Volume 20, numéro 1, 2024 Conversations

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Art/Design Education Resiliency: “Staying with the Trouble” references Donna Haraway’s call to commit to, and persevere in, realising connections as kin in a distressed world. Pam Patterson reviews a community research project, COVID-Anxiety, looking at the promise of laterally structured and collegially organized art educational communities of practice. Independent self-facilitated research communities such as these composed of students, staff, and faculty can inform research and build capacity for practice in art education. Comparing this success to the failed establishment of a Disability Caucus that followed, she pursues an explicatory reflective writing that locates her study in time, place, and situation. She further uses these reflections to develop a metatext that identifies a theory around dialogic/dialect process use for the establishment – and potential success – of co-learning art and design educational communities of practice (CoPs).

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Art/Design Education Resiliency: Co-generatively in a Community of Practice is a co-authored dialogic/dialectic conversation among co-founders of the Creative Research Inclusive Practices (CRIP) Lab located at OCAD University. Founders are Pam Patterson, Faculty of Art, and School of Graduate Studies, OCAD U; Roman Romanov, Faculty of Design, OCAD U; and Matt Hawthorn, Head Design, University of Derby. The three have named their collective research practice as a form of snorkelling1! They swim the surface of discourse in play, deep diving into projects or exhibitions when paradoxical or multi-positional situations arise. It is a critical and yet deeply pleasurable discursive practice.

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This is an arts-based action research (ABAR) project on how online/offline hate speech impacts new immigrant and refugee youth. Using a non-experimental qualitative arts-based approach, the youth participants developed digital literacy skills to create alternative narratives by transforming online images, text, and symbols into comics as new narratives. By working within a feminist and critical theoretical framework this project aimed to amplify the marginalized voices of youth through participatory art workshops, skill building, group discussions, and semi-structured interviews. In order to diffuse systemic inequalities and racism this research aims to build bridges between youth’s engagement with social media and their embodied knowledge towards fostering a new sense of belonging in their online/offline communities.

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This article aims to summarize a grounded theory inquiry to examine renewed interests in craft practices. Through remote interviews with female participants in their early twenties, and several rounds of data coding three emergent themes were identified: moving beyond traditional learning trajectories, art as function, and implications for sustainability. Investigating what motivates these women to engage creatively, and how they gained knowledge about their chosen mode of creative production, this inquiry reveals the self-directed nature of craft learning. Self-directed learning (SDL) is becoming more prevalent due to the increasing availability of resources and is therefore recognized for its validity as a contemporary learning approach. Especially relevant is the redemptive and autonomous qualities of both craft and self-directed learning in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. This investigation cracks the surface of how craft-making and learning have been impacted by the pandemic, justifying the importance of independence, accessibility, and co-construction in teaching and learning.

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In the Fall of 2021, STEM researchers were invited to participate in a series of SSHRC-funded workshops delivered at the University of Guelph’s School of Fine Art and Music (SOFAM), where they examined a work of abstract art drawn from the SOFAM Print Study Collection (Reflex Victory by Chrysanne Stathacos, lithograph, 1979). The project’s objective was to determine if methodologies used in the analysis and interpretation of art are helpful to researchers who use visual observation as a primary method of collecting data. Our findings indicate that over the duration of the one-hour workshop, participants demonstrated greater confidence in identifying what lay in their fields of vision with precision, exhibited greater comfort in pursuing open-ended inquiry, and became more conscious of the mutable and subjective qualities of their looking. This report shares the story of our experiment and presents our preliminary findings on the value of arts-based methodologies in developing skills in data collection and analysis. This research contributes to the discourse on the role visual art can play in practices of teaching, learning, and research that extend beyond the studio, museum, and gallery space.

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This qualitative case study investigates the development of perceived competency for teaching visual art in pre-service generalist teachers and their readiness to use visual arts in their future elementary classrooms through a visual art methodology course. Pre-service generalist teachers’ feelings of preparedness and sense of efficacy are both important indicators of whether they will be able to meet the challenges of incorporating visual arts in their future classrooms and as effective 21st century educators. To achieve this aim, the study considered in-depth firsthand experiences of four pre-service teachers and their course instructor for the entire semester during their training. The uncertainty of understanding the role of visual arts in contemporary education, lack of personal confidence, and prior negative experience in visual arts are some of the contributing fear factors. Scholars suggest that this thinking can be changed through appropriate experiences, influences and environments provided during the pre-service training stage. Findings illustrate that pre-service teachers indicated an optimistic shift in their confidence to pursue visual arts with a refreshed mindset, by applying the Studio Habits of Mind within learning and teaching visual arts.

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This article discusses how I documented my dreams for two months, with the goal of uncovering how dreams are stored in my brain and gaining insight into the unconscious processes that lead to their creation. In exploring the relationship between dreams and art, I sought to understand the creative potential of dream-inspired art. Informed by my exploration I created art inspired by my dreams using Adobe Photoshop and Dall-E, an artificial intelligence tool. By comparing the aesthetic qualities of my digital art with those generated by Dall-E, I share the insights I have gained into the potential for AI in the creative process. This artistic exploration has broader implications for our understanding of the creative process, the role of the unconscious in art, and the relationship between humans and AI. Future research could further explore the potential for dream-inspired art and the role of AI in the creative process.