Transversality Hub: Toward a New Mode of Learning for Community Arts Education Practice

• In Event: A Transversal Understanding of the International Perspectives on Community Arts Education

Abstract

This introductory paper aims to anchor the context, overview and theoretical framework of our collective endeavor. Central to this collective scholarship is the proposition that the creation of spaces and practices helps produce the diverse and differentiated methods of teaching and learning needed to tackle the complex interplay of education and community. The research objectives are to: 1) examine to what extent community as knowledge space is organized and produced through the engagement with the arts; 2) facilitate various modes of knowledge exchanges by developing an alliance of community arts education practice and scholarship.

We use the notion of Transversality Hub to describe the complexity of the international perspectives on community arts education. It signifies points of intersection between horizontal flows of dialogue among members and players in educational learning settings and vertical modes of exchange within partnerships and collaboration situated at the unique locations around the world. Transversality Hub implies a milieu for forming transverse connections that enables nodes of entanglement and brings forth alternative ways of understanding how the arts might facilitate critical interfaces across human relationships at the nexus of community development and social innovation. It engages academics, community activists and policy makers to link ideas and action through multimodal representations within collaborative knowledge exchanges. It builds on strengths of our university-community partnerships to foreground the spatiality of community arts education practice.

In terms of theoretical approach, we draw on the literature around contemporary works of art as social engagement (Helguera, 2011) to examine the participatory, experiential and performative dimensions of CAEP. In particularly, we embrace the notion of the event as the moment of knowledge creation. In our case, this involves staging community events to create a platform of scholarly action that enables rich dialogic exchanges of theory and practice (Badiou, 2013; Lacy, 2010; Thompson, 2012). To discuss issues of collaboration, activism, and participation that are derived from our inquiry into CAEP, we examine the literature on the critical pedagogic tradition (Giroux, 1997; McLean, 2014) and its adaption in the pedagogies of place (Ellsworth, 2005).

The Transversality Hub is significant because: 1) it creates multi-layered intellectual exchanges and intergenerational dialogue articulating how social institutions embrace innovative models of teaching and learning; 2) it offers insights into how CAEP strengthens social dynamics of innovation and generates learning outcomes that are sustainable; 3) it provides recommendations for ways of envisioning community as the space of knowledge production where artful social innovations and pedagogical relations can be re-imagined.

Authors

• Ching-Chiu Lin, Simon Fraser University

• Anita Sinner, University of British Columbia

• Rita L. Irwin, University of British Columbia