Paradigm shifts in northern art, community and environment studies for art teacher education (original) (raw)
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Arctic art education in changing nature and culture
Education in the North, 2022
The interconnection between the ecological and the cultural is evident in the Arctic. Thus, we propose the term ecoculture to highlight the connection of communities to places. Ecological knowledge, Indigenous knowledge, tacit knowledge and local knowledge are some of the concepts that highlight diverse ways of knowing in rural communities living close to nature. We use the terms northern knowledge, Arctic art education and new genre Arctic art, to discuss how art in North and the Arctic can foster education for sustainability and revitalisation of ecoculture. The long-term art-based action research to develop Arctic art education at winter circumstances is presented in this article. The research has included a number of winter art projects in Northern Scandinavia and NorthWest Russia. Three winter art projects, carried out in remote villages together with communities and schools, are reflected and theorized in this article. Artists, teachers and participants of winter art projects have transformed northern knowledge to respond to needs of contemporary society. As a result of the action research, wintery ecoculture has been revitalized and knowing with nature has been fostered as response to decolonisation needs. Research shows that new genre Arctic art and Arctic art education can revitalise ecoculture and northern knowledge.
Studies in Art Education
In this article, we tackle critical and socially engaged issues on Arctic visual culture (AVC) education in Finland, which are, in this article, considered culturally sensitive topics in Finnish art education. The article emerges from research interests in (1) place-specific issues in art teacher education, as they relate to the critical study of AVC, and (2) Arctic art and Sámi art and craft, the current development and discussion in Finnish contexts, and their importance to art teacher education. Our approach is drawn from the field of Finnish art education and previous knowledge of culturally sensitive, socially engaged art education approaches practiced in two Finnish universities. Through this collaboration, we further develop research and practices related to the topic. The context of the collaboration is a 3-year multidisciplinary and nationwide project, Arctic Reformative and Exploratory Teaching Profession, funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture.
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2010
The theme of the first European regional INSEA congress, held in Finland in 1971, was Environmental Protection in Art Education. The accompanying rationale for the conference stated: One reason for making the theme was the wish to emphasize the manifoldness and diversity of our environmental problems --[they] are not purely biological, economic and social ones but also aesthetic ones, and are consequently part of art education, not only as separate subjects of study but also as integrated parts of other subjects dealing with our living environment. In my article, I will reflect on different approaches to environmental education in the context of Finnish art education since the 1970s.
Teach Me Your Arctic: Place-Based Intercultural Approaches in Art Education
Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education
In this article, I will discuss what a place-based approach in art education means for cultural understanding and culturally sustainable work in the context of the Nordic Arctic. I will approach and reflect these themes through art-based action research of the place-based art course “Our Arctic” that I organized with my colleagues at the University of Lapland in Spring 2017. The aim of the course in which art education and art students participated was to use artistic methods to collect and map the local school pupils’ perceptions of their lives in the Arctic and share these as a collective narrative in the form of a video art installation in an international exhibition. The approaches used in the course aimed to create knowledge that is locally and collaboratively produced and, in the process, also to see one’s own stance and cultural interpretations related to the Arctic.
How can art educators address questions of environmental sustainability, accepting to be ethically normative but avoiding becoming dogmatic? How can the complex 'pool' of knowledge generated in and through art education research become useful in working with these questions, which many of us find overwhelmingly difficult? AESD -Art Education for Sustainable Developmentis a concept coined for this article with the intention of bringing environmental problems onto the agenda. In an attempt to provoke the necessary discussion about environmental sustainability in art education, the article examines selected texts from recent Nordic research in order to build an 'epistemological platform' that might function as a research-based 'tool' for discussing environmental issues. The article is organized in four sections, which refer to the four 'cornerstones' of the platform, where each cornerstone corresponds to a recent current in art education. These currents, as defined by the author, are: critical art education, poststructuralist strategies, visual culture pedagogy, and community oriented visual practices. Using selected Nordic texts as material for the analysis, the epistemological perspective of each current is briefly presented and its relationship to evironmental questions is discussed. In the final discussion, eight keywords are presented: praxis, change, performance, reflexivity, visuality, event, situatedness and collaboration. When put together, these concepts offer a dynamic picture of the 'pool' of ideas offered by contemporary Nordic and international research, which will be useful for 'performing' AESD both as teaching practices and as research.
Arctic Arts with Pride: Discourses on Arctic Arts, Culture and Sustainability
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There has been growing interest in Arctic arts and culture as well as in sustainability among artists, researchers, and policy makers. However, until recently, the comprehension of Arctic arts and culture within the framework of sustainable development has remained vague. In this study, by analysing diverse debates from the Arctic Arts Summit 2019 in Rovaniemi, we investigate how the arts and culture sector promotes Arctic sustainability. An analysis of abstracts, conclusions, blogs and newspaper articles reflecting the presentations, art events, exhibitions and dialogues showed that the discourse on sustainability is organised around five themes: (1) global politics and ecological crises as part of the cultural politics of the Arctic; (2) indigenous and non-indigenous Arctic arts and culture; (3) 'handmade' and the material culture of the Arctic; (4) place-making, revitalisation and regional development; and (5) economy and sustainability. These partly interlinked themes have relevance for policy making, defining principles for arts and culture funding, artistic practice and research on the Arctic. In addition, education and artistic training are important for all of the five themes; therefore, resources for educational institutions are crucial for the sustainable future of the Arctic. Arts, culture and education have the potential to empower people in the Arctic, increase cultural pride, educate and inform global audiences and create connectedness between the past, present and future. Arts, culture and education contribute to Arctic sustainability.
Teaching and learning with Canadian art students in North Iceland: towards the Posthuman
Education in the North, 2019
This article presents a reflective consideration of the author’s design and implementation of the Iceland Field School for Concordia University (Montreal, Canada), describing her desire to bring her teaching, research and art-making practices in line with her posthuman values. Named “Imagining Iceland,” this course provided 13 senior undergraduate and graduate students with the opportunity to spend the month of June 2016 in the small north Iceland community of Blönduós, making art according to their individual practices. The course aimed to support both the professionalization of the students’ artistic practices and their engagement with the particularities of Iceland as an ethically complicated place to visit, learn and make art, touching on environmental and posthumanist themes. Offering a case study of the Iceland Field School, the text articulates the problems and contradictions the author finds in implementing her posthuman values in her teaching, and offers four examples of student work for consideration as to whether their artmaking and experiential learning begins to connect them to the world around, dismantling humanist hierarchies. The author ends with short list of questions that will guide her future work and that may be of value to others striving to implement arts-oriented teaching in the north.
At the Heart of Art and Earth: An Exploration of Practices in Arts-Based Environmental Education
2013
In today’s technological world, human intertwinement with the rest of nature has been severely diminished. In our digital culture, many people hardly have any direct experience of and sense of connection with “the real” of the natural world. The author assumes that when we want to find ways to mend this gap, arts-based environmental education (AEE) can play a meaningful role. In AEE, artmaking is regarded as itself a way of potentially gaining new understandings about our natural environment. As a reflective practitioner, the author facilitated three different AEE activities, at several times and at diverse locations. On basis of his observations, memories, written notes, audio-visual recordings and interviews with participants, teachers and informed outsiders, he interpreted the experiences both of participants and himself. To this end he employed interpretative phenomenological analysis paired with autoethnography. The artmaking activities researched here aimed to bring about a shift in focus. Participants were encouraged to approach natural phenomena not head-on, but in an indirect way. Moreover, the artmaking process aspired to heighten their awareness to the presence of their embodied self at a certain place. The research questions that the author poses in this study are: (1) What is distinctive in the process of the AEE activities that I facilitate?; (2) Which specific competencies can be identified for a facilitator of AEE activities?; and (3) Does participating in the AEE activities that I facilitate enhance the ability of participants to have a direct experience of feeling connected to the natural world? In this explorative study, the author identifies facilitated estrangement through participating in AEE as an important catalyst when aiming to evoke such instances of transformative learning. In undergoing such moments, participants grope their way in a new liminal space. Artmaking can create favorable conditions for this to happen through its defamiliarizing effect which takes participants away from merely acting according to habit (on “autopilot”). The open-ended structure of the artmaking activities contributed to the creation of a learning arena in which emergent properties could become manifest. Thus, participants could potentially experience a sense of wonder and begin to acquire new understandings – a form of knowing that the author calls “rudimentary cognition.” The research further suggests that a facilitator should be able to bear witness to and hold the space for whatever enfolds in this encounter with artistic process in AEE. He or she must walk the tightrope between control and non-interfering. The analysis of the impacts of the AEE activities that were facilitated leads the author to conclude that it is doubtful whether these in and of themselves caused participants to experience the natural environment in demonstrable new and deep ways. He asserts that most of their awareness was focused on the internal level of their own embodied presence; engagement with place, the location where the AEE activity was performed, seemed secondary. The findings show that AEE activities first and foremost help bring about the ignition and augmentation of the participants’ fascination and curiosity, centered in an increased awareness of their own body and its interactions with the natural world. The present study can be seen as a contribution to efforts of envisaging innovative forms of sustainable education that challenge the way we have distanced ourselves from the more-than-human world.
2017
It is argued here that teacher education needs to make a fundamental shift in the types of knowledge and experience that count as valuable for future teachers. The article reflects on some aspects of a weeklong project involving student teachers and 5th grade students that has taken place in the Reykjavik Botanical Garden for the past four years called What is hidden in nature that we have never seen or heard? The project has been a part of the Children’s Cultural Festival. This is a collective project where more than seventy pupils from a neighbourhood school work under the direction of a group of student teachers from the Iceland Academy of the Arts (IAA). The project focuses on the transformative power of education for sustainability (EfS), and participatory pedagogy including critical place-based learning and tacit knowledge. The settings at the Botanical Garden were developed as a part of a pedagogical course taught by the author of this article, aiming to develop the student t...
The Lure of Lapland: A Handbook of Arctic Art and Design
2018
's research profile places emphasis on the dynamic interrelationship of art, design, scientific research and the environment. In the faculty of art and design, these areas figure strongly and our portfolio of degree programmes are in harmony with the strategic aims of the university as a whole. Community-based and environmental art, service design and context sensitive research form key components of the masters' degree that is the subject of this book; Arctic Art and Design. This is an innovative degree that blends art and design studio practice with 'real life' projects that take place in the special environment of Arctic. This book contains chapters by the professors and short essays, or 'vignettes' , by students about Arctic Art and Design. It provides the reader with first-hand accounts of the kinds of creative practice that students have carried out in communities, with companies or a combination of both. Richly illustrated, the book offers an insight to the ways that art and design can contribute to the sociocultural and economic well-being of the region. Art-based action research has been developed at the University of Lapland's Faculty of Arts, primarily in development projects, where the challenges of peripheral villages, such as population ageing, the isolation of young people, and undeveloped creative-industries and cultural services have been in the background (Hiltunen, 2009; Jokela, Hiltunen, & Härkönen, 2015a, 2015b; Jokela, Huhmarniemi, & Hiltunen, upcoming). Long term art-based action research projects are also being conducted on winter art in collaboration with cold climate engineering and tourism (Jokela, 2014) and on cultural sustainability (Härkönen, Huhmarniemi, & Jokela, 2018). The working methods of art education and community art have been applied in these projects as methods of regional development and well-being work. The projects have included place-based and community projects, which both village and school communities, as well as small and medium-sized companies have participated in. The development tasks have been defined in teamwork and with the community members. One of the starting points for art-based action research is that stakeholders and members of the community participate in the research and development process.