"It's important to me to create communities of learning in my classes so that we're learning together: I have a constructivist approach to learning. I want the work I develop with students to relate to contemporary issues and events so that we look beyond the classroom walls and move out into the world in as many ways as possible. I guess the questions for art education in the 21st century are, how do we orient ourselves within our current context: towards social and environmental justice, inclusivity, diversity? How do we explore the variety of media we have, and the richness of pop culture as well as the historically traditional fine arts? How do cultivate sustainability? How do we create and teach art that has an impact, that matters?
"I have a strong orientation towards research/creation and learning through making; making is at the core of my thinking, theorizing, writing, and teaching. In the end, we're all trying to find different ways to talk about how research happens through art-making and how we want to consider that research be expressed through art, language, and other associated communicative forms."
Dr. Kathleen Vaughan is a visual artist, writer, scholar, and educator whose work reflects a trans-disciplinary orientation to questions of place and belonging and the theme of ‘home’. She aims to balance her love for post-industrial sites, urban forests and green spaces with critical engagement, and often uses walking and mapping as method and form. Kathleen uses textile practices, painting, drawing, photography, installation, audio and video. Her work comprises multiple approaches, studio-based, collaborative/participatory and community-based. Active within her Montreal neighbourhood of Pointe-St-Charles, Kathleen has worked with seniors and children in social housing, schools and community agencies. She has also developed creative projects with children, adults and seniors in Toronto, Iceland, Latvia and the Netherlands, oriented to cultivating knowledge and awareness of ‘place’ and building community.
As the Concordia University Research Chair in Art Education for Sustainable and Just Futures (Tier 1, 2021-26) and Socially Engaged Art and Public Pedagogies (Tier 2, 2016-21), Kathleen initiated Studio Re-Imagine, to create and evaluate a series of socially engaged art projects in collaboration with a variety of local stakeholders in Montreal, Canada, and elsewhere, working with graduate researchers via research-creation and oral history methods. Its mandate is to explore how socially engaged art engages public pedagogies to build impact and promote change.
These projects include:
- Walk in the Water / Marcher sur les eaux, on the environmental and social histories of the St. Lawrence River at Pointe-St-Charles, a studio-based project that integrates oral histories into textile mapping
- Black and Light / Noir éclair, a participatory project in partnership with two Montreal cultural institutions to explore the impact of art-making on museum visitors
- At Home in the City /Être chez soi dans la ville, a collaborative exploration of community building through artmaking in the dense and rapidly developing neighbourhood around Concordia's downtown campus.
Earlier research projects such as Nel mezzo del cammin (2011-2015) use textile mapping (textile piecing, digital and hand embroidery) to explore the political ecologies and personal experience of walking in urban woods and greenspaces in Toronto and Montreal, with "Angell Woods" being the only Canadian artwork selected for exhibition at the International Triennial of Textile and Fibre Art in Riga, Latvia (2015). Vu d'ici: Artmaking and Storytelling with Seniors in Pointe-St-Charles (2010-12) engaged residents of social housing, taking up questions of home and belonging. For her 2012 bilingual artist's project, Dans le village.../In the village...
Kathleen Vaughan is the co-director (with Barbara Layne) of the Textiles and Materiality cluster of Milieux, Concordia's Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology. Kathleen is also an active member of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) and often uses oral histories/storytelling in her research.
Kathleen holds a PhD in Education from York University (Toronto), where her multimodal PhD dissertation incorporating a visual art installation and illustrated text was the first of its kind at the university, and won four Canadian and international academic awards for innovation and excellence. Dr. Vaughan has also earned an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University (Montreal), a diploma in Fine Arts from the (then) Ontario College of Art (Toronto) and a BA in English and Art History from the University of Toronto. Prior to joining the Art Education faculty at Concordia in 2008, she taught in York University's Faculty of Education, at the Ontario College of Art and Design, in Concordia's Studio Arts department and through visiting artist programs in Toronto schools.
Kathleen has a great love of dogs, and poodles in particular, and in her leisure moments enjoys the company of her own canine companion and volunteering for poodle and pit bull rescue.
