Juan Carlos Castro

Learning and Teaching Art: Through Social Media.

Social media practices are increasingly woven into the everyday lives of teens and adults, becoming a significant part of how they relate, know, and learn. In this article, I present findings from a design-based research study that explored how the dynamics of learning and teaching art shift through social media. Learning and teaching through social media has been described as a form of participatory culture, and I expand this further by drawing upon complexity thinking to better understand the reciprocal dynamics of learning and teaching. Learning art through social media can be characterized as encounters with difference, both in ideas and contexts. Subsequently, the dynamics of attention shifts and distributes across collectives. From this, I infer a conceptualization of the art teacher as an identity that is not fixed but one that shifts throughout social media.

Encounters with Difference: Community-Based New Media Programs and Practices

Community-based new media programs offer a distinct place of arts learning in the larger learning and media ecologies that teens and young adults navigate. As part of a 3-year case study of new media programs, the Gulf Islands Film and Television School (GIFTS) presents pedagogical and curricular insights that are relevant to both out-of- and in-school art programs. We suggest that the roles of the teacher and the learner are rapidly shifting as the curricular potential of new media emerges across educational landscapes. Community-based new media programs provide an occasion to create encounters for both producers and viewers to experience differing ways of knowing. At GIFTS, an emphasis on creativity, critical analysis, identity development, and voice are achieved through an intense immersion into film production. Community-based new media programs prompt encounters with difference, and in this case, we highlight the learning possibilities of time, place, new media, identity development, and teaching and learning. This inquiry suggests that through new media production, agency and empowerment become significant outcomes for both students and teachers.

Structuring Democratic Places of Learning: The Gulf Island Film and Television School.

It is not enough to merely teach ideas about democracy; they must be embodied in our art curricula and pedagogies. Places such as GIFTS offer insights into possibilities for structuring curricular and pedagogical experiences that use new media and foster democratic practice—communication, collaboration, and collective problem solving. Additionally, we argue that as new media practice, especially filmmaking and video arts, becomes more common in art classrooms (Szekely & Szekely, 2005), K-12 art educators can draw from the curricula and pedagogies from places like GIFTS. The Gul f I s land F i lm and Te lev i s ion School structuring democratic places of learning:

Understanding the (Im)mobilities of Engaging At-Risk Youth Through Art and Mobile Media

Teens in high school who have or are at-risk of dropping out of school confront a number of educational challenges. One of these challenges is the restricted mobility students face in school. Mobile media offers the potential to engage with art curricula inside or outside of the classroom. It also offers new ways of thinking about the role of mobility in learning and improving students’ sense of agency. In this study, we present our research with at-risk youth, who typically associated traditional schooling with a low sense of personal agency and spatial constraints. To judge by their responses (visual and verbal) to our mobile media visual art curriculum, the physical mobility afforded by mobile technology heightened their sense of agency and opened them to the possibility that learning might be a positive experience, and that they might want to be at school.

Amplifying Youth Cultural Practices by Engaging and Developing Professional Identity through Social Media

This chapter presents an analysis of the pedagogical and curricular methods used at the La Releve program at Maison Kekpart, a new media arts community program in Montreal, Quebec, established to support students (13-to 17-years-olds) who are at risk of dropping out of school. We specifically examine how social media is deployed to create a space that fosters positive and professional relationships between the artists-educators, youth, and the cultural environments. Our analysis demonstrated that the implementation of social media in an educational setting promoted ownership of the cultural objects produced by youth and further fostered engagement in their social and academic communities.

Cena e Computadores: fricções para uma pedagogia do teatro expandido

A nova perspectiva na arte contemporânea apresenta objetos artisticos que se utilizam do computador ou de maquinas analogicas para propor diferentes formas de apreciacao. No teatro, observamos uma forte tendencia no uso da tecnologia do video em cenarios, projecoes em corpos e performances interativas. Com uma perspectiva diferente, na pedagogia do teatro ainda trabalhamos com um forte vinculo a cena classica, baseando sua estruturacao em jogos teatrais. Este artigo pretende discutir o atual estado do teatro e tecnologia nas aulas de teatro do Brasil. Nossa questao central e baseada a articulacao entre a tendencia em arte contemporânea e as reais possibilidades em nossas aulas de teatro. Para nosso suporte teorico, nos articularemos as ideias de Philip Auslander , e sua atencao sobre o novo espectador imerso no contexto da midia digital, Michael Anderson e as atuais circunstâncias das tecnologias nas aulas de teatro, em dialogo com o pesquisadores da arte educacao brasileiros. Palavras chave: Pedagogia do Teatro, Arte Educacao e Formacao de Professores.

“This Allowed Us to See What Others Were Thinking”: Curriculum for Collective Learning in Art

Learning in Art rt educators can harness the collective intelligence and creativity of a class by focusing on the knowledge that emerges from the everyday connections and interactions among students (Davis & Sumara, 2006; Rolling, 2013). In this article, we argue for the importance and value of collective learning in the art classroom by presenting a lesson from our mobile media visual art curriculum entitled MonCoin (My Corner in French). MonCoin is a curricular research project that utilizes the mobility of mobile devices and the connectivity of social media to engage youth in their education (Castro, Lalonde, & Pariser, 2016; Lalonde, Castro, & Pariser, 2016; Pariser, Castro, & Lalonde, 2016). A key objective of our curriculum is to amplify the already existing peer learning networks and harness the collective intelligence of the class to expand the space of possibility in creative ideation. As such, our curriculum is not centred only on the teacher nor students, but rather the collective learning that emerges from interactions among students within the conditions established by the teacher. Ehsan Akbari, Juan Carlos Castro, Martin Lalonde, Lina Moreno, and David Pariser “This Allowed Us to See What Others Were Thinking”: Curriculum for Collective Learning in Art