Brianna Shetzler

8.29 Shifting Curricular Territories Through Transformative Art Practice (Paper)

Brianna Shetzler – University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA

Debrah Sickler-Voigt – Middle Tennessee State University, USA

Cathy Smilan – University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA

Abstract:

Transformation is a normal part of life and vital to teacher and student growth. Practicing transformative art education, informed by United Nations educational policies (UNESCO, 2023), is timely and necessary due to teachers’ and students’ increased stress and mental health concerns stemming from trauma, restrictive educational policies, teacher shortages, student learning gaps, and public divides generated by social media’s advancements of false, confrontational, and unhealthy narratives. Participants will learn strategies to drive teacher and student agency using this presentation’s original models of transformative art education to shift grounds in teacher education. By using teacher-research to inform curriculum design, we encourage the inclusion of work by global artists that engage us in expanding perspectives for ourselves and our students. Transformations are never easy and cannot be forced. Rather, they are guided by individuals’ and communities’ desires to produce substantive changes to better themselves, improve situations, and support other human experience. Artwork becomes the vehicle to promote healthy discourse and transformations in a comprehensive global design inside the classroom and ultimately extends understandings out of the classroom. For art teachers and learners, transformative practice starts with learning to sit within the generative spaces that motivate the search for resolution. Guided by the principles of Mezirow’s (1991) transformative learning theory, art-based research can guide artist/teachers to identify conceptual problems beyond discipline specific skills and techniques to invite discursive inner dialogue that leads to new perspectives. Through sustained inquiry, artist experience their work as maker/teacher/ human and expand their curricular offerings to their learners. Exemplars of teachers process from a graduate class are shared as exemplars of Incorporating studio-based art teacher research into one’s curriculum and instruction practice.

Mezirow, J. Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning. Jossey-Bass, 1991. UNESCO. (2023). Report on the 2022 Transforming Education Summit convened by the UN Secretary-General. https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/report_on_the_2022_transforming_education_summit.pdf