Art Practice Commons^™

Fragments Of Armenian Identity, Celeste Snowber, Marsha Nouritza Odabashian

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

We come as two artists, one a poet and dancer, Celeste Nazeli Snowber, and the other a visual artist, Marsha Nouritza Odabashian to excavate, reclaim and celebrate our Armenian identities. This offering is a collaboration of poems and visual images which sing a song deep in our bones and cells. Through colors, words, hues, and textures we hearken back to what has been in us all along. We offer it to you as a place to know that cultural identities live within the skin in all their paradox, glory and mystery.

Who’S Curating?: Situating Autohistorias-Teorías In The Archives, Leslie C. Sotomayor, Julie M. Porterfield

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

During the 2018-2019 academic year, we collaborated to facilitate a workshop for students in an Art Education course, using archival material from the Eberly Family Special Collections Library at Penn State. The course centered on diversity, pedagogy, and visual culture. Using our respective expertise in Art Education and primary source literacy, we chose the design and scope of the two-day workshop and subsequent assignment as a reflection for our passion for feminist theorizing and reimagining the academic White patriarchal canon in a predominantly White institution. As critical, feminist pedagogues, and in an effort to match the course theme, we chose …

The Verge: Networks Of Intersubjective Responding For Just Sustainability Arts Educational Research, Marna Hauk, Amanda Rachel Kippen

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Two sustainability arts scholars describe a method of data interpretation they developed for making sense of complex environmental and sustainability education research data. They “played” images and recorded a conversation in a form of arts-based intersubjective knowing. The card game process was named the Verge because of how the process promises to surface unheard voices and re-center nondominant insights and ways of knowing. It leverages Casey’s glance method with systems networks to complicate sense making in arts-based educational research. The arts scholars intermixed research data from two just sustainability education research case studies: collages from participants of a climate justice …

An Unlikely Correspondence: Gps And Body In Place, Patti Pente

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This visual essay investigates the significance of GPS technology and the human body in relation to a sense of place. Framed by posthumanism, the poetic images offer an approach to transformative education through a local site. Agency of place is key to this exploration of dynamic relationships with technology, body and the earth. As a creative performance, I executed a series of movements in a place of personal significance, and then further developed the essay through visual poetry. The research is informed by an underlying assumption that creative understanding and artistic analysis can foster deeper environmental care, and although this …

Eco-Pedagogical Wandering And Pondering In Pacific Spirit Park, Nicole Rallis

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This poetry emerges from my ongoing Ph.D. research and coursework at the University of British Columbia, where I am engaging in an a/r/tographic-walking inquiry on environmental sustainability and climate change. After moving to the unceded and ancestral lands of the Coast Salish peoples, now known as Vancouver, I began walking the forest trails of Pacific Spirit Park. Inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s (2013) pedagogical discussions about the grammar of animacy, two-eyed ways of seeing, and childlike ways of seeing, my poems pay tribute to the plant elders and more-than-human beings guiding my learning journey. My ecopedagogical wandering and pondering align …

A Contemplative And Artful Métissage Of Inquiry And Response, Jackie Mitchell, Nicholas Phillips, Robyn Trail, Susan C. Walsh, Barbara Bickel, Wendalyn Bartley, Medwyn Mcconachy

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

In this mixed media métissage, we offer an exploration of artful and contemplative inquiry and response. We are a group of seven artist-researchers who engage with contemplative practices associated with various spiritual traditions, including spiritual feminist, Wiccan, Mi’kmaw, and Tibetan Buddhist, integral to all of which are beliefs about human interconnectedness with the energies of all sentient beings, the Earth, and beings in the spirit worlds. As artist-researchers, we engage with a range of arts disciplines including poetry, creative non-fiction, storytelling, sounding, visual art, filmmaking, and photography. Together, we invite the reader/listener/viewer--as co-creator—into the potentialities of our métissage: the narratives, …

Walking And Dwelling: Creating An Atelier In Nature, Kwang Dae (Mitsy) Chung

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This paper comprises a description of an exploration of how the author’s daily walking reflected the emergence of an a/r/tographical living inquiry that engendered a profound sense of dwelling and lingering, and a deeper understanding of the nature of artistic invitation through a pedagogical aesthetic provocation.

Paying It Forward: A Gift Economy Of Poetry And Visual Art Images, Susan Gerofsky, Daniel Barney, Mira Gerard

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

As our world has changed rapidly and ineluctably with the COVID-19 pandemic, many are advocating an ethos of generosity and a gift economy, based on generative, creative offerings, as an alternative or balance to the excesses of a mainstream neoliberal exchange economy. What is the gift economy, and how does it entangle us in a fabric of mutual responsibility, obligation, creative practices and love, within the human and greater-than-human world? A Pay-It-Forward New Year's gift game amongst a group of artist/ educators, ongoing since 2014, gives rise to this meditation on the gift economy, based on Mauss, Hyde, Kimmerer, Vaughan …

Begin With Letting Go: A Found Poem In Honour Of Carl Leggo, Contemplative Arts Collective

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

As a group of nineteen, we are pleased to offer a found poem that we co-created with lines from our contributions to a two-part special issue of Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal (2018, 2019). We wove our words together with those of our dear friend, colleague, and mentor, Carl Leggo, who was integral to the emergence and energy of the special issue and to the work of this group. Further, we performed the found poem at an event in honour of Carl’s life and work (Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies Preconference Event—The Many Faces of Love: Celebrating the Lifework of …

Introduction: Curating As Compassion, Barbara Bickel, Darlene St.Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This issue’s open call brought forth a diversity of submissions that reflect the culture of uncertainty and possibilities for the arts and inquiry, teaching and learning in the Twenty-first Century. We offer this issue as a gift during a time of pandemic, ecological crisis, and racial and gender divides, with a desire to contribute to unmaking and making meaning through the arts; “it is how we develop our agency and exercise our voice.

Front Matter Artizein October 2020, Barbara Bickel, Darlene St.Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Front Matter for Artizein 2020. Includes Cover and Table of Contents.

Full Issue Artizein October 2020, Barbara Bickel, Darlene St.Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Full PDF of the 2020 issue edited by Barbara Bickel with Guest Assistant Editor & Design by Darlene St. Georges

Reaching Across Community Lines: How Informal Visual Art Educational Programming Bridges The Gap, Janelle O'Malley

Student Projects

Economic disparity in underserved communities is in large part responsible for a lack of access to quality visual arts education. The communities most in need are often hit first when it comes to funding the arts, and the students suffer these financial consequences. How can we ensure those underserved communities receive a complete education with the visual arts? What other ways can access to the visual arts be provided to schools?

Public School Art Teacher Autonomy In A Segregated City: Affordances And Contradictions, Albert Stabler, Jorge R. Lucero

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Over the past two decades, the Chicago Public Schools have seen a lot of change. First there was the opening of magnet schools, and other gestures at reform, followed by school closures and the flourishing of charter schools. In this essay, two former Chicago art teachers, one who taught in a prominent college prep magnet high school on the north side, and one who taught in an under-resourced neighborhood high school on the south side, examine the commonalities of their otherwise divergent experiences, particularly with regard to the freedom allotted to both them and their students by the administrative affordances …

Full Issue: An Arts-Based Contemplative Pause Part 2_June 2019, Susan Walsh, Barbara Bickel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Full PDF of the issue An Arts-Based Contemplative Pause: Part 2. Co-edited by Susan Walsh (guest editor) & Barbara Bickel

Closing Pause, Peter London

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Peter London was invited to offer a response to the two part special issue of An Arts-Based Contemplative Pause as a last moment of pause. Peter, in turn, graciously offered his contemplative thoughts that we hope will inspire others to pause and engage their own contemplative reflections inspired by the artist scholar offerings in this special issue.

The Lion’S Gaze: Filmmaking As An Awareness Practice, Robyn Traill

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This is an extract from a Masters study describing my exploration of the art of film as an inner awareness practice from the view of the Buddhist yogic tradition and the teachings by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche called dharma art. I call this contemplative film practice.The article speaks to the initial pre-production and production phases of this research where formless Mahamudra meditations were most important. A camera lens was employed as a cue or reminder to practice the lens of awareness while capturing moving images. In the post-production phase, the creative meditations within Buddhist yogas became a major reference point: visualization, …

Music As Meditative Inquiry: Dialogical Reflections On Learning And Composing Indian Classical Music, Ashwani Kumar, Adrian Downey

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This dialogical paper explores Ashwani Kumar’s concept of music as meditative inquiry and its implications for teaching, learning, and living. The notion of music as meditative inquiry is rooted in Kumar’s journey of learning, composing, and researching Indian classical music. This paper makes use of an emerging methodological framework called dialogical meditative inquiry (DMI), which has been theorized by Kumar. Due to its emphasis on meditative and holistic listening, DMI goes beyond a usual interview where the intent is to elicit specific information. Through employing DMI to explore Kumar’s ideas regarding music, meditative inquiry, and creativity, this paper engages with …

Lectio Divina: A Call For Salah & Poetic Being, Momina A. Khan

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

I reflect back on the ARTS Pre-Conference 2017 of the Canadian Society for Studies in Education. It was a day full of non-linear knowledge exchanges, conversations, creations, contemplation and arts-based activities. Collaborators dwelled in, engaged, and emerged together spiritually, poetically, and musically to rekindle their learning, coexistence and mystical understandings. I was in my fasting state with dry mouth, hungry stomach, and thirsty soul combined with contemplative sessions, plus my scholarly and poetic inspirations in the flesh. It was purely an epoch of unbridled spirit tenderly wrapped in creative and contemplative ways of being present in the moment, with the …

Incarnatas: An Artist In Residence Practice In The Ubc Botanical Garden, Celeste Snowber

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article shares some of the poetry and dance that emerged out of a two-year Artist in Residency in the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden in Vancouver, British Columbia.

As a site-specific performance artist, my practice has explored being with and in the Botanical Garden and allowing poetry and dance to emerge out of my walks, arts-based practice of listening, observing the various species in the Asian garden from all over Asia as well as indigenous plants and trees in B.C. My offering was to bring an artistic lens to the exploration and interpretation of the garden. Out of …

“Metramorphosis”: A Socially-Engaged Arts-Based And Contemplative Inquiry, Barbara Bickel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

The birth story of the Metramorphosis book begins in 2010 at an artist residency on Toronto Island. The book is bound with buttons allowing the cloth pages to be unbound and bound over and over again. In this way it is read anew each time, as it is never re-buttoned in the same order. After a year of stitching into the book I realized it was not my book alone to complete, as the study of matrixial theory (Ettinger, 2005) I was contemplatively engaging in the book making is about relationality, co-becoming and copoiesis. In 2012 I began to carry …

Living With A Liminal Mind, Yoriko Gillard

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Learning to be an educational storyteller entails using every creative skill I learned since my childhood and has allowed me to connect with others especially those in pain. This paper is a reflection of my emotional past. My tears are coming from the ocean and rivers in my liminal space. In this space, I contemplate my hopeful future and seek its contemplative challenges to discover what I still do not know and could learn as an educator. My sincere contemplation to serve society shall be a poetic reflection of who I am becoming each step of my life. Creative writing …

Indigenous Poiesis: Medicine For Mother Earth, Vicki Kelly

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Indigenous knowledge practices are ecological encounters of profound ethical relationality that acknowledge the act of co-creating through living embodiments of Indigenous Poiesis. This radical participation in Indigeneity through the offering of our humble humanity allows us to move into the living intensity of profound reciprocal relationship. Through Indigenous Poiesis, art becomes ecological activism. This Indigenous Métissage weaves life writing, indigenous woodcarving, and experiences of native flute playing, and presencing Anishinaabe stories in the spirit of Indigenous oral tradition.

An Arts-Based And Contemplative Pause: Introduction To Part Two: Creating Restorative And Caring Learning Spaces, Susan Walsh, Barbara Bickel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

The introduction to Part Two of this special issue attends to arts-based and contemplative practices in inquiry and teaching. Co-editing this two-part special issue has been a gift of co-labour that we have been transformed by. For as Lewis Hyde wrote so beautifully in 1979, “it is when art acts as an agent of transformation that we may correctly speak of it as a gift. A lively culture will have transformative gifts as a general feature…. And it will have artists whose creations are gifts for the transformation of the race.” (pp. 59-60). The 20 contributors to Part One …

Front Matter Artizein June 2019, Susan Walsh, Barbara Bickel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

No abstract provided.

What Can A Studio Approach To Teaching Tell Us About The Academic And Social Learning Of Middle School Students? An Exploration Of Student Understanding Of How Making Art Supports Their Academic And Social Learning., Maureen Creegan- Quinquis, Maureen A. Creegan-Quinquis

Educational Studies Dissertations

This study explores the types of social and academic learning typically overlooked in public school education. Art-based approaches to academic learning have been labeled as“fluff.” Education policymakers hold a biased view of the arts. When asked to consider art as a viable epistemology, cognition theorists have dismissed art as irrational. These biased views have contributed to the marginalization of the field of art education. The purpose of this study was to question this bias through an art-based studio approach to research. The goal was to explore how middle school students understand the role of visual arts in their own academic …

Art Therapy And Art Education: A Conversation - A Critical Review Of The Literature, Shannon Rogers

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Art therapists and art educators are continuing to define the boundaries of their professions while finding opportunities for collaboration. While there are limited studies focusing on art therapy with students, the existing research suggests that the interventions that have been done are associated with an increase of self-esteem, ability to communicate thoughts and feelings, and healthy self-expression for students. The topic question investigated in this paper is what are the emotional benefits of implementing art therapy for elementary students within art education? This literature review will explore what few have focused on, the overlap between art therapy and art education. …

Painting Intimacy: Art-Based Research Of Intimacy, Michal Lev

Expressive Therapies Dissertations

This art-based research explores whether — and, if so, how — the process of painting, together with witnessing and reflection on the process and imagery, further an understanding of intimacy. The research also examines the conditions that favor intimacy, the obstacles to intimacy, and the particular features of artistic media, processes and reflection, through the editing of video footage, that can further the intimate experience. The participants in the study were five adults (including the researcher) between the ages of thirty and eighty who were familiar with the creation of visual art. Among them were three women and two men …

An Artistic Contemplative Inquiry: What Arrives In Co-Contemplating Assessment And Evaluation, Michelle Searle, Lynn M. Fels

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Contemporary arts-based inquiry invites us to linger in moments, to reflect upon our lives, our encounters, our relationships within the grander context of the worlds within which we dwell and those that we co-create. Here, we explore the landscape of the arts in relation to assessment and evaluation. Through a collaborative artistic contemplative inquiry, an emergent dialogue exploring assessment and evaluation is recorded and presented as a found poem, “What Arrives.” Our hope, when we embarked upon this artistic contemplation, was that we would evoke, provoke, and interrupt each other for the purpose of creating possibilities of alliance and (re)cognition …

Making Peace With The Highwood River: One Year In Contemplative Photographs And Flows, Jennifer Markides

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Since the 2013 Alberta floods, my relationship with the Highwood River has been changing. Before the disaster, I had taken the power of the river for granted. Then, the floodwaters ravaged the community of High River—my home. In the time after the flood, I engaged in a study of place as part of a course in Holistic Approaches to Life and Living led by Elder, Bob Cardinal of the Maskekosihk Enoch Cree Nation. I observed the flows through my camera lens: visiting and re-visiting the river, observing the seasonal changes, forming a stronger connection to my place in the community, …