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Arianna Garcia-Fialdini & David LeRue

"We're bringing art education to life online."

David LeRue and Arianna Garcia-Fialdini, a student and Doctoral candidate from the Department of Art Education, received the Experiential Learning (EL) Grant to conduct a collaborative research assistantship under the direction of Dr. Kathleen Vaughan. Their research would investigate the current role community-engaged Art Education could have during a pandemic, and how in-person learning could be effectively re-oriented to online forms of engagement. These two students paid special attention to making these modes inclusive and mindful of generational divides. 

Both Dave and Arianna considered these questions through similar but slightly different positions as community-engaged artists and instructors. Arianna’s angle included being in preparation for teaching ARTE 330 during the upcoming Winter semester of 2021. Introduction to Community Art Education, a course which focuses on preparing students to teach an art course of their own, needed to be altered from its traditional focus of preparing students for on-site learning to preparing students for experiential learning at a distance. In Dave’s case, he conducted much of this research in-tandem with a course taught at the Pointe-St-Charles Art School called Landscaping the City, which took place from October to December. Below, Dave and Arianna reflect on lessons learned from both the research and its application to a community art class. 

As previously mentioned, the project was a direct response to the impact of COVID-19 on the internship-based teaching and learning required by the course that Arianna will be teaching alongside Dr. Vaughan. This course is taken by second-year Art Education undergraduates as they learn to teach in community sites. These sites usually include homeless shelters, seniors’ residences, schools for youth at risk or with special needs, community centers, museums and on-campus locales like the International Students’ Centre. The second-year undergraduate artists/teachers facilitate in-person art-making for to up to 50 hours of experiential internship over the academic year. Due to our current public health crisis, all 2020 and Winter 2021 internships were suspended.

Arianna’s role involved re-adapting these internships to the current climate: “this opportunity to delve further into EL in this context provided necessary and eminent time for me to develop, redesign and rethinking possible ways to offer both groups of ARTE 330 valuable and rich remote/virtual experience of what it means to have the privilege to engage, teach and learn in and with diverse communities through an art education lens whilst considering the current circumstance our world finds itself in.” Arianna cites calling on the “strong, generous and wonderfully animated” art education community for help and support in developing and reshaping the course. “This experience has been a very humbling and exciting one for me as I continue to develop my own teaching and research practice and I am very grateful for the opportunity to do so” 

As for Dave, he taught an eight-week online drawing course in the Fall of 2020 called Landscaping the City, attended by fifteen participants from the ages of 11-80. Participants attended live lessons and were given weekly drawing prompts, which encouraged viewing neighborhoods through the frameworks and methods of landscape painting. Dave took the chance to research the rich and evolving field of online learning, while considering the complexities it poses to the visual arts. His strategy for designing Landscaping the City considered successful moments he has experienced as a teacher and student in in-person classrooms, then finding ways to reverse-engineer such instances through available technologies. Through his research, Dave studied what other instructors were doing and considered what might work best with his own teaching style. 

Dave recounts his drawing course creating a feeling of shared authorship and he notes that it had the effect of reaching across the generational and other experiences students brought to the classroom. It also allowed students to discuss topics which most interested them, ranging from the formal and aesthetic questions of landscape to social considerations and histories of the forces which shape landscapes, neighborhoods and communities. “My experience developing and delivering this course have been heartening—while much of what I know from teaching in-person has effectively been made obsolete, the engagement of the students and the quality of their projects was a heartening experience for the resilience being shown at this critical time. I have also come to further understand and appreciate the tremendous capacities and engagement of participants in community classrooms of all ages, and feel increasingly optimistic about the potential for online learning, whether we continue to do it by necessity or, in time, by choice.” 

This article was written by Emily Andrews.

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