Art Education Commons^™

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.

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, …

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.

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 …

Arts-Based Education For Enchanting, Embodied And Embedded Sustainability, Hans Dieleman

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article sketches two contrasting ideal-typical narratives of sustainability, a disenchanting and an enchanting one, and argues that current thinking in sustainability is mainly situated in the narrative of disenchantment. This narrative is based on various obsolete philosophical assumptions, and hampers the transformation process, as it distances the population from being part of this. It then sketches the narrative of enchanting sustainability and shows how this has the capacity to engage, intrigue and motivate people to be involved. It is rooted in an arts-based approach of connecting aesthetics, associative thinking, reflective practice, emotion-based working, aspiration and intentionality. The article moves …