rich and complex, mapping a story of mentorship across time. This a/r/tographical research brings to light a theory of mentoring that was revealed through the process of creating.
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