Playing it Safe in the Artroom (original) (raw)
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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.
Safe Classrooms: A fundamental Principle of Democratic Practice
Giving Voice to Democracy in Music Education: Diversity and Social Justice in the Classroom , 2015
As current and future educators, one of the motivating factors in pursuing a career in education may have been our sense of safety and acceptance within our learning environment. Pedagogical theories abound with the creation of judgment-free zones in every aspect of education relating to individual expression, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and circumstance. Anti-bullying and creative oppression are current “buzz words” within the educational paradigm as teachers and administrators have come to realize that all students have worth and are capable when free from judgment. This is especially relevant to creative problem solving. For the music educator, this is nothing new. Educators outside of the creative arts may have only recently experienced the role that unconditional acceptance of the individual plays within the learning space (Maslow 1993). The creative arts classroom, in particular the music classroom, by its very nature can allow the student to learn, create, and explore in a unique and often un-traditional manner. Unfortunately, in many instances, music students are faced with challenges that may be a direct result of their own gender identities as well as societal expectations of their exterior genders. As a greater understanding of gender identity continues to come to light, historic stereotypes are set aside, allowing each student to express him- or herself in the context of an individual and not a gender. Certainly, national organizations such as the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) and Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) have heightened the awareness of anti-bullying and verbal abuse toward the LGBTQQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning) community throughout our educational system. However, within the music classroom, students are constantly faced with issues that not only facilitate or challenge creative expression, but are also an extension of their own and/or society’s expectations of gender expression. As we encourage the individual to create, how do we, as educators, create an educational environment that supports each student and assures that he or she is free to make creative choices in the music classroom regardless of sexual orientation and/or gender identity/expression? How do we ensure that our music room is a “Safe Space”?
Since the early 1990s, the novel concept of cultural safety has revolutionised the practice of health care and bioethics. Education has much in common with health care in terms of dependency relationships, power imbalances, dominant paradigms, and rules of professional conduct. And while it seems imperative that educators pay closer attention to the principles of cultural safety, the education sector so far has been slow to duplicate the successes achieved in health care. After presenting a brief overview of the concept of cultural safety and its potential benefits we propose some reasons why cultural safety in education deserves a great deal more attention. Based on experience from our teacher training program in northwestern British Columbia, as well as on contributions from the participants in the workshop at the 2011 IJAS conference in Prague, we discuss various strategies that might allow educators to include cultural safety in their curriculum planning, their classroom activities, and their assessment practices. Keywords: Cultural safety, inclusive education, empowerment, human security
The Canadian Review of Art Education / Revue canadienne d’éducation artistique
Book response: Art, culture, and pedagogy: Revisiting the work of F. Graeme Chalmers. Dustin Garnet and Anita Sinner (Eds.) Leiden, The Netherlands, Brill/Sense, 2019, 286 pp., ISBN: 978-90-04-39007-2Keywords: Art education; Cultural pluralism; Cultural colonialism; Multiculturalism.Réaction livresque: Art, culture, and pedagogy: Revisiting the work of F. Graeme Chalmers. Dustin Garnet and Anita Sinner (Eds.) Leiden, The Netherlands, Brill/Sense, 2019, 286 pp., ISBN: 978-90-04-39007-2Mots-clés : éducation artistique ; pluralisme culturel ; colonialisme culturel ; multiculturalisme
Drawing upon the author’s experience of being a performance artist and working directly with an audience as a performer/protagonist, this paper questions ‘What are some of the links between performance (art), peer observation within teaching and exchange of power relation?’ By doing so, it makes an original contribution to new knowledge in art pedagogy around power dynamics in post-studio environments (Buren, 1979). A three-part framework is employed to address the question: Anticipation, Action and Analysis. Critical evaluation and personal reflection of one peer observed seminar entitled Performance and Collaboration delivered to a group of single honours first year undergraduate Fine Art students at Loughborough University (referred to as LU thereafter) in March 2015 employing a bricolage (Kincheloe, 2008) of digital, performance, fine art and collaboration methodologies functions as the vehicle to not only explore the question but to also describe Anticipation, Action and Analysis as both a structuring device to document events taking place during the seminar in written form. The paper can be read as a benchmark for critical engagement not only in its attempt to theorise, articulate and demonstrate the complicated nature of power relations of peer observation within the specified context with amplified acknowledgement of some of the [psychological] limitations of ‘being observed’, but also in its ability to evidence how those relations can be further complexified when disruption via planned moments of interruption is employed as a creative pedagogic tool within the art seminar environment to generate practice. The main outcomes of the seminar support and go beyond the aims of answering the question, defining links between performance (art), peer observation within teaching and exchange of power relation in respect to drawing together: 1) the effects of ‘being observed’; 2) performative pedagogy and inclusion; 3) the interplay between art in terms of the performative, pedagogic risk-taking and disruption.