Debrah Sickler-Voigt

2.33 Enhancing Inclusive Classroom Practices through Participation in the International Children’s Exhibition of Fine Arts, Lidice (Paper)

Debrah Sickler-Voigt – Middle Tennessee State University, USA

Monica Leister – Tennessee School for the Blind in Nashville, TN, USA 

Abstract:

Disability is a normal part of the human condition. Fifteen percent of schoolchildren have a disability in the United States. Because most classrooms contain students with special needs, educators need to know supports ranging from low-tech to high-tech assistive technologies to facilitate equitable learning in visual and media arts. The aim of this presentation is to explain inclusive interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary instructional practices resulting from a 12-year-partnership between a K-12 school for the blind and a university art education program, who have participated in the International Children’s Exhibition of Fine Arts (ICEFA), Lidice. Based in the Czech Republic, ICEFA Lidice promotes childhood peace through its art exhibitions and collection of children’s artworks from six continents and 83 countries. Its annual themes correspond with UNESCO’s International Years about cultural diversity. Its collection commemorates all child victims of war and demonstrates human resiliency in moving beyond the horrific Nazi attack that destroyed Lidice’s entire village, including 82 innocent children. By participating in ICEFA Lidice, the presenters and their students explored unexpected territories and have learned new technologies including stop motion animation, green screen technologies, and robotics. These skills are strengthened with assistive technologies and physical artmaking. We will describe how our students have created multimedia artworks based on UNESCO themes that teach meaningful global subject matter, present disability as a normal part of the human condition, and demonstrate the many abilities of students with disabilities to a public audience. We will explain how access to assistive technologies enables students with disabilities to participate in learning tasks that can be impossible without them (UNESCO, 2019). Ultimately, given our participation in ICEFA Lidice, our presentation will equip educators with innovative strategies to integrate visual and media arts alongside assistive technologies to their unique teaching situations to promote student accessibility, equity, inclusion, and independence.

8.29 Shifting Curricular Territories Through Transformative Art Practice (Paper)

Debrah Sickler-Voigt – Middle Tennessee State University, USA

Cathy Smilan – University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA

Brianna Shetzler – 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