Making Storied Connections: Braiding Archives, Oral Histories, and the Art Education Institution at Central Tech

• In Event: Storying Innovative Practices: International Perspectives on Archives and Schools

Abstract

This research is aimed at engaging historians interested in transdisciplinary approaches to working with archives, oral histories, material culture, and personal experience. By presenting a case study of my research on Central Technical School in Toronto, Ontario, this paper advances a model for the artful storying of history. As Tuchman (1981) and Ellis and Bochner (2000) argue, historians can also be artists, and creative writers. In this paper, I will demonstrate that the artful storying of history creates compelling, generative narratives.

Reconstructing a history of education in the 21st century requires a framework capable of encompassing the growing potential of various contributing sources (Gidney & Millar, 2012, p. xxii). New histories highlight the inherently incomplete, unstable and interactive nature of what we call history, challenging traditional historians’ conventional methods and resulting in evolutionary changes affecting historical writing across the disciplines. A new history text is aware of: (a) its intertextuality; (b) its authorialism and subjectivity; (c) its always unfinished nature; (d) its impressionistic and dialogic character; and (e) its role as the precursor to the next stage in the evolution of historical expression (Munslow, 2010).

My program of research takes on the margins and edges of historical writing in art education in three distinct ways: by confronting history as a literary artistic tool; by reconfiguring the conception, structure and format of accepted ways to present the past; and by using the author as a participating actor in the reconstructed history (Jenkins, 2009). My mode of inquiry is necessarily multifaceted, combining conversations and interviews teasing out personal recollections, archival research, and photography to create an emplotted history.

This paper reports on one specific engagement with a graduate of the Central Technical School art program. Sue Shintani has maintained a presence in this 122-year-old institution for over sixty years, first as a student and then as a volunteer. Her untold story is rich with detailed historical accounts of the school, and her perspective has provided a new lens through which to re-explore archival materials that I overlooked in the past.

The results of my historical research shed new light on important relational experiences that can offer new subject positions, motivating historians to reimagine the ways our histories are made and remade with every encounter of the archives (Burton, 2005). The result of my transdisciplinary approach to historical research has been to tease out a new history of CTS that is rich in details and perspectives missing from earlier official accounts.

The researcher is integral to the archive, functioning as a dynamic and generative participant in a dialectical research process. Utilizing new histories as a framework for generating richly textured narratives creates a relational understanding located between the historian and the past. My research brings new histories into the field of art education and constructs the relatively unknown stories of this Canadian national treasure.

Author

• Dustin Ian Garnet, Concordia University