Places of Possibility, Cultures of Connection: Exploring Art, Design, Making, and Imagination in Enacting Educational Alternatives

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium brings together a range of perspectives on contemporary discourse surrounding the arts in education. We take a critical look at research trajectories and curricular framings that have positioned encounters with the arts through outcomes perspectives, justified by social efficiency aims. We offer conceptual and empirical insights that highlight relationships between educators and students, pedagogy and sociopolitical contexts, and collaboration, play, and possibility. The papers cover a wide-array of arts-based teaching/research contexts: from K-12 classrooms to teacher education, community-based settings to the experiences of arts-educators as well as theoretical framings. The symposium highlights the need for educators to rethink the relationship between the arts and broader ideals of education—democratic values, cultural work, joy and imagination, knowledge hierarchies, and (un)learning.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Arts and Learning

Chair

• Vivek Vellanki, Indiana University

Papers

• Shifting Knowledge Territories and Participation Frames Through Prototyping a Structure - Melita Morales, Boston College

• Making Place, Making Space: Examining the Role of Community Arts Education in Supporting Youth-Driven Cultural Work - Raquel Jimenez, Harvard University

• Teaching, Learning, and Living Imaginatively: Committing to Possibilities by Forming Spaces for Nourishing Relational Imagination - Ali Blake, Boston College

• Artist-Educators' Reflections and Lived Experiences With Arts-Involved Pedagogies - Joseph Madres, Boston College

• Mapping Other Possibilities: Exploring Unlearning in the Teacher Education Classroom Through the Arts - Vivek Vellanki, Indiana University

Discussant

• Sandro Barros, Michigan State University