GRAD STUDENT INFORMATION

ARTE 670 Critical Perspectives on Art Education: History, Theory and Practice (3 credits)

Term: Fall
Day/time: Monday 18:30-20:30

Instructor: Juan Carlos Castro 

A seminar course in which students develop critical reading and writing skills while adding to their understanding of trends past and present that have shaped the field of art education. 

ARTE 672 Advanced Critical Analysis (3 credits -prerequisite ARTE 670)

Term: Winter
Day/time: Monday 18:30-20:30

Instructor: Dave LeRue

A seminar course in which students develop advanced skills in critical analysis, academic writing and library research. Assignments include compiling and writing a review of literature on a topic of research or professional interest.

ARTE 680 Foundations for Inquiry (3 credits)

Term: Fall
Day/time: Wednesday 16:00-18:00

Instructor: Jessie Beier

A seminar course in which students are introduced to the basic concepts, terminology, and contexts of inquiry in art education. Students learn about the practice of systematic inquiry, including: identifying and articulating a topic or question; situating the inquiry within a theoretical framework; relating the inquiry to art education practices; and selecting appropriate inquiry procedures. Each student develops a proposal for a small-scale project related to his/her particular art education interests.

ARTE 682 Research Practice (3 credits -prerequisite ARTE 680 )

Term: Winter
Day/time: Wednesday 16:00 - 18:00

Instructor: Jessie Beier

A seminar course in which students conduct a small-scale research project based on their own research proposal. Students are introduced to appropriate forms and practices for conducting the project and presenting the results.

ARTE 606 Studio Inquiry (3 credits)

Term: Fall
Day/time: Thursday 16:00-18:00 (Lab 14:00-16:00)

Instructor: TBD
Topic: TBD

ARTE 606 Studio Inquiry (3 credits): 

Term: Winter
Day/time: Monday 16:00-18:00 (Lab 14:00-16:00)

Instructor:  Kathleen Vaughan
Topic:  What is art for? Considering making, teaching, learning, and curating art in a [post?] pandemic world 

Through individual and collaborative projects, course participants will embody their answer(s) to the question, “ What is art for … now?” As artists and educators, we will think through current social and environmental issues, age-old discussions of art’s human purposes, and personal motivations and ambitions. Further, we will connect with the What is art for? exhibition at the Warren G. Flowers Art Gallery of Dawson University (Feb-Mar 2026), and its maker-space that invites visitors to respond to the same question in conversation with the installation of 81 artworks of a collaborative mail-art pandemic project. This project was designed and led by Kathleen in 2020, with more information online. 

ARTE 660 Selected Topics in Art Education (3 credits):

Term: Fall
Day/time: Tuesday 16:00-18:00

Instructor:  Sandra Huber
Topic: Ritual as Pedagogy

How is ritual pedagogy? How is pedagogy ritual? In this class, we will explore intersections between art ritual, and pedagogy through an indisciplinary lens and with incursions into adjacent fields such as contemplative pedagogy, performance studies, theatre, critical race studies, art therapy, feminist theory, and esoteric studies. How do pedagogy and ritual, when combined, open a liminal space that allows an expanded conception of sensory, intellectual, and embodied knowledges in educational research? In this direction, we will examine how aesthetic and pedagogical engagements with esoteric and unruly methods channel a minoritarian impulse to shapeshift colonial epistemologies of rationalism, individualism, ableism, and universalism. We will ask: how might such engagements in turn participate in the creation of other worlds-in-the-(un)making? Taking a cue from the twenty-first-century surge of popular interest in the occult and esoteric — particularly within feminist and queer communities — our class will join in emergent scholarly, artistic, and pedagogical discussions about how esoteric knowledges and embodied ritual practices inform decolonial and speculative turns. Class assignments will place emphasis on group work and research-creation while allowing time for exploration and experimentation. By the end of the class, students will have developed concrete methods of fusing ritual into pedagogical and theoretical practices.

ARTE 660 Selected Topics in Art Education (3 credits):

Term: Winter
Day/time: Tuesday 16:00-18:00

Instructor: jessie beier

Topic: Brain as Screen: Cinema, Pedagogy, Desire

This graduate seminar explores the intersections of cinema, pedagogy, and desire through Gilles Deleuze’s (1998) proposition that “the brain is the screen.” For Deleuze, cinema does not simply entertain or represent—it sets thought in motion, producing and reconfiguring circuits of affect,perception, and desire in the process. In this way, cinema enacts a pedagogy of the senses: a mode of thinking that excavates the “spiritual life” of decision, obstinacy, and existence as much as it dramatizes aberrant behaviours, bodily intensities, and affective shocks. Put another way: cinema teaches, even when it resists being reduced to lessons, by staging encounters with forces that may (or may not) exceed representation, unsettle identity, and rewire how we attune to the world, including the world of education. Desire threads through these encounters, not as lack or moral allegory, but as a machinic energy that drives metamorphosis, haunts images, and traverses the brain-screen, producing pedagogies that think through us as much as we think through them.

Each week, we will turn to films that approach pedagogy and desire in this transversal way—cutting across philosophy, aesthetics, politics, and educational theory; moving between bodies, images, and affects; and tracing unexpected connections between learning and unlearning, sensation and thought, theory and practice. Across themes of metamorphosis, play, discipline, contagion, labour, survival, eros, ritual, mutation and dreams, we will explore how cinematic worlds teach by passing through rather than representing, by transforming rather than instructing.

From the virtual bleeds of Carax’s Holy Motors (2012) and the queer televisual hauntings of Schoenbrunn’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024), to the violent schooling of Fukasaku’s Battle Royal (2000) and the hallucinatory media-body mutations of Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), we will investigate how cinema functions as a pedagogical site that shapes desire, de/habituates bodies, and circuits modes of perception. Course readings will move across philosophy, post-critical pedagogy, feminist and queer theory, media studies, affect theory, (post)psychoanalytic discourse, and sound and performance studies. Our approach will be iterative and experimental: weekly viewings will be paired with theoretical texts, short written responses, and collaborative making-thinking sessions. Alongside this ongoing work, students will produce an experimental video essay that responds to course themes and questions.

The overarching aim of the course is to explore pedagogy not as something confined to classrooms, but as something that emerges in and through encounters with images, affects, rhythms, and cinematic assemblages. If cinema thinks, it does so with and without us: a brainscreen that machines perception, conjuring pedagogies that both configure and exceed the spectator. Here, pedagogy and desire are not opposed but co-constitutive—cinema teaches by desiring and desires by teaching, composing new neural, affective, and collective pathways through which learning, thinking, making, and doing unfold.

ARTE 870 Critical Perspectives on Art Education: History, Theory and Practice (3 credits)

Term: Fall
Day/time: Monday 18:30-20:30

Instructor:  Juan Carlos Castro

A seminar course in which students develop critical reading and writing skills while adding to their understanding of trends past and present that have shaped the field of art education. 

ARTE 872 Advanced Critical Analysis (3 credits -prerequisite ARTE 870)

Term: Winter
Day/time: Monday 18:30-20:30

Instructor:  Dave Lerue

A seminar course in which students develop advanced skills in critical analysis, academic writing and library research. Assignments include compiling and writing a review of literature on a topic of research or professional interest.

ARTE 880 Foundations for Inquiry (3 credits)

Term: Fall
Day/time: Wednesday 16:00-18:00

Instructor: Jessie Beier

A seminar course in which students are introduced to the basic concepts, terminology, and contexts of inquiry in art education. Students learn about the practice of systematic inquiry, including: identifying and articulating a topic or question; situating the inquiry within a theoretical framework; relating the inquiry to art education practices; and selecting appropriate inquiry procedures. Each student develops a proposal for a small-scale project related to his/her particular art education interests.

ARTE 882 Research Practice (3 credits -prerequisite ARTE 880 )

Term: Winter
Day/time: Wednesday 16:00 - 18:00

Instructor: Jessie Beier

A seminar course in which students conduct a small-scale research project based on their own research proposal. Students are introduced to appropriate forms and practices for conducting the project and presenting the results.

ARTE 884 Doctoral Seminar (3 credits)

Term: Winter
Day/time: Wednesday 18:30-20:30

Instructor: MJ Thompson

This course addresses research and communication, thesis writing, and professional practice.

ARTE 806 Studio Inquiry (3 credits)

Term: Fall
Day/time: Thursday 16:00-18:00 (Lab 14:00-16:00)

Instructor:  TBD
Topic: TBD

ARTE 806 Studio Inquiry (3 credits): 

Term: Winter
Day/time: Monday 16:00-18:00 (Lab 14:00-16:00)

Instructor:   Kathleen Vaughan

Topic: What is art for? Considering making, teaching, learning, and curating art in a [post?] pandemic world 

Through individual and collaborative projects, course participants will embody their answer(s) to the question, “ What is art for … now?” As artists and educators, we will think through current social and environmental issues, age-old discussions of art’s human purposes, and personal motivations and ambitions. Further, we will connect with the What is art for? exhibition at the Warren G. Flowers Art Gallery of Dawson University (Feb-Mar 2026), and its maker-space that invites visitors to respond to the same question in conversation with the installation of 81 artworks of a collaborative mail-art pandemic project. This project was designed and led by Kathleen in 2020, with more information online.

ARTE 850 Selected Topics in Art Education (3 credits):

Term: Fall
Day/time: Tuesday 16:00-18:00

Instructor:  Sandra Huber
Topic: Ritual as Pedagogy

How is ritual pedagogy? How is pedagogy ritual? In this class, we will explore intersections between art, ritual, and pedagogy through an indisciplinary lens and with incursions into adjacent fields such as contemplative pedagogy, performance studies, theatre, critical race studies, art therapy, feminist theory, and esoteric studies. How do pedagogy and ritual, when combined, open a liminal space that allows an expanded conception of sensory, intellectual, and embodied knowledges in educational research? In this direction, we will examine how aesthetic and pedagogical engagements with esoteric and unruly methods channel a minoritarian impulse to shapeshift colonial epistemologies of rationalism, individualism, ableism, and universalism. We will ask: how might such engagements in turn participate in the creation of other worlds-in-the-(un)making? Taking a cue from the twenty-first-century surge of popular interest in the occult and esoteric — particularly within feminist and queer communities — our class will join in emergent scholarly, artistic, and pedagogical discussions about how esoteric knowledges and embodied ritual practices inform decolonial and speculative turns. Class assignments will place emphasis on group work and research-creation while allowing time for exploration and experimentation. By the end of the class, students will have developed concrete methods of fusing ritual into pedagogical and theoretical practices.

ARTE 850 Selected Topics in Art Education (3 credits):

Term: Winter
Day/time: Tuesday 16:00-18:00

Instructor:  jessie beier
Topic: Brain as Screen: Cinema, Pedagogy, Desire

This graduate seminar explores the intersections of cinema, pedagogy, and desire through Gilles Deleuze’s (1998) proposition that “the brain is the screen.” For Deleuze, cinema does not simply entertain or represent—it sets thought in motion, producing and reconfiguring circuits of affect, perception, and desire in the process. In this way, cinema enacts a pedagogy of the senses: a mode of thinking that excavates the “spiritual life” of decision, obstinacy, and existence as much as it dramatizes aberrant behaviours, bodily intensities, and affective shocks. Put another way: cinema teaches, even when it resists being reduced to lessons, by staging encounters with forces that may (or may not) exceed representation, unsettle identity, and rewire how we attune to the world, including the world of education. Desire threads through these encounters, not as lack or moral allegory, but as a machinic energy that drives metamorphosis, haunts images, and traverses the brain-screen, producing pedagogies that think through us as much as we think through them.

Each week, we will turn to films that approach pedagogy and desire in this transversal way—cutting across philosophy, aesthetics, politics, and educational theory; moving between bodies, images, and affects; and tracing unexpected connections between learning and unlearning, sensation and thought, theory and practice. Across themes of metamorphosis, play, discipline, contagion, labour, survival, eros, ritual, mutation and dreams, we will explore how cinematic worlds teach by passing through rather than representing, by transforming rather than instructing.

From the virtual bleeds of Carax’s Holy Motors (2012) and the queer televisual hauntings of Schoenbrunn’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024), to the violent schooling of Fukasaku’s Battle Royale (2000) and the hallucinatory media-body mutations of Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), we will investigate how cinema functions as a pedagogical site that shapes desire, de/habituates bodies, and circuits modes of perception. Course readings will move across philosophy, post-critical pedagogy, feminist and queer theory, media studies, affect theory, (post)psychoanalytic discourse, and sound and performance studies. Our approach will be iterative and experimental: weekly viewings will be paired with theoretical texts, short written responses, and collaborativemaking-thinking sessions. Alongside this ongoing work, students will produce an experimental video essay that responds to course themes and questions.

The overarching aim of the course is to explore pedagogy not as something confined to classrooms, but as something that emerges in and through encounters with images, affects, rhythms, and cinematic assemblages. If cinema thinks, it does so with and without us: a brainscreen that machines perception, conjuring pedagogies that both configure and exceed the spectator. Here, pedagogy and desire are not opposed but co-constitutive—cinema teaches by desiring and desires by teaching, composing new neural, affective, and collective pathways through which learning, thinking, making, and doing unfold.