Fiona Blaikie

4.6 Visual and Textual Inquiries into Situated and Shifting Identities: Popular Culture, Social Media, and Intersectionality (Paper)

Fiona Blaikie – Faculty of Education, Brock University, Ontario, Canada

Abstract:

Drawing on auto/ethnographic visual and textual inquiries into situated and shifting identities framed by popular culture, social media, and lenses of intersectionality, explored in art-led research-pedagogical settings, this presentation will feature three qualitative research projects, two undertaken with graduate students, that focus on explorations of visual, textual, and cultural contexts and meanings.

First, framed by Kathleen Stewart’s worlding, a study into grade 11 students’ evolving identity constructs was explored in a pedagogical setting where I led ethnographic focus groups, had conversations with key participants, drawing on their artworks and writing, resulting in an art-led ficto-critical case study into “Danny” (x, 2020), who drew on her own art and poetry to make, analyse, interpret, and make sense and meaning of her world. 

Second, working with graduate students via auto-ethnographic, situated, feminist, racialized, visual, and cultural analysis, we examined three personally relevant 21st century superhero movies, Black Panther, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Wonder Woman (X, Nguyen, and Strachan, 2022). Analysing the visuality of the movies via race, gender and culture, a key emergent theme is transhumanism in relation to visual representations of characters, situated settings, narratives, and overarching significance. 

Third, with graduate students, we engaged in a collaborative pedagogical-research study taking up art-led autoethnographic explorations of the impacts of cultural and gender conventions that framed our childhoods via gendered norms, framed by Nodding’s ethics of care and Bourdieusian habitus (X, Y, and Z. 2023). These norms are established and reinforced from the moment a child is born. Through visual/narrative vignettes, we offer experiences and memories of our gendered childhoods where we lived lives circumscribed by family subcultures.

8.4 High School Art Teachers: Discipline and Learner-centred Pedagogy/ies, Challenging Curricula, Issues of Compliance and Agency (Paper)

Fiona Blaikie – Faculty of Education, Brock University, Ontario, Canada

Karen Maras – University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Abstract:

The paper examines conceptions of learner-centred and discipline centred pedagogies in art education encapsulated in equivalents of grades 11 and 12 in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IB) in Visual Arts, and the Australian New South Wales Stage 6 Visual Arts Syllabus (NSW). Tracing similar epistemological and aesthetic roots, IB and NSW have evolved into differentiated orientations to high school art pedagogy, yet both provide scope for praxis-oriented experiences supporting students’ burgeoning autonomy as developing artists in formalized high-stakes final examinations that draw on criterion referencing, articulated levels of achievement, and external examinations. Starting with a brief history of IB and NSW and comparison of high stakes pedagogy and examination protocols, key will be preparation for final examination via discipline and learner-centred pedagogy/ies, students’ independent self-directed inquiry/ies, and students viewed as becoming practicing artists rather than neophyte art learners. Discussion will shift to issues of student and teacher autonomy, agency/ies, interdependence, and compliance in relation to implementation of pedagogy, formative assessment, and high stakes final examination protocols. We contemplate how curriculum and assessment protocols define what counts as art, and what counts as art education. Further, we examine how these conceptions are taken forward and operationalized by high school art teachers in relation to discipline and learner-centred approaches, challenging curricula, issues of teacher and student compliance and agency in relation to high stakes examination practices in the field of art education. Further considerations for practice encompass internal and external policing of high school art teachers’ work; the contested space between state and private schools; internal and external expectations of art teachers and their students in relation to curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, agency and compliance.