Disrupting Teacher Education: Performing an Intervention With/in the Space Between Art and Pedagogy

• In Event: Relationality and Pedagogy in A/r/tography

Abstract

Objectives
The pedagogic turn in contemporary art practice is situated within an interdisciplinary environment that is committed to inquiry, dialogue, and critical self-reflection. Artists adopt pedagogical models and education processes as the subject and object of their work, often drawing upon social situations and relational acts. In this paper we examine an artist residency that took place in a teacher education program, in which we worked collaboratively with two artists who incorporate ideas of pedagogy into their practice. The purpose of this research study was to create a space for teacher candidates (student-teachers) to think about art as a pedagogical act and to examine how they might understand the act of teaching differently by learning to learn pedagogy through artistic inquiry.

Perspectives
Underpinning this turn to pedagogy is the understanding that knowledge is produced not just in the performance or the doing, but as Irit Rogoff suggests, in consciousness. That is through the process of thought, discussion, writing, debate, exchange; in the social, collective and “isolated struggle for control of under-standing as well as from engagement in the unfamiliar idea.” Through a/r/tography the practices of being artists, researchers, and teachers are experienced contiguously, and teacher candidates will experience the generative flow of knowledge in the spaces between and within these practices.

Methods
We invited the artists to become involved in the program for a total of three weeks, to explore what the teacher candidates might learn about art education pedagogy from creating pedagogical conditions through art events and art productions. The artists engaged the students with projects that required collective and participatory interactions, including community-based events and social gatherings.

Data
Group interviews were recorded with all of the teacher candidates, the artists, and participating instructors. The teacher candidates contributed to a collaborative gallery exhibit that the artists organized later in the school year.

Results and Conclusions
The research process promoted the notion of the unfamiliar and proved to disrupt the expectations of our teacher candidates, ultimately requiring a certain level of trust and engagement as the process unfolded. The knowledge produced became an educational experience aligned with the notion of curriculum-as-lived. Curriculum theorist Ted Aoki once appealed to fine art educators for the creation of a new curricular landscape and an understanding of the importance of a “metonymic space of doubling, between curriculum-as-plan and curriculum-as-lived.” This research is a response to Aoki’s appeal, with a metonymic space of doubling existing in the space between the learning of pedagogy and the teaching of art.

Significance
Pedagogy is rarely discussed within teacher education from the viewpoint of the discipline of art. This research project created a space for art education teacher candidates to both learn about and develop a language around pedagogy from their own disciplinary perspective, and to explore new understandings of knowing, learning, and teaching.

Authors

• Heidi May, The University of British Columbia

• Donal O'Donoghue, The University of British Columbia