48.010 - Education Research at the Intersection of Art and Design: A Site Visit Session at OCAD University in Downtown Toronto

Session Type: Off-Site Visit

Abstract

This site visit to OCAD University, Canada’s largest art and design university, involves a series of linked presentations from the fields of Material Art and Design, Design History and Drawing, bringing traditional academic and emerging practice-based research projects from diverse art and design disciplines into conversation with one another. All presentations take up student learning artifacts – for example, visual work, sketchbook assignments and writing assignments – as both a source of evidence and a space of critical inquiry into pedagogical questions and concerns that engage, affirm and intervene in wider scholarly debates and practices of knowledge production. By bringing together a group of educators, scholars, artists and designers conducting educational research across diverse art and design disciplines, we hope to showcase the possibilities of collaborative, cross-disciplinary educational research in reflecting upon inherited understandings of best pedagogical practice and shaping new relationships between pedagogy and knowledge production. The session will be led by a moderator/curator who will begin with a traditional land acknowledgment, including opening remarks locating OCAD University’s history as an art and design university within its wider social, historical and pedagogical contexts, before guiding participants through different studio classrooms as a way of acknowledging the embodied and emplaced practices of creativity in art and design education. By locating the session at OCAD University, in the studio learning environment in which the research has been taking place, we hope to ground our presentation in the embodied experience of studio learning to both highlight its particularities for audience members who may not be familiar with art and design education and unsettle those conventional academic understandings of what university education and scholarly practice look and feel like.

Sub Unit

• AERA Presidential Session

Visit Leaders

• Emilie Brancato, OCAD University

• Cary DiPietro, OCAD University

• Sarah Ferguson

Participants

• Travis Freeman, OCAD University

• David L Griffin, OCAD University

• Lynne Heller, OCAD University

• Marie-Josee Therrien, OCAD University

Discussant

• Caroline Langill, OCAD University