Bench (digital photo, Pam Patterson) is made from photographs taken at Shankill Castle, Ireland. Here I use the metaphor of the castle garden. To be in such a garden is to stand in the middle of a vision of the world—the garden is in itself a cosmological statement where within its symmetrical plan and ordered framework, particularity is seemingly understood to be varied, fertile and hospitable. But how is this order maintained? What are the underlying expectations? Here this distorted garden bench acts in image to create a disturbance inviting us to see, through a contemporary pandemic lens, the past ruptured and reassessed through the trauma of famine and expulsion.
Researchers:
OCAD:
- Pam Patterson (Principal Investigator), Assistant Professor TIS, Faculty of Art
- Daniel Payne (Head of Reference and Instructional Services, Dorothy H. Hoover Library (former), Social Sciences & Humanities Librarian, York University (current)).
- Research Assistants: Emily Cadotte (Graduate Research Assistant & Teaching Assistant), Angie Ma (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
- Designer (Libguide): Marta Chudolinska (Learning Zone Librarian, OCADU (former))
- Teaching Assistant: Penelope Smart
- CA: Janine Arellano
- Independent Study Researcher: Vicky Talwar
University of Manitoba:
- Joanna Black, Professor, Education, cross appointed to the School of Art
- Research Assistant: Sarah Paradis
Over 100 other project participants including from OCADU, University of Manitoba, Textile Museum, AGO, Carbon Art & Design etc.
Research in/on Making and Teaching in the Time of COVID is a collaborative creation research project led by Dr. Pam Patterson with Daniel Payne and Joanna Black. It has been funded by an OCAD U Seed Grant, a Canada Council Strategic Initiatives Digital Futures COVID-19 Grant, a University of Manitoba Creative Works Grant, and Manitoba Arts Council and Ontario Arts Council grants.
Researchers have been exploring the generative potential of working in joyful, vulnerable, and committed communities of practice. Accepting anxiety as a given, as inherent in creative making, and during this pandemic, they have been exploring mutually supportive pedagogies among themselves and with students from the University of Manitoba and OCAD University. With over 100 participants thus far in this project, including members of institutions such as Gallery 1313 and the Textile Museum of Canada, they have generated collaborations and produced exhibitions. Creating a resource-rich environment for learning, researchers have been developing curricular resources and teaching and learning models that are being articulated as research results. Marta Chudolinska (Former Librarian, OCADU Learning Zone) designed a library Libguide for public access. This guide is now stored at the University of Manitoba.
Other student and recent graduate research collaborators have included Vicky Talwar, Angie Ma, Penelope Smart, Emily Cadotte (OCAD University), and Sarah Paradis (University of Manitoba).
Concepts, Questions, and Ideas:
Generativity:
Much of our early discussion focused on the idea of generativity.
Questions included: How are we learning and making alongside students? What can be generated among us through conversation? How can we frame and invite learning communities where we can tell our own stories? How do we build free-form ideas and be cognizant of the research and making tools that we are using?
Generativity speaks to the energy that exists in creative and teaching practices. By using a course, as a structure, we grounded and provided a frame that was relatively open where stories could be told and developed. Resources fed this generativity and allowed us to find our own voices.
Deterrents that spoke to the “advancement of teaching and learning”:
We questioned how some of the existing academic structures may be problematic to a generative form of research on/in art education: the tension between reaching for Indigenous and other holistic, inclusive, and empathetic pedagogical forms of learning while dealing with the stresses of testing/rubrics and administrative surveillance.
Strategies for research creation in art education:
Natalie Loveless: “I turn to research creation to encourage modes of temporal, material atonement within the academy and slowing down, in a way that does not fetishize the slow but in which slowness comes from deep theorization and the time it takes to ask questions differently.”
In courses at both universities, we created events or opportunities for our own, and our collaborators’, learning.
In researching art curriculum, the work was informed by the instructor(s) and the course as frame. This emphasised teacher learning outcomes as a model for research. Before we arrived at those outcomes, we explored intersecting circles - circles representative of ideas, concepts, images etc. From this overlap, new dynamics emerged.
We recognized - in process - the important of unpacking language and attending to words that are often normalized such as “isolation” and “quarantine” and “regulation” and the value of library searches for generative questioning and for exploring spaces that exist in the tensions between binaries.
COVID 19 – as Generative:
By looking at COVID-19 as context not theory, we strategized on ways to explore it in a nuanced way within the broader context of isolation, community, and surveillance. How does COVID 19 frame what we are doing and how does the online environment do the same? We recognized the changing environment and through using reflection and documentation, we proceeded to making. We made aesthetic decisions and learned in process.
Jeremey Davies: “…the world is seen as characteristically full of devious chains of cause and effect; of intricate rates that link economies to ocean currents assistance to plate tectonics…” (8). Also as quoted in Davies by Canadian poet Don McKay “... We become members in deep time… We gain the gift and defamiliarization: becoming other to ourselves: one expression of the ever-evolving planet. “(11)
dian marino: “We… need to generate alternative knowledge and images, making new visions out of the mud of our current interpretations.” (151).
Jim Clifford in Donna Haraway: “We need stories (and theories) that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections.” (160)
Questions in/for COVID-19 Research Creation:
How can we embrace uncertainty, decenter and be vulnerable while researching/teaching?
How can we understand that research is personal? Conveying our personal aesthetic ideas through a visual or performative medium is perhaps intuitive, but how do we translate these personal ideas into other forms?
How can external information sources create or inform our own personal narratives?
Can empathy be used to contextualize one’s research journey?
Strategies/Observations:
We thought about binaries such as the one between hope/fear as dialectic (with a potential for generating learning). Is anxiety formed between hope and fear? How does this inform how and what we create?
Anxiety can be generated using online platforms in teaching and learning. We need to note our experiences of chaos and be transparent and model how we feel about this chaos and how we can constantly adjust and attempt to welcome this chaos.
Who assigns values to the objects around us and how does COVID challenge these ideas?
We continue looking curiously at the materiality of what we make and the relationships we build among our social, gendered, raced and physical locations.
References:
Davies, J. (2016). The Birth of the Anthropocene. University of California Press.
marino, d. (1997). Wild Garden: Art, Education, and the Culture of Resistance. Between the Lines Press.
Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities, vol. 6, pp. 159-165.
Projects:
COVID-19 Anxiety: Location, Refuge and Loss (2020): http://covid19anxiety.ca/
COVID Pedagogies: Tools, Content & Strategies (2021): https://libguides.lib.umanitoba.ca/c.php?g=728969
Conference and Guest Presentations:
2022: Pandemic Stories, Research, and Art Making in Art Education, University of Manitoba. (Patterson).
2021: “COVID-19 Anxiety: Locating Culture, Refuge and Loss”, Art & Visual Culture - Annual Conference of the Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association (Patterson, Payne, Black).
“COVID-19 Anxiety: Location, Refuge and Loss” Symposium Panel presentation for Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design (AICAD) with Daniel Payne & Joanna Black.
“Thinking together: (Pre)Post-pandemic research in remote art education learning” We Connect We ReCollect Symposium (OCAD University & Ontario Tech). (Patterson, Payne, Cadotte, Ma).
“COVID-19 Anxiety” (panel presentation) at Kana Wain Dida Virtual International Gathering facilitated by Kitatipithitamak Mithwayawin, who work alongside Indigenous and First Nations communities to develop culturally appropriate resources for managing the many challenges caused by the pandemic. (Patterson, Payne, Black).
“Pandemic Online Learning: A Pedagogy of Vulnerability” COVID Pedagogies: Tools, Content & Strategies. OCAD University Library, Presented as course guests at OCAD University in April 2021. (Patterson, Payne, Ma).
Publications:
2022: Pandemic Team Teaching: Stories of Collaborative Performativity (with D. Payne, A. Ma, & E. Cadotte) Art Education, NAEA (pending).
2022: A. Mandrona & P.Patterson (Eds). Canadian Art Teacher, 17.2. https://csea-scea.ca/3d-flip-book/canadian-art-teacher-vol-17-no-2-2021/
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Financial assistance provided by the Manitoba Arts Council.