Sue Girak

Shifting Grounds: Imagining Global Possibilities for Community Arts Education (Panel)

Sue Girak – City Beach Primary School, WA, Australia

Chair: Anita Sinner – The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Sophia Chiata – University of the Aegean, Greece

Sue Girak – City Beach Primary School, WA, Australia

Kazuyo Nakamura – Hiroshima University, Japan

Merna Meyer

Patricia Osler – The Convergence Initiative – Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

Abstract:

In this multi-paper session, we envision community arts education (CAE) as shifting ground, where discursive changes at the local level informs pedagogy and practice at the intersection of complex and ever-changing global dynamics. We reimagine the role of the arts in community inquiry – a role that is responsive to relations among individuals, communities and the arts – to cultivate more sophisticated understandings of future pathways for community arts education, deliberating on the concept of transversality to signify both an overarching theoretical framework and the methodological structure for reimagining the complexity of community. To move this collective scholarship forward, we make a distinction in philosophy and practice when defining the term community arts education. We purposely favour the term community arts education over community-based arts education. Community arts education implies the necessary equality of education (e.g. pedagogical implementations) and a variety of practices (e.g. programming) for advancing and solidifying relationships between education and community through access to the artistic fields. In this way, we engage with community as not just a place to enact curriculum; it is the curriculum – a practice in which community life, learning and learning activities, and educational aims intersect. We present case studies from Japan, Australia, Canada and Greece that outline challenges ahead and address how thinking transversally is changing our engagement as artists, researchers and teachers. We facilitate greater resilience through multimodal, multifaceted research architectures, produced across three dimensions: horizontal (first person, creative expression); vertical (analytic, sequential problem-solving); and diagonal (traversing digital matrices) to ensure rigour and accountability. In this way, the cartographic potential of community arts education through diverse and socially engaged art, public pedagogy, community engagement, artistic research, and hybridized practices, reflects the growing impact of critical post-humanism, new materialism and worldly education – approaches that reconceptualize community spaces and international educative borders.

Propositions for Museum Education: International Art Educators in Conversation (Panel; 90 mins.)

Chair: Patricia Osler – The Convergence Initiative – Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

Lilly Blue – Art Gallery of Western Australia Perth Cultural Centre, Australia

Sue Girak – City Beach Primary School, WA, Australia

Anniina Koivurova – University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland

Tatiana Kravtsov – University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland

Rolf Laven – University College of Teacher Education, Vienna, Austria

Anita Sinner – The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Lisbet Skregelid – University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway – virtual

Anniina Suominen – Aalto university, School of Art, Design and Architecture, Finland

Susana Vargas-Mejía – Bogota Museum of Modern Art / Universidad de los Andes, Colombia

Abstract:

This panel discussion explores how international art educators are engaging with new approaches to museum education in response to 21st century challenges. Panellists discuss how and why museums are shifting, evolving as sites that mediate different and multiple knowledges for the future. Who is a learner? What is a museum? Whose art is missing? Within the shifting discourse, authors of this edited collection investigate museum futures as contiguous educational sites that contribute to inclusivity, equity and diversity, and embrace dynamic innovations for teaching and learning. We open the conversation in an ‘artful exchange’ across global, local and glocal contexts, reconceptualizing museums to consider accessibility, differences in lived experiences, and how both situated and virtual practices create impactful change. With an overarching concept of relationality between art museums and interdisciplinary perspectives, museums as informal learning sites offer the communities they serve unexpected territories for meaningful experiential and educational exchange through practice-based projects. As catalysts for public scholarship, the propositions for museum education in this collection reflect living futures in relation to practice, weaving the learning potential of interacting with artworks more fully within international and localized communities to present a distinct socio-cultural discourse that is at the heart of teaching and learning.