Putting Edmonton on the (Google) Map (original) (raw)
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IJETA, 2020
Through an Arts-Based Educational Research (ABER) methodology, we explore the urban perceptions of fourth-year university students from the School of Education at the University of Granada (Spain). ABER methodologies provide a subtle, representative and sensitive approach to the urban experience. In this study, we surveyed 130 students, asking them to draw and cut out a city map of Granada. This was done in order to reveal the known boundaries of the city and to identify the parts yet to be discovered by the students. With these answers as collected data, an ABER analysis was carried out through the production of visual media. Assessing findings quantitatively and visually allowed for the further investigation of students’ knowledge of the city. This inquiry questions the role of the graphic map in research and the boundaries between its technical and artistic values. These findings validate the use of ABER instruments to investigate the city and enhance understanding of the way students live the urban life.
Unforgetting Place in Urban Education through Creative Participatory Visual Methods
Educational Theory, 2019
In this article, Eve Tuck and Sefanit Habtom first consider the consequences of the erasure of the importance of place in the field of urban education and then describe a new youth participatory action research project in Toronto called Making Sense of Movements (MSOM). MSOM is a youth participatory visual research project that engages Black and Indigenous youth in thinking about the influence of social movements such as Black Lives Matter and Idle No More in their relationships to Toronto as a place, and also in their postsecondary planning.
The city as a site for interdisciplinary teaching and learning
International Journal of Education Through Art, 2011
In this article, the authors make a case for using the city as a classroom, and through semiotic lenses, they reflect on the assignments and the outcomes of three courses they offered in diverse geographic locations. In these interdisciplinary courses they encouraged students to purposefully explore aspects of their cities and reflect on them as multifaceted theatrical performances. The pedagogical intention is to facilitate their students' engagement with the city's identity in ways they normally would not consider.
Innovative Exemplars and Curriculum Created from Online Videos of Visual Artists in Greater Sudbury
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 2018
The article begins with a description of the award-winning online artists’ video project, 14 Videos of Visual Artists in Greater Sudbury, and concludes with a presentation of my pre-service BEd students’ creative use of this digital resource. The video series was conceived and created with the aim of filling a gap in materials that were sorely lacking to teachers of Visual Arts in Ontario. The video series includes Aboriginal, Metis, Francophone and Anglophone artists and highlights the artists’ interconnections with the local community. The streamed, linked and library-accessible videos (see http://www3.laurentian.ca/visual\_artists/) served as inspiration for student teachers’ creation of their own innovative curricular exemplars. In the article, I describe the complex inner workings of the research project in order to establish a context for the students’ work. I show how the students were able to conceptualize curriculum through being able to better see what and how to teach thro...
New Cityscapes Redesigning Urban Cartographies Through Creative Practices and Critical Pedagogies
Lexington Books, 2020
This chapter engages in a critical analysis of urban inequalities as they are experienced at the juncture of the local and the global. I do so by discussing a collaborative project based in London, called Sonic Futures, that resulted from cooperation between the London College of Communication (LCC) and May Project Gardens, a community organization. The project was conceptualized as a way to support students in their academic endeavors by combining participatory action research1 (Selener, 1997; Ulvik, Riese, & Roness, 2018) with hip-hop music and critical pedagogies. These theoretical aspects were coupled with gardening, a practical activity that allowed participants to reflect on several local themes within this global city, including social justice, diversity, and sustainability. As unusual as it may sound, these disparate elements worked well together, prompting participants to question social structures and the inequalities they generate, alongside considerations of well-being and community formation. Funded by the Teaching and Learning Innovation Fund at LCC, this innovative approach to understanding urban spaces and inequalities concretized in a series of five workshops that took place between October 2018 and April 2019. The activities were open to students from both LCC and London South Bank University (LSBU), another partner in this venture. The original aim of the workshops was to support student attainment, retention, and engagement in academic activities. Yet, despite the original goal to support students who might be struggling and unprepared, the students who participated were all international students from relatively privileged backgrounds. As a consequence, while maintaining a keen interest in exploring how pedagogical practices could respond to student needs, one of the questions at the heart of the workshops shifted to reflect on the positionality of instructors and students. As we all shared some experiences of migration, this reflexivity allowed us to examine the complex urban inequalities framed by the many migratory movements visible within London. Considering the location of LCC and LSBU, we decided to concentrate primarily on the area where both universities are located: Elephant and Castle in South London, within the Borough of Southwark (see figure 9.1). The workshops made connections between past and present within this site, seeking to make sense of the ways in which resources were distributed, the means by which communities gathered, and how various urban processes that produced "new (in some cases expansive, in some restrictive) notions of membership and solidarity" (Holston & Appadurai, 1999, p. 189) within this global city. The question of urban inequality was central to the workshops and was approached from two angles. First, the workshops bore testimony to the very structures of inequalities that underlie differentiated access to spaces and resources within the global city, seen in the inability to recruit local undergraduate students from marginalized backgrounds.2 The students who did participate were all graduate students from different regions of the
Art in the field: harvesting visual narratives in the dispersed city.
2014
This post presents a project that engaged designers and citizens in the creation of representations – visual narratives, or films – documenting and interpreting urban conditions in the city of Winnipeg, Canada. The intention of the project was that these stories would articulate problems in the city (both physical and social); that the involvement of different groups would contribute to a dialogue about these problems; and that the existence of the films would help develop a shared, if contested, imagination of the city’s potential future, including its urban design. A range of works were created; each fits on a spectrum between urban documentary and storytelling. All share something with urban activist approaches like “photovoice”: contributing to the social understanding of the city, and to our imagination of it. This post takes a critical look at the methods and results of the project.
Place, Self, Community: City as Text™ in the Twenty-First Century
2021
Students and faculty who have designed or participated in City as Text™ (CAT) know well that every place they have explored has organized itself into areas, events, and interactions that either immediately or eventually make sense out of contradictory bits of information. This realization might be more self-evident in urban walkabouts but has bubbled up to consciousness in rural settings, forests, jungles, neighborhoods, and even a shopping mall explored at a National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) conference. What lies beneath the surface, we tell our explorers, is what we want to expose to our gaze and unmask for our deeper consideration. What we suspect about “place” reveals what makes it unique: the particular contradictions that reveal themselves only if we look more carefully, critically, and sensitively at what hides them. These underlying contradictions are what we think about when we consider a constellation of CAT questions about a place: What does it feel like to live/b...
A visual tale of two cities: video as a tool for representation through informal learning
III Jornadas sobre Innovación Docente en Arquitectura (JIDA’15), Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona, del 25 al 29 de Mayo de 2015
In recent years, videos have become significant aspects of learning experience. Learning now occurs in a variety of ways through different communities of practice and personal networks. This is true for learning in design arena. Architectural design education consists of theoretical and practical courses aiming at contribution to the society at social and cultural levels. With the advent of globalization another aim has become contribution to the society at international level. International workshops are held frequently between architectural schools resulting in outstanding success and sharing. This paper is about an international workshop titled “In the Pursuit of Sinan” held in Ýstanbul in January 2015. Students from BAU FA&D and UPC ETSAB were asked to create a stop motion video of the two cities they visited. Going through Sinan’s works while walking around the city, in Ýstanbul and Edirne, Turkish and Spanish students encountered both cities with all their senses and voiced ta...
Beyond Mapping: Seizing Affective Geographies in Toronto
Space and Culture, 2018
In this paper, I use a recent research-creation project and its mobile component (the Transitions in Progress lab) to emphasize the importance of regarding the city as an entanglement of sometimes evident, sometimes hidden naturecultural geographies and more-than-human encounters. Traditional cartographic practices do not seem to be able to seize them, and official narratives are not interested in narrating such vibrant multidimensionality. In exploring ways to illuminate this complexity, I interrogate the ability of contemporary mapping devices to capture, and valorize, the vectors through which the human and the nonhuman, people and infrastructures, shape the urban landscapes in which they dwell and through which they pass.