Faculty projects

Anita Sinner (Principal investigator), Linda Szabad-Smyth, Kathleen Vaughan
Concordia Faculty of Fine Arts Seed Grant

The Community Art Education (CAE) program at Concordia is unparalleled in longevity, embeddedness in key community and social service agencies, links to art teacher education, and orientation to outstanding arts practice as well as teaching. The Creating a model of innovative teaching and research in Canada project recognizes both the historic contributions of the CAE program to art education, and how it continues to evolve in ways that define community art education practices. 

Creating a model of innovative teaching and research in Canada investigates the history of the community art education program in the Department of Art Education, how this program is situated in relation to art education in Canada, and the scope of current literature concerning community art education.

"Mirroring" and "interactivity": two educationally-oriented strategies for successful public art projects examines the fundamental conflict that exists between the public sphere and artists' own expectations for their works of public art. In previous research, Lachapelle contrasted investigations into the public sphere and popular expectations for public art with the concomitant expectations of artists and art promoters. In  "Mirroring" and "interactivity", he summarizes previous arguments to provide the groundwork for a discussion of two contemporary strategies for engaging viewers as they encounter works of public art: mirroring and interactivity - strategies that are educational in nature and hold the promise of better public art projects. 

Lorrie Blair and Sebastien Fitch seek to discover what practical criteria are used to assess art making in a first year drawing course. How does one assess the creative worth of an artwork? What are students learning in beginning drawing courses and how do instructors assess their learning? Is the emphasis on the art product, content knowledge, technical skills, personal expression, aesthetics...? And, how are such criteria conveyed to students? What role does the class critique play in student learning? How are grades determined? Are assessment methods used in studio courses in line with methods taught in our art education courses?

Juan Carlos Castro (Concordia University) and Clayton Funk (Ohio State University)

Data visualization of texts and data sets are increasingly becoming an important tool for gaining understandings of complicated phenomena and large sets of information. Castro and Funk's research examine the patterns, presence and absence of ideas and themes in large data sets. Currently, they are visualizing 65 years of National Art Education Association (NAEA) annual convention catalogs. Because the NAEA convention catalog represents a broad survey of the field, including presentations by art educators from elementary classrooms, museums, higher education and other settings, it provides parallel discourses of the art education profession. Castro and Funk's analysis stems from visualized and aggregated proposal titles and catalog descriptions in the form of word clouds. Word clouds are visualizations of word frequency: the number of times a word appears in a text. Their research offers the potential of yielding patterns of present and absent discourses in the history of art education in North America.

Anita Sinner (Principal investigator), Erika Hasebe-Ludt (Lethbridge) and Carl Leggo (UBC)

The Portrayals of Teachers' Lives: Investigating Teacher Education Through Popular Culture and Digital Media as Arts Education (Three-year SSHRC Standard Grant, 2011-2013) study investigates how contemporary and historic portrayals of teachers' lives are rendered in popular culture through integrative methods of creative nonfiction and digital media as life writing.

Anita Sinner and colleagues undertook three interrelated projects: an examination of creative life writing about teachers in popular culture; an investigation into the history of teacher education; and an inquiry by a self-selected group of in-service teachers that focused on new and multiple literacies engaged in life writing workshops that render contemporary teachers' experiences of teaching. 

These projects demonstrate how life writing as research facilitates knowledge construction in teacher education, and how this approach has the potential to change structures of learning and teaching, and in the process, provide a suitable method to write and reclaim historical and contemporary teacher stories.

Finding Home: Drawing: Queen West Dusk (detail), Charcoal on paper, 2006 (Original image is 92 inches high by 44.5 inches wide)

Exploring theories and practices of creating a feeling of being 'at home' in the world, Finding Home is a visual installation based on a walk through the Toronto neighbourhoods of my residence and studio. The installation is a mix of cultural and urban theory, history and geography, as well as ecology--our word 'ecology' being derived from the Greek oikos, meaning house or home. For this inquiry, home is a state of being as much as a structure to live within. The installation proposes that a person may find a feeling of being at home in the world by walking, observation, and art-making, and aims to recreate a version of this multifaceted process for the viewer.

Using media as diverse as large-scale charcoal drawings, textile maps and archival and contemporary photographs, Finding Home is a creation of untraditional collage. Collage being a medium of juxtapositions, this installation invites the viewer/reader to consider the formal and conceptual individualities of the various components as a single conversation--about place, belonging and home.

Reflecting on the body of work emerging in the area of action research, this workshop set out multiple aims: to bring together scholars, artists, and teachers to develop a research agenda that facilitates cutting edge classroom oriented practice that addresses issues effecting teenagers; and to create a community of researchers that includes university researchers, classroom art teachers, pre-service art teachers (undergraduates), graduate students who are also classroom art teachers, and artists. Since the teen stage is primarily about the construction of identity, this workshop examined multiple ways to explore identity development and diversity issues such as class, oppression, and privilege.The organization committee identified five thematics for the workshop. They include: place (real and virtual), fashion, the body, and media. 

Visiting Scholar Aileen Pugliese Castro's Early Childhood curriculum takes art outside. One of her curricular explorations is featured on the cover of May/June 2011 School Art Magazine. In her article she writes:

"I wanted to have students collaborate with forms in nature to create their own visual structures to communicate ideas. I call it "collaborating" because students are often inspired as they work with forms in nature."

To read more, visit: http://www.davisart.com/portal/schoolarts/sadefault.aspx