Speakers
Description
In this session, we envision community arts education (CAE) as a globalizing phenomenon by addressing how CAE research at the local level, informs pedagogy and practice at the intersection of complex and ever-changing global dynamics, as a ‘glocal’ context that is restructuring silos of education and community. Responding to a compelling need for reimagining the role of the arts in community inquiry – a role that is responsive to relations among individuals, communities and the arts – we seek to cultivate more sophisticated understandings of future pathways for community arts education, deliberating on the concept of transversality to signify both an overarching theoretical framework and the methodological structure for reimagining the complexity of community. To move this collective scholarship forward, we make a distinction in philosophy and practice when defining the term community arts education. We purposely favour the term community arts education over community-based arts education. Community arts education implies the necessary equality of education (e.g. pedagogical implementations) and a variety of practices (e.g. programming, organizational strategies and instruments) for advancing and solidifying relationships between education and community through access to the artistic fields. In this way, we engage with community as not just a place to enact curriculum; it is the curriculum – a practice in which community life, learning and learning activities, and educational aims intersect.
CV
Anita Sinner, Kazuyo Nakamura, Sophia Chaita, Sue Girak, Patricia Osler
Anita Sinner is a professor in art education, The University of British Columbia. Her interests include arts research methods, life writing, teacher education, international art education and community art education.
Kazuyo Nakamura is a professor in the Faculty of Education at Hiroshima University in Japan. Her interests include philosophy of art education and international art education.
Sophia Chaita is the visual arts education coordinator for primary and secondary education in the Southern Aegean and Crete. A PhD candidate at the University of the Aegean, Greece, her interests include community art education, a/r/tography, sustainability, remote islands, visual arts curriculum and visual literacy.
Sue Girak is a visual arts specialist teacher at a metropolitan primary school and visual arts education lecturer at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. She encourages collaborative and environmentally sustainable art practices through the creative reuse of salvageable materials. Sue fosters a culture of a/r/tography by encouraging greater autonomy in students’ artmaking.
Patricia Osler is an artist, art educator and President of the Convergence Initiative, a Montreal-based Art-sci/Sci-art organization dedicated to advancing transversality by mobilizing domain-specific knowledge through collaborative artmaking. Her transdisciplinary research investigates new pedagogies at the nexus of art education and the neuroscience of creativity (NsC), a dynamic field revolutionizing curriculum and practice for the 21st century learner.
