Monthly Mentor

Natalie C. Jones (February)
Each month, a different member is the guest writer for the NAEA Monthly Mentor Blog. Natalie C. Jones is an artist, small business owner, and the director of education at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture. She has 10 years of experience working as an art teacher and teaching artist throughout the east coast and the Midwest. Click "GO" to read her full bio.

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Thursday 10.31.19

Happy Halloween!

By Aaron Knochel

I wanted to close out my October month of blogging for the NAEA Mentor Blog by showing a little bit of the work that I do. Most of the month I have been trying to talk through conceptions of curricula and disciplinarity in art education, so it seems appropriate to close out the month looking at how I put this into practice.

My work at the ADRI focuses on assistive technologies and digital fabrication. I use fabrication techniques, such as 3-D printing, to explore boundaries of digital and creative practice. I’ve written about crowdsourcing assistive technologies for children with disabilities in Art Education. These boundary shifting fabrication techniques pursue design solutions that enable, empower, and destabilize notions of “normal” in built environments, including but not limited to the exploration of prosthetics that enable art making and expanding art education curricula.

Research has shown that the majority of entry-level digital fabrication occurs within makerspaces. However, the same research discusses that, while the spectacle of the 3D printing process often lures users to the various systems, users may maintain only a superficial or passing interest in the technology if not encouraged to experiment. While makerspaces have been shown to excite communities of makers, there are few studies that assess whether or not such makerspaces sustain user’s initial spectacle-driven fascination into learning and engagement with STEAM disciplines. To explore this curricular spectacle of makerspaces and 3D printing, I’ve been working on developing a project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) creating mobile makerspaces or what we call M.A.K.E. 3D (Mobile Atelier for Kinesthetic Education, 3D). See more info at https://sites.psu.edu/mobilemakerspace/

A recent project that I have been working on pushes further the role of digital fabrication, iterative methodologies such as design thinking, and critical practices in art education to explore pubic space and the role of speculative design. Similar to projects like the Monument Lab, we’ve been exploring what role the novice architect can play in speculative design practices that are driven by social justice and community engaged values. The action research project is broadly called SpaceMakers and has had several iterations working with youth and college students.

Just last week I gave a short workshop in the Borland Project Space as a part of the larger Art Education faculty and student exhibition and schedule of talks and workshops called Art at the Center: Transdisciplinary Creativity. After a brief slideshow, I asked a group of art education graduate student to propose designs for the rebuilding of Notre Dame. After the tragic fire this past summer and the ensuing conversation around what should be the new life of Notre Dame, we engaged in a simple sketching exercise to explore ideas of what matters now for Notre Dame. How should the billion+ euros be spent to resurrect it as a tourist attraction? a symbol of French culture? a relic of religious community? How might the destruction of a building that will never be finished allow for a re-visioning of its cultural and social values? To challenge the students and myself, I asked them to consider how we might suggest a speculative design that synthesizes UNESCO’s sustainable development goals to guide rebuilding goals. See more educator resources about these goals at https://en.unesco.org/themes/education/sdgs/material

These are just some threads and I look forward to hearing more from you and what you are doing to build our discipline. Or take it apart.

Happy Halloween and thanks to NAEA for allowing me to share this work with you.

- AK

Tuesday 10.29.19

Art & Design Research Incubator @ Penn State

By Aaron Knochel

The artists and researchers that I have focused on so far from the ADRI have been from the field of the visual arts and art education, but the ADRI is representative of a wide range of artistic practices. What’s exciting about this context is the opportunity to reflect on how the arts serve as forms of knowledge production (or research), but also to reflect on the nuances of the arts broadly defined in this production. The visual arts offer a range of methodologies and opportunities, but when you consider theater, dance, and music that range of impact only gets stronger. Here are a couple of ADRI affiliated faculty that come from other art forms:

Michele Dunleavy, Associate Professor of Dance, School of Theatre
ADRI Bio
School of Theater Bio
https://www.micheledunleavy.com/

Dunleavy has choreographed and performed extensively in a variety of dance forms including tap, jazz, and modern, and her choreography has been presented by arts organizations in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, NYC, Maryland, and West Virginia. Her practice and choreography explore site specificity and ethnographic methods in relation to labor and history.

Check out this video of her ongoing series Steel Valley Rhythms performed at the ADRI space https://vimeo.com/245809223

William Doan, ADRI Director, Professor of Theatre, Artist-in-residence in the College of Nursing, 2019-20 Penn State Laureate
ADRI Bio
School of Theater Bio
https://williamjdoan.com/

Doan project work includes performances, drawings, and publications. His multimedia solo stage shows focus on issues that are deeply personal and highly relatable involving storytelling and drawings that reflect on family trauma and living with anxiety. His graphic narrative work has appeared multiple times in The Annals of Internal Medicine/Graphic Medicine.

Check out this video of his process for The Anxiety Project https://youtu.be/iLI05DndotY

- AK

Monday 10.28.19

Art & Design Research Incubator @ Penn State

By Aaron Knochel

The ADRI has attracted a wide range of researchers and artists sharing their work. As reviewed in the last post, folks like Kim Powell are exploring walking as a form of inquiry and Eduardo Navas working to develop visualization tools to understand remix practices. I’d like to highlight in this post a few more affiliated faculty:

Cristin Millett, Professor of Art
ADRI Bio
SoVA Bio
http://cristin-millett.com

Millet’s work explores the boundaries of human biology through sculpture, installation, and contemporary cultural critique of societal issues surrounding reproduction and gender identity. From immersive environments to established sculptural form in bronze casting and marble carving, Millett asks challenging questions about conceptions of the female body now and into the future of artificial conception.

Check out this great video of her process: https://youtu.be/t0MJBA-YEDQ

Steven Rubin, Associate Professor of Art
ADRI Bio
SoVA Bio
https://www.stevenrubin.com/

Rubin uses photography as an investigative tool to try to understand the human experience. Part documentarian, part portraitist, Rubin’s work often engages with communities in the midst of uncertainty. Whether it be in the midst of  an environmental catastrophe of shale fracking in Pennsylvania or the daily realities of uncertain health care resources in Sierre Leone for those that have diabetes, Rubin uses the camera as a mirror to reflect the fraught daily survival for many people around the world.

Check out this recent book project with poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf

-AK

Thursday 10.24.19

Art & Design Research Incubator @ Penn State

By Aaron Knochel

The Art & Design Research Incubator (ADRI) operates like a water cooler for arts-based research in that artists at Penn State become affiliated with the space and show work, share research, and pursue funding for their projects. Of the affiliated faculty, I wanted to highlight a few from the Penn State School of Visual Arts (SoVA) to showcase their work in my ongoing discussion of art and art education as a (trans)disciplinary space of practice.

Eduardo Navas, Associate Research Professor
School of Visual Arts bio
ADRI bio
Google Scholar

Navas teaches in our Digital Arts and Design program with a focus on new media and media studies. His research focuses on cultural analytics, digital humanities, and remix as a form of cultural practice and theory. He maintains an excellent website with his many activities at http://navasse.net

As a part of his project work at ADRI he developed a data visualization project Remix[ed] Data Viz

Kimberly Powell, Associate Professor of Education, Art Education, and Asian Studies
School of Visual Arts bio
ADRI bio

Dr. Powell is a fellow art educator and an established scholar in art education. Her focus in the ADRI is on sensory ethnography and the methodology of walking that illicit stories, experiences, and sensation that are relevant as research about people and places. In a Penn State News story, Powell states,

“I’m interested in the ways in which walking can be a form of inquiry into the world,” she says. “Walking as storytelling and place-making, how the simple movement of walking affects and produces people’s thinking about their experiences.”

More information about walking as a form of inquiry can be found at https://walkinglab.org/

From remix theory to walking as place-based inquiry, Navas and Powell offer really multimodal practices of research and production. In my next post I will look at two artists that come from more traditional studio spaces, sculpture and photo, but who explore material connections and social engagement with arts that go deep into thematic explorations.

- AK

Friday 10.18.19

Art & Design Research Incubator @ Penn State

By Aaron Knochel 

Transdisciplinary. Knowledge formation. Embracing complexity. Investigatory and constructionist.

Engaging learners as embodied problem solvers

What does it mean to value disciplinary crossover and specialization? What is the moment of knowledge formed and how does formation fold back to inform us about the world that we live in to make vital decisions, nurture realization, and cultivate wonder? How do we embrace indeterminate problems in systems that thrive on determinacy and a fixed sense of passing and failing? These are the complexities of the disciplinary body that we’ve been stitching together.

On any given day, these types of questions might not make the top ten. Instead, we have a sink to fix. An IEP to develop and implement. A parent to call. However, when we look into the next semester, organize a materials closet, take the time to plan with a team of colleagues about curriculum, these may be the questions that begin to creep in.

And then again, perhaps inquiry in. art education comes back to the art. The impulse to find inspiration in the world. The creative drive. The instinct of materials in our hands, eyes, noses, and breadth. There is a practice that is at the root of a discipline.

I wanted to share some of the places and people that motivate my drive for inquiry, investigation, and bringing together a layered practice of making with colleagues at my home institution of Penn State. As a large research university there is no end to the types of work going on here. To tap into these immense landscapes, the College of Arts & Architecture has formed the Art & Design Research Incubator (ADRI).

Operating within the College of Arts and Architecture Research Office, ADRI provides seed funding, technical support, and workspace to high-impact arts and design research projects that, although often in their initial stages, have a strong probability of attracting future external funding. In keeping with goals outlined in the College’s strategic plan, ADRI projects are typically collaborative and interdisciplinary in nature, push methodological boundaries, link research and teaching, make innovative use of technology, engage with university-wide research initiatives and priorities, and have the potential to garner national and international recognition. ADRI also coordinates and hosts a range of programming designed to foster and support innovative arts research and its broad dissemination (ADRI, About).

With faculty from across the arts, from theater to visual arts, ADRI creates a dynamic space to explore the kinds of project work that may help to inspire our thinking about the arts mutating new disciplinary bodies. In the next few posts, we’ll take a closer look at the work going on.

-AK

Wednesday 10.16.19

Situating Art Education as a Discipline

By Aaron Knochel

I’ve described what connective tissues are available within the transdisciplinary body of a discipline or its manifestation in an exquisite corpse curriculum. After reviewing these connections, it might be useful to zoom out a bit to position these connections within a larger discourse of art education as a situated discipline itself.

Art education has a long history of implementation in coordination with other disciplines whether it is through arts integration or interdisciplinary curriculum. As a part of the early 20th century progressive movement in education, art education was promoted within education for its significance to experiential processes (Dewey, 1934) and for the relevance of creative expression to student’s lives (Winslow, 1939). Liora Bresler (1995) describes a resurgence of arts integration in the 1960s and 1970s through Henry Broudy’s (1972) focus on aesthetic education as increasing imaginative perception and Elliot Eisner’s (1982) advocacy for arts learning as expanding the cognitive capacity of learners through the affective and sensorial. In the 1990s, the field of art education began asserting more of its own disciplinarity through Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE) to gain status as a part of the core curriculum (Dobbs, 1992; Eisner, 1988).

The opening of the 21st century brought critiques of Discipline Based Art Education coming from visual culture studies perspectives (Duncum, 2001; 2009; Freedman & Stuhr, 2004) and an increased dynamism of how the field is conceptualized “through/with/by/for/ of/in/beyond/as” (Carpenter & Tavin, 2010) a disciplinary coherence. Ironically, this dynamism appears to proliferate within an ever more burdensome era of national standards, narrowing budgets and high-stakes testing. These acts of arts integration as interdisciplinary conceptualizations, whether efforts of cognitive translation, assessing more global impacts of arts perception or understanding experiential impacts of the arts, have often been performed under threats to the field. The need to be more standardized in an era of standardization, the need to access cultural cache and funding support through the tumult of public sentiment, or the need to stay relevant to the diverse methodologies of contemporary art making, all exert pressure on art education practitioners effecting curriculum and understandings of what it entails. One sentiment that continues to be true is Elliot Eisner’s (1999) warning to the field in bending to the pressures of public persuasion:

It strikes me that we do the arts no service when we try to make their case by touting their contributions to other fields. When such contributions become priorities, the arts become handmaidens to ends that are not distinctively artistic and in the process undermine the value of art's unique contributions to the education of the young. (p. 158)

Current calls for arts-integrated curriculum could most certainly be guilty of some of these scrambles for funding and relevancy, but I would advocate that in addition to these very real pressures there be an opportunity to actualize a resurgence of the fundamental importance of making to all performances of learning regardless of the discipline.

I offer the following presuppositions for arts-integrated curriculum that when taken as a foundation may allow the arts to evade Eisner’s (1999) pejorative “handmaiden” status:

  • Transdisciplinary (values disciplinary knowledge crossover, intersection, and specialization)

  • Forming knowledge (understands the different types of questions that disciplines ask and the value of multiple ways of knowing)

  • Embraces complexity (sees the world as having complex, unpredictable, and indeterminate problems without singular solutions)

  • Investigatory and constructionist (engages learners as embodied problem solvers through the process of making and iterative methodologies)

 

I am careful here to not forget Glatthorn, Boschee, Whitehead, & Boschees’ (2015) distinction between prescriptive and descriptive curricular theories. In my suggestive curricular analysis, it is absolutely possible that through my soft prescription of the significance of my connections may in fact get turned on its head if an actual descriptive analysis of for example a STEAM curriculum were to apply these connections.

Nonetheless, in the posts to come I will try to put these connections to work with some suggestions of case studies that we might consider.

- AK

References

Bresler, L. (1995). The subservient, co-equal, affective, and social integration styles and their implications for the arts. Arts Education Policy Review, 96(5), 31-37.

Broudy, H. (1972). Enlightened cherishing. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Carpenter, B. S. & Tavin, K. (2010). Art education beyond reconceptualization: Enacting curriculum through/with/by/for/ of/in/beyond/as visual culture, community, and public pedagogy. In E. Malewski (Ed.), Curriculum Studies Handbook  (pp.  244-262). New York, NY: Routledge.

Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York, NY: Perigee.

Dobbs, S. M. (1992). The DBAE handbook: An overview of discipline-based art education. Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED349253.pdf

Duncum, P. (2001). Visual culture: Developments, definitions, and directions for art education. Studies in Art Education, 42(2), 101-112.

Duncum, P. (2009). Visual culture in art education, circa 2009. Visual Arts Research, 35(1), 64-75.

Eisner, E. W. (1982). Cognition and curriculum. New York, NY: Longman.

Eisner, E. W. (1988). Structure and magic in discipline-based art education. Journal of Art & Design Education, 7(2), 185-196.

Eisner, E. W. (1999). Getting down to basics in arts education. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 33(4), 145.

Freedman, K. & Stuhr, P. (2004). Curriculum changes for the 21st century: Visual culture in art education. In E. Eisner & M. Day (Eds.) Handbook of research and policy in art education (pp. 815-828). Reston, VA: NAEA.

Glatthorn, A., Boschee, F., Whitehead, B. & Boschee, B. (2015). Curriculum leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Winslow, L. (1939) The integrated school art program. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Tuesday 10.15.19

Discipline as Body (Parts) IV

By Aaron Knochel

So far in stitching together the disciplinary body, we have covered skills (measurement, observation, & peer review) and dispositions (creativity, making, iterative methodologies, & collaboration). In this final post of the exquisite corpse curriculum I’d like to focus on larger themes that guide connections across disciplines.

Investigating Materiality

The rise of the academic field of material culture studies, combining anthropology, archeology and art, in the 1990’s has brought about a more exact focus on the nature of material both in their histories and their discourses. The term “materiality” indicates a theoretical approach that focuses on physical things as one starting point for building an understanding of thought and behavior (White 2009). Materiality has also been defined as to its properties to do something, or what science and technology studies scholar Andrew Pickering (1995) calls “material performativity” (p. 7). Pickering (1995) states

Scientists, as human agents, maneuver in a field of material agency, constructing machines that, as I shall say, variously capture, seduce, download, recruit, enroll, or materialize that agency, taming and domesticating it, putting it at our service, often in the accomplishment of task that are simply beyond the capabilities of naked human minds and bodies, individually or collectively. (p. 7)

So there is a world of material agencies doing things in the world, but that doing is never alone: for example, the digital materiality of something like software is not tangible matter, but rather its material agency to interact with its human counterpart accounts for a certain character of materiality. This interaction between the material as thing and performance as doing something makes it important as a way to follow material agencies in ways that engage, disrupt, and conjure modes of meaning.

9) Engaging Matters of Concern

Common to issues of discovery and innovation in science and the arts are the ways that they enter a public debate. Importantly, public discourse is often fraught with many contributing factors that go well beyond the facts, and engages discovery in complex assemblages of belief, regulation, and cultural difference.  Actor Network theorist Bruno Latour (2005) structures this public discourse without unity in his discussion of matters of fact versus matters of concern. Matters of fact are characterized by the rigor of scientific fact: an object or hypothesis has been tested and supported through further tests. A matter of fact is a closing down of investigation, a singularity, and an empirical certainty. However, Latour asserts that empiricism is not so certain; objects and matters of fact become more complicated the closer you get to them so that “the empirical multiplicity of former ‘natural’ agencies overflows the narrow boundary of matters of fact” (Latour, 2005, p.111). Innovations cannot be reduced to facts, but instead are multiplied as matters of concern. For Latour, matters of concern “while highly uncertain and loudly disputed, these real, objective, atypical and above all, interesting agencies are taken not exactly as object but rather as gathering” (p. 114). To see innovation as a matter of concern is to acknowledge the hybrid status of disciplinary knowledge as being situated within multiple disciplinary spaces simultaneously. Objective fact becomes an assemblage of coding and decoding that ultimately can have significant impact on how disciplines assert knowledge and engage inquiry.

10) Articulating Social Practice

Social practice is a form of participatory art engaged in social reconstructionism or a philosophy focused on achieving social change. Social practice has raised important questions about the role of the artist in society. These social-practice works are critiqued from a range of viewpoints: “Should they be evaluated for the social changes they produce, for the elements of performance they incorporate, or for the esthetic qualities of the environments in which they take place?” (Miranda, 2014, para. 21). Parallel to these developments in contemporary art, starting in the 1990’s, initiatives in engineering education have sought to incorporate a socially situated engineering workplace (ASEE, 1994), to better incorporate social contexts and stakeholders (Bucciarelli, 1994), and to contribute to a more just society (Baillee & Catalano, 2009). What is significant to both these developments in engineering and contemporary art is that there is a common thread in applying the range of aptitudes, skillsets, worldviews, methods, and epistemologies that come from any disciplinary position to a socially-engaged practice that looks to better society. Social practice as a connection between disciplines opens up a collaborative approach that can have a positive impact on “attaining social and ecological justice” (Guyette et, al. 2014, p 19).

-AK

References

American Society for Engineering Education [ASEE]. (1994). The green report: Engineering education for a changing world. Retrieved from www.asee.org/papersand-publications/publications/The-Green-Report.pdf

Baillee, C. & Catalano, G. (2009). Engineering and society: Working towards social justice. [Synthesis Lectures on Engineers, Technology and Society series]. San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool.

Bucciarelli, L. L. (1994). Designing engineers. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Guyotte, K. W., Sochacka, N. W., Constantino, T. E., Walther, J., & Kellam, N. N. (2014). STEAM as social practice: Cultivating creativity in transdisciplinary spaces. Art Education, 67(6), 12–19.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Miranda, C. A. (2014, April 7). How the art of social practice is changing the world, one row house at a time. Artnews. Retrieved from http://www.artnews.com/2014/04/07/art-of-social-practice-is-changing-the-world-one-row-house-at-a-time/

Pickering, A. (1995). The mangle of practice: Time, agency, and science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

White, C. (2009). The materiality of individuality: Archaeological studies of individual lives. New York, NY: Springer Science.

 

Note: This series of blog posts is adapted from a much lengthier chapter for an edited book. Email me and I can send you the full copy or you can find it yourself:

Knochel, A. (2019). An exquisite corpse of curriculum: Transdisciplinarity, STEAM and Art Education [Chinese trans.]. In Y.Cooper (Ed., Trans.), On 21st Century Arts and Culture Education. Taipei, Taiwan: Hungyeh Publishing Co.

Wednesday 10. 9.19

Discipline as Body (Parts) III

We’ve covered the first three proposals for discipinary connections in those that refer to skills (#1-3): observation, measurement, and peer review and referentiality. Now let’s take a look at the next four which I refer to as habits or dispositions (#4-7):

4) Creativity

Creativity is a difficult idea to define, but its value is significant to understanding how individuals create novel and appropriate solutions to problems (Sternberg, 1999). Creativity has both social and individual functions, but the ability to play with concepts driven by strategies of inversion, juxtaposition, and re-patterning until something new emerges cannot be easily couched within any one discipline. Creativity is an important disposition through which students can establish new connection and a flow of ideas that is important to inhabiting transdisciplinary inquiry.

5) Making

Making provides a focus in educational settings on the active construction of things in the learning process. While the concept and performance of making is something that is inherently productive in the art room, project-based work has not always been the standard in STEM. Computer scientist, mathematician, and educator Seymour Papert’s idea of constructionism is an important concept in propelling project-based work in STEM subjects. Constructionism adds to constructivism by theorizing people learn most effectively when they actively make “external and sharable artifacts” as part of the learning process (Kafai & Resnick, 1996, p. 4). Constructionism has had important impact on fields such as mathematics and computer science in putting project work at the center of learning activities and this makes making an important part of all subjects.

6) Iterative methodologies

An iterative methodology emphasizes process and involves different stages of divergence and convergence in exploring solutions to an inquiry.  Design thinking is a good example of an iterative methodology that is not a singular approach to design or representative of a protocol for any one profession, although it has been closely aligned with creative and artistic processes (Bequette & Bequette, 2012). Rather, design thinking references a process of problem solving that takes a non-linear pathway through stages of define, research, ideate, prototype, choose, implement, and learn (Simon, 1969). While there are slight variations in these descriptive stages, centrally design thinking is focused on an iterative process of what Robert McKim (1973) calls “express-test-cycle.” From engineering to graphic design to painting, iterative methodologies can provide a core process by which scientists and artists pursue inquiry.

7) Collaboration

Collaboration is a process of working together that values group dynamics, human interaction, and the co-construction of ideas and outcomes. While the role of collaboration can be seen in the sciences and the arts, important to this description is the role that collaboration may play across disciplines. The transdisciplinary learning space is one that is necessarily collaborative (Guyette et. al., 2014), but there is also an interesting set of assets that arise from intermixing disciplinary collaborators that may reflect back upon their disciplinary spaces as well. For example, artists may gain from having a new world of materials and methods to play in such as bioart or sonic art, and scientists may benefit from increased communication skills and an unexpected range of new ideas for inquiry (Kieniewicz, 2013). Importantly, deep collaborations may so thoroughly blur the boundaries between art and science that there emerges what Arthur Miller (2012) calls a “third culture.” Miller asks “can there ever be art-influenced science or, better still, works combining art and science, making images that reflect a new aesthetic - a third culture, in which art and science fuse?” (para. 13). Assuredly, this third culture can only emerge by negotiation and interaction that comes with collaboration.

In the next post we’ll review larger themes (#8-10) that help to connect new and strange disciplinary bodies.

-AK

References

Bequette, J. W. & Bequette, M. B. (2012). A place for ART and DESIGN education in the STEM conversation. Art Education, 65(2), 40–47.

Guyotte, K. W., Sochacka, N. W., Constantino, T. E., Walther, J., & Kellam, N. N. (2014). STEAM as social practice: Cultivating creativity in transdisciplinary spaces. Art Education, 67(6), 12–19.

Kafai, Y. B. & Resnick, M. (Eds.). (1996). Constructionism in practice: Designing, thinking, and learning in a digital world. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Kieniewicz, J. (2013, June 19). Why art and science? PLOS Blogs. Retrieved from http://blogs.plos.org/attheinterface/2013/06/19/why-art-and-science/

McKim, R. (1973). Experiences in visual thinking. New York, NY: Brooks/Cole Publishing Co.

Miller, A. I. (2012, October 25). Fearless symmetries. Times Higher Education. Retrieved from http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/421555.article

Simon, H. (1969). The sciences of the artificial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Sternberg, R. J. (Ed.). (1999). Handbook of creativity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

 

Note: This series of blog posts is adapted from a much lengthier chapter for an edited book. Email me and I can send you the full copy or you can find it yourself:

Knochel, A. (2019). An exquisite corpse of curriculum: Transdisciplinarity, STEAM and Art Education [Chinese trans.]. In Y.Cooper (Ed., Trans.), On 21st Century Arts and Culture Education. Taipei, Taiwan: Hungyeh Publishing Co.

Monday 10. 7.19

Discipline as Body (Parts) II

By Aaron Knochel

In my last post I was musing about the emergent and playful quality of the exquisite corpse as a metaphor in creating new kinds of disciplinary bodies. STEAM, SEAD, transdisciplinarity—whatever it is that you are combining, I posit that the essence of possibility, or emergence, is the key to lively, relevant and responsive curriculum. Of course, what the exquisite corpse curriculum also needs is connection.

How are we stitching this Frankenstein together?

In order for STEAM to perform these layered pathways of the curriculum, the following is a list of proposals for STEAM connections. I offer the list in an intentional order to suggest skills (#1-3), habits or dispositions (#4-7), and larger themes (#8-10), but acknowledge that the suggested ascension of their importance may be out of proportion when taken in the context of a given instance of curriculum.

Let’s start with skills,

1) Observation

Observation is a core performance in STEAM. From observing the live figure model in a drawing class to noting the growth patterns of crystal formations in chemistry, many of the learning activities in a range of STEAM curricula rely on observation within their singular disciplinary spaces. Observation is important sensorial and technological data gathering that impacts modes of inquiry and project creation that continues to have a foundational place in the transdisciplinary learning of STEAM.

2) Measurement

Measurement is concerned with issues of quantity, scale and relationality. Many areas of STEAM curricula rely on measurement to build project work, improve outcomes, and understand relationships. Like observation, measurement continues to maintain prominence within the transdisciplinary learning of STEAM.

3) Peer Review & Referentiality

Established systems of peer review and referentiality are a foundation of many academic fields of knowledge, but the pathways of how these systems of feedback operate can be quite different. The central idea is that concepts are vetted within collectives creating feedback loops that produce criticality and refinement. These feedback loops actively build records of knowledge and experience through the sourcing of prior discovery, building upon established knowledge, and seeing nuance and difference in previously understood quantities and qualities. An anonymous peer review of a research manuscript and a critique of a portfolio of artwork may appear as very different modes of feedback, but they both embrace the importance of review, feedback, and critique in building a realm of ideas.

In the next post we’ll tackle habits or dispositions (#4-7).

-AK

Note: This series of blog posts is adapted from a much lengthier chapter for an edited book. Email me and I can send you the full copy or you can find it yourself:

Knochel, A. (2019). An exquisite corpse of curriculum: Transdisciplinarity, STEAM and Art Education [Chinese trans.]. In Y.Cooper (Ed., Trans.), On 21st Century Arts and Culture Education. Taipei, Taiwan: Hungyeh Publishing Co.

Thursday 10. 3.19

Discipline as Body (Parts) I

By Aaron Knochel 

In many art classrooms across the United States, at some point in the year the art teacher will guide her students in creating an exquisite corpse. The exquisite corpse, part game and part art-making activity, was used by Surrealist artists in the early 20th century. Central to the exquisite corpse is that you have a collective submitting parts that build into an emergent whole. In drawing, a paper is folded as many times as there are group members and each member draws on their section making sure that the drawing picks up marks on the edge of the drawing above and leaves marks that invade the next section so that the next group member knows where to connect their new addition to the emerging form. Emergence in this sense is the resulting form that is created from separate parts and ultimately establishes something new: a form that cannot be reduced to those parts. Significant to the exquisite corpse is a wholeness that emerges from parts articulated through a structure, for example a folded piece of drawing paper, and transformed through an unfolding via connections at the crease of that paper.

Exquisite corpse

In the following blog posts, I will use this creative process of the exquisite corpse and its emergent production as a metaphor to gain insight into the connections that may be possible in curriculum between science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines and art education or what is referred to as STEAM (“A” standing for Art). 

***aside***

This set up is already problematic. Is science really a discipline? Technology? Really!?! In the taxonomic hierarchy of knowledge isn’t that a bit higher in the ranking. It’s kind of like calling a wolf a dog because they are both in the genus Canis without any further clarification, but let’s go with it…

Moving on.

***aside over***

It is the emergent quality, the essence of unknown form, that makes the exquisite corpse a rich metaphor for drawing together disciplines into new bodies. Importantly, the exquisite corpse curriculum provides a playful structure in need of building connections that may aid in articulating the emergent, new whole. If STEAM initiatives are going to have any relevance to 21st century education it must have both this structure of connection and essence of possibility.

Anyone out there have any STEAM examples that capture this sense of emergence and connection?

- AK

Note: This series of blog posts is adapted from a much lengthier chapter for an edited book. Email me and I can send you the full copy or you can find it yourself:

Knochel, A. (2019). An exquisite corpse of curriculum: Transdisciplinarity, STEAM and Art Education [Chinese trans.]. In Y.Cooper (Ed., Trans.), On 21st Century Arts and Culture Education. Taipei, Taiwan: Hungyeh Publishing Co.