Art Practice Commons^™

Relations To Live By, Morgan Gardner

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

In 2017, I experienced the ARTS Pre- Conference of the Canadian Society for Studies in Education as a welcome refuge. As participants, we gathered to feed our minds, bodies and spirits via arts-based, contemplative practice. It became a day of (re)visioning academic life. In gratitude for this day, I share two poems from my research journal supporting my own (re)visioning of academic research. The poems are meditations on the small and large wonders of nature and their connection to the wealth of our fragile, mysterious lives. They explore our immeasurable interconnectedness to all of life and the life-giving relations that …

"Born Different, But Still The Same": My Journey As A Sibling Of Persons With Special Needs: Contemplative Practices In An Academic Environment, Annemarie Cuculiza-Brunke

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article is an autobiographical exploration of the author’s experience as a younger sibling of two people with a cognitive disability. It comprises nine years of conscious self-work and shows how an academic environment can nurture reflection on complex personal issues, and through this reflection, aid in the process of self-discovery and healing. The author explores autobiographical writing and poetic inquiry as a method to develop witnessing consciousness. The purpose of this piece is to contribute to the conversation about the challenges that siblings of people with disabilities face, as much attention is focused upon parents and the people with …

Looking For Water Stories, Janice Santos Valdez

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

As an immigrant settler, I contemplate my role as witness and participant in relation to water and First Nations people, who, for many generations, have been guardians of the ecosystems where I live. The poem I offer here is a reflection and response to my experience of witnessing a First Nations community during a consultation on the topic of water treatment systems with the engineering initiative Res’ Eau. My poem, Looking for Water Stories, contemplates a relationship to water and humanity through physical, socio-cultural, historical and spiritual perceptions. The poem is the form which my field notes took …

Performing Research: Contemplating What It Means To Be A "Man", George Belliveau

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Sharing research in performative modes opens new possibilities for meaning making. This article offers a monologue that explores my experience of working on a theatre project with military veterans. The impact of working on the creative process with veterans inspired this performed piece, and provided an opportunity to contemplate what it means to be a ‘man’ in today’s society. The article first situates performed research within current arts-based literature prior to sharing the creative piece, which is at the heart of this offering. The piece then concludes with how performed research opens the possibility for different forms of engagement and …

Sharing Footprints: Dwelling With/In Loss, Robert Christopher Nellis

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This essay explores spaces between— between presence and absence, model and canvas, page and thought. Launching from the cliché that love is blind, the piece reads through Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind and its inspirations toward the paintings The Origin of Painting by Jean- Baptiste Regnault (1786) and The Invention of the Art of Drawing by Joseph-Benoit Suvée (1791) to locate spaces in between, spaces of contingency. The essay advocates not rushing through such spaces, but dwelling there—as sites of contemplation. The work engages in conversation with Lectio Divina as articulated by Mesner, Bickel, and Walsh (2015) and follows …

Holding Fast To H: Ruminations On The Arts Preconference, Carl Leggo

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

When Susan, Barbara, Diane, and I began planning for the ARTS Preconference, we quickly decided that the event ought to be different from most conference gatherings. Early on, we suggested that the event ought to be a “happening.” My main way of ruminating, investigating, and questioning is to write poetry. In the process of writing poetry I slow down and linger with memories, experiences, and emotions. In all my writing, I am seeking ways to live with wellness. In poetry I seek new ways of knowing and being and becoming. I write in order to invite conversation about what it …

An Offering And A Prayer, Vicki Kelly

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This offering and prayer opens this special two part issue of Artizein entitled An Arts-Based and Contemplative Pause. Vicki Kelly humbly offers this songful prayer as a way of welcome and as an act of reciprocal recognition for the diverse ecologies of place and being gathered here.

An Art-Based Contemplative Pause: Introduction To Part 1: Sharing Radical Creative Possibilities, Barbara Bickel, Susan Walsh, Diane Conrad

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Contained here is the Introduction for Part One of the special issue An Arts-Based Contemplative Pause. Co-written by Barbara Bickel, Susan Walsh and Diane Conrad.

Front Matter: An Arts-Based Contemplative Pause: Part 1

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

No abstract provided.

Full Issue: An Arts-Based Contemplative Pause Part 1

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

No abstract provided.

Art Studio As Thinking Lab: Fostering Metacognition In Art Classrooms, Julia Marshall, Kimberley D'Adamo

Kimberley D'Adamo: Art, Curriculum, Publications, and Other Scholarly Works

What can high school art classes offer to both aspiring artists and students who have other interests and goals? Here’s an answer: thinking skills. Thinking skills are essential for all learners, and both art creation and encoun-tering art provide opportunities for complex thinking and, therefore, for honing conceptual skills. Beyond that, art experiences can spur students to reflect on how they think and to expand and refine their thinking. That is to say, art classes can cultivate metacognition.

This article pursues both trains of thought and describes how an art class can be an art thinking lab—a site for everyone …

Bringing Students Into The Picture: Teaching With Tableaux Vivants, Ellery E. Foutch

Art History Pedagogy & Practice

This article explores a recent experiment in implementing tableaux vivants as a college-level art history assignment, in which students researched works of art and also assumed the pose, posture, and attributes of the work; students were also invited to reconceptualize and think transformatively about these historical works. Drawing upon the principles of Universal Design for Learning, the assignment offers an impetus for close looking, research, critical thinking, interpretation and creativity, and an engagement in metacognitive and embodied experiences, as will be demonstrated by the resulting assignments and students’ written self-reflections. While the assignment was originally designed for a course focused …

Dialogic Communication In The One-To-One Improvisation Lesson: A Qualitative Study, Leon R. De Bruin

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

This qualitative study investigates the dialogic interactions between teacher and student that enhance learning and teaching within the one-to-one music improvisation lesson. This study analyses the ways teachers elicit student actions, thoughts and processes that develop student skills, critical and creative thinking processes necessary for improvisational development. Interactions and interplay between six Australian conservatoire improvisation students and their teachers were investigated. Data reveal dialogic interactions that span instruction, conversation, inquiry and enablement of student knowledge and skills that constitute a complex socio-cultural tapestry of discursive threads. Teacher-student interactions that activate desired creative student activity engage meta-cognitive processes and the cultivation …

Stumbling Into The Spiral: A Serendipitous Steam Exploration, David Rufo

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

An artist-educator discovers how a STEAM-based approach to making art brings together a variety of subject areas in surprising ways.

Material Forms: What Is Really Going On? Shaping Who We Are And What We Do, Vicky J. Grube

The Qualitative Report

Using visual and ethnographic methods the author forms a connection between materiality and the memories of childhood. The researcher begins by asking the question, “Can a studio environment create encounters between a researcher and preschool children that deepen understanding of culture?” To this end, the researcher engaged in sensory research practices through ethnographic methods in a preschool art studio. Through free choice art making, children were found expressing their emotions and demonstrating an awareness of adult culture. In particular, the researcher’s encounter with four-year old George was enriched through sensory participation and triggered embodied and empathetic knowing. As it happens, …

The Art Of Reflection, Amy L. Ruopp, Mae Debruyn

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This writing shares a course designed to reconnect middle school students to the natural world. In reconnecting to nature while IN nature students are afforded the opportunity for deep reflection, and the space to wonder and realize the inter-connectivity between things. We highlight transformational thinking and feeling awareness as students’ connection with nature is expressed though art and writing while deeply immersed in the natural environment.

Embroidered Meteorology, Bettina L. Matzkuhn

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Weathering is a series of embroidered works that explore the symbolic and cartographic language of meteorology. Through research, mentorship and the physical work, my understanding and anxiety around weather has grown. Making art is a learning process for me: the haptic is a means for understanding. From embroidered world maps to animation to painted laundry, I conflate the intricacy of textiles with the complicated nature of the atmosphere.

When Art Is Rooted In Place: Strawtown Studio's Environmental Education And Water Advocacy, Laurie Seeman, Joanna Dickey

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

When art is rooted in place, it gives voice to the place. To create art from the earth and to advocate for the natural places we know and love is our work as Strawtown artists and educators. We develop place-based arts programs that connect people with their natural surroundings and show them new ways of seeing and being.

Book Review Of "Point Of Departure: Returning To A More Authentic Worldview For Education And Survival" By Four Arrows (Aka Don Trent Jacobs), Barbara Bickel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Four Arrows’ new book, according to his Wikipedia page, is his 22^nd book. Prolific in his life work as a professor, Indigenous educator, writer, musician and activist, he describes this book as his most honest and most radical. It is radical in how it reveals the damage inflicted by what he labels the Dominant (Western) Worldview. He urges us to return to the primal healing ways of the contrasting ancient Indigenous Worldview in order to limit the largely anthropogenic 6^th mass extinction on planet earth. The good news that Four Arrows highlights at the opening of the book …

Being In Sync: Practicing Creative Nature Connection With Youth, Lisa M. Lipsett

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article and companion video detail the Creative Nature Connection program, its theory and application, in five place based learning classrooms. Opening the senses, repeated practice, using simple materials, making encounters personally meaningful, following the principles of contemplative practice and supporting improvisational free play all support the shift to being in- sync with nature building a love of nature, creative confidence and environmental knowledge. Themes of resilience, well-being, trust, calm, creative confidence, focus, self-change, alternative ways to know, belonging and connection to self, others and nature, are briefly shared using student's and teacher's words. The companion video shares short student …

Biology, Art And Sustainability, Linda Jolly, Jan Van Boeckel, Solveig Slåttli

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

How can the teaching of biology contribute to sustainability education? The authors of this article suggest that their approach has the potential to increase the students’ level of engagement with the natural environment. The scope of biology teaching can be widened by allowing room for more experience and art-based activities. Such a change may deepen and expand the learners’ insights in natural phenomena, which in turn might foster or enhance an attitude of care-taking for the natural environment.

Art-Based Perceptual Ecology: An Alternative Monitoring Method In The Assessment Of Rainfall And Vegetation In A Ciénaga Community, Lee Ann Woolery

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

As an artist, educator, researcher, and scholar, with a focus on divergent ways of knowing, I use art-making as a way to connect with the natural world. In the following article, I explore the making of an image with my hands when practicing Art-Based Perceptual Ecology (ABPE) as a way of extending my understanding and ecological knowing of the natural world, or what will also be referred to as the landscape. ABPE methodologies may offer the means by which humans reconnect to a pre-discursive (mimetic) language, a sentient language our ancestors used to communicate with the animate world. In …

Art & Ecology In The West Of Ireland: Finding, Understanding, & Creating Relationships Between Artistic Practice And The Burren, Eileen C. Hutton

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

In this essay I describe how my engagement with the Burren in the west of Ireland became the foundation for my doctoral research and subsequently the development of an Art & Ecology Masters in Fine Art. I present a brief overview of the unique ecology of the Burren, including its geological, archaeological and agricultural history, so as to provide a context for both my artistic inquiry and the Burren College of Art students’ immersive experience. I then discuss my collaborative practice with small birds and honeybees as a means for exploring and expanding the traditional notion of ecology through artistic …

An Exotic Journey Into The Commonplace, Linda Weintraub

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Standardized mass-produced commodities, reliance upon electronic data-gathering, and sanitized material manipulations are so pervasive in contemporary industrialized societies that today, ‘exotic’ experiences activate sensory interactions with the substances and conditions of planet Earth. ‘Plugging in’ to the international flow of goods and information commonly results in ‘tuning out’ connections with the immediate surroundings. This essay highlights the capacity of the un-aided mind and body to explore the wondrous complexity of planet Earth. The first part presents four artists who, by engaging geological, biological, and meteorological components of their surroundings, exchange dematerialized surfing activities offered by the World Wide Web, for …

The World Breathing Me. Introduction To Artizein, Jan Van Boeckel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This introductory article argues why it is both relevant and timely to reflect on ways in which art and ecology can be brought together in educational practices – the theme of this edition of Artizein. It also provides an overview of all written contributions.

Front Matter, Jodi A. Patterson

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This file contains cover for Volume II, Issue II, Editorial Board, Acknowledgements.

Walking As Ontological Shifter: Thoughts In The Key Of Life, Bibi (Silvina) Calderaro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With walking as ontological shifter I pursue an alternative to the dominant modernist episteme that offers either/or onto-epistemologies of opposition and their reifying engagements. I propose this type of walking is an intentional turning towards a set of radical positions that, as integrative aesthetic and therapeutic practice, brings multiplicity and synchronicity to experience and being in an expanded sociality. This practice facilitates the conditions of possibility for recurring points of contact between the interiority perceived as ‘body’ and the exteriority perceived as ‘world.’ While making evident the self’s at once incoherence with it-self, it opens to a space beyond the …

Biographies, Jodi A. Patterson

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Includes biographies of authors who contributed to Artizein: Arts and teaching journal special edition "The Peter London Papers."

Words In Honor Of Peter London, Rain Gianneschi-Mcnichols

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Article contains presentation Patricia Rain Gianneschi gave at the Symposium for the Peter London Papers at the University of Illinois, Carbondale.

Art's Disclosive Dimensions: Reflections On The Work Of Peter London, Aaron Darrisaw

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

When I initially came to this project, I vaguely remembered hearing of Peter London once before – in passing perhaps. Yet I knew nothing really of his art or his work as an educator. Each day I came into work, however, I was met with a series of very interesting correspondences, articles, conference presentations, lecture notes, and more that offered a thoroughgoing vision of art as a personally, socially, and spiritually transformative and enriching enterprise. The collection contained document after document of valuable contributions to the instrumental role that art can and does play in opening up individuals to their …