Marzieh Mosavarzadeh

2.15 A Collective Practice of Walking Poems as a Pedagogical Art of Noticing (Paper)

Marzieh Mosavarzadeh – University of British Columbia, Canada

Addyson Frattura – University of British Columbia, Canada

Abstract:

Walking poems is a pedagogical art of noticing. The outcome is to nurture dialogue and practice the art of noticing. We are guided by questioning: How do we be human within the limiting structures of time and schooling? What can be imagined from movements beyond time? Schooling hurries us through skills, competencies, and assessment while enforcing structured limits of time. What is lost here and what might we seek to find? We offer examples of visual-textual practice of walking poems to showcase the art of noticing and its implications for education. Our orientations to the lands that we walk on and with invite us to question ourselves and how we make, who we make with, and what we make while we are here. First, we provide an overview of a historical and theoretical framework for the art of noticing. Second, we showcase three iterations of what emerges – unexpectedly so – through the visual-textual practice of walking poetry. While one walks, one observes what one normally rushes past. In such noticing, we create images and visuals to build language, images, dialogue, community, and knowledge. Third, we extend our work toward collaborative making across different lands, territories (conceptual and physical), and communities. There is pedagogical necessity in slowing down, in stopping time, in walking and noticing, and creating from what is noticed. Walking is not just arriving at a destination; it is an in-between place of possibility. Similarly, education is not the achievement of an endpoint that schooling assumes. We begin with respect and humility as we engage with histories, scholars, artists, and practices which each of us are at times included within and privileged from, and at other times excluded from. We approach this work through respectful cultural understanding in recognizing the colonial lands upon which we learn, walk, and notice.

2.40 Invitations to (Re)imagine (Paper)

Marzieh Mosavarzadeh – University of British Columbia, Canada

Abstract:

This presentation steps into the imaginative and pedagogical potential of invitations as artful, relational, and open-ended forms of engagement. Drawing from my doctoral research, Making –Place A/r/tographically, I explore how creating invitations can become a generative process of inquiry, transforming both inviter and invitee through shared exploration. Anchored in a/r/tography – a methodology intertwining artmaking, research, and teaching – I investigate how invitations create conditions for imaginative ways of knowing, co-thinking, and co-making. I approach invitations as “doorways for imagination,” inspired by Maxine Greene’s (1995) assertion that imagination enables us to see “as if things could be otherwise” (p. 16). These doorways encourage both inviter and invitee to embrace uncertainty and step into unfamiliar, unexpected pathways. Informed by the practice of instruction artists, I highlight that invitations share a kinship with instruction art. Like imaginative pedagogy, instruction art thrives on participation, softening the boundaries between creator and audience. This interplay reflects the pedagogical potential of invitations, which rely on vulnerability, openness, and the co-construction of meaning. Through the lens of a/r/tography, I frame invitations as evolving works of art and pedagogy. Drawing on Bourriaud’s (2002) relational aesthetics and Elizabeth Ellsworth’s (2005) concept of “pedagogy in the making,” I suggest a way of pedagogy that prioritizes experimentation, reflexivity, and relational inquiry while resisting the urge to fit learning into pre-existing frameworks. As such, I explore how crafting and sharing invitations becomes a practice of forging connections and sustaining emergent possibilities. Rather than providing answers, these invitations aim to provoke – to draw attention to the unnoticed, the ordinary, and the yet-to-be-imagined. In this sense, this presentation invites attendees to consider how they might offer invitations to open doorways to imagination in/through their own arts-based research.