Kelly W. Guyotte

Steam as Social Practice: Cultivating Creativity in Transdisciplinary Spaces.

12 In the wake of the economic recession and increasing competition from developing economies, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education has emerged as a national priority. To art educators, however, the pervasiveness and apparent exclusivity of STEM can be viewed as another instance of art education being relegated to the margins of curriculum (Greene, 1995). Taking a different perspective, we find it helpful to look past STEM as a vehicle for promoting economic growth and international competitiveness and view it as a means toward overcoming the compartmentalized disciplinary approach to education (Holley, 2009). Considered in this way, STEM is about collaboration. In an educational setting, this means taking subjects that have previously been taught in isolation and weaving them into an integrated curriculum—a transdisciplinary endeavor that has the potential to lead to exciting and unexpected outcomes that can transcend the traditional goals of disciplinary education to address questions of social practice. Recently there have been calls to expand STEM education to include the arts and design, transforming STEM into STEAM in the K-20 classroom (Maeda, 2013). Like STEM, STEAM education stresses making connections between disciplines that were previously perceived as disparate. This has been conceptualized in different ways, such as: focusing on the creative design process that is fundamental to engineering and art (Bequette & Bequette, 2012); emphasizing the role of creative and synthetic thinking to enhance student interest and learning in science and mathematics; and showing the value in exploring the science and mathematics that underpin different artistic techniques (Wynn & Harris, 2012). In this article, we describe how a collaboration between art education, engineering, and landscape architecture led us to conceptualize STEAM as a social practice that reflects concerns for community engagement and ecological sustainability. Figure 1. An engineering student explains how art offers a different modality of ‘doing’ in a Transdisciplinary Design Studio. OOur nation’s success depends on strengthening America’s role as the world’s engine of discovery and innovation... And that leadership tomorrow depends on how we educate our students today—especially in science, technology, engineering, and math [STEM].

Is This Research? Productive Tensions in Living the (Collaborative) Autoethnographic Process

We came to collaborative autoethnography quite by accident. In this methodological paper, we consider our experiences as we embraced a new methodology, taught and researched collaboratively in an interdisciplinary space, and grappled with how we might nestle our work in a journal with no history of publishing autoethnographies—all while becoming awakened to critiques against and arguments for autoethnographic research. Our discussions are presented along with portions of our lengthy e-mail correspondences written during our research process and center on two prominent facets of our research experience: interdisciplinarity and the research process. Entangled in our methodological unpacking, we highlight “Productive Tensions” that emerged from both our collaboration and reviewer feedback that is presented alongside our discussion. Through seeing these tensions as productive, we argue that embracing diverse perspectives can serve to strengthen the depth of engagement, quality, and potential impact of (collaborative) autoethnographic research.

Artful Pedagogy: (En)Visioning the Unfinished Whole.

ABSTRACT The hum of florescent lights still drone quietly in the background just as they did in the high school art classrooms of the authors, only now they are teaching research methods and educational theory and practice in the academy, not sculpture, ceramics, drawing, or painting1 1 Occasionally we refer to Saras and Kellys experiences as high school art teachers and assistant professors. We find it important to note that the third author, Nicole, is a graduate student enrolled in the Art Therapy program at Florida State University, which is nestled in the Art Education Department.. Once high school art educators, drawn to teaching and learning with and through the arts, the vantage points of the authors have now shifted as they find themselves situated at two large research universities. In these higher education spaces the authors are once again finding ways to artfully engage in the reciprocal process of teaching and learning. Although the locations have changed, the authors still feel seduced by the world of art and all the possibilities therein.

Inquiry on the Sly: Playful Intervention as Philosophical Action

As an ongoing practice, work can never be fully accounted for or described. Furthermore, the notion of play is often situated in opposition to work in Western cultures—as though work and play cannot occur simultaneously or even within the same location. In this article, we engage in a bit of a quandary—how to make our playful actions visible while resisting the foreclosure that visibility often entails. As an attempt at exploring this question (among others), we invoke de Certeau’s conception of la perruque (“the wig”) as a playful mechanism for “working inquiry.” We overlay Certeau’s work with a Deleuzian-inspired orientation toward the excessive capacity of becoming to articulate our central argument: Through playful excess, the work of inquiry intervenes in normative processes of knowing and being. Such a disruption makes possible an indeterminate space in which inquiry and social justice work (as inquiry) might be differently enacted. This is the sly and playful action necessary for reconceiving a methodology-of-the-past into methodologies-of-the-immanent-now.

Cultivating critical game makers in digital game-based learning: learning from the arts

ABSTRACT Digital games have the potential of being a transformative tool for applying constructionist principles to learning within formal and informal learning settings. Unfortunately, most recent attention has focused on instructionist games. Connected gaming provides a tantalizing alternative approach by calling for the development of games that are both instructive and modifiable by learners. If game design is to be used as a pedagogical tool in this manner, emphasis should be placed on the concurrent development of critical makers. In this paper, we advance the notion of connected gaming through positing a conception of a critical maker. To accomplish this, we look to the arts as a domain where pedagogical approaches are in place from which the game-based learning community can draw insights from, along with an overview of the potential challenges and opportunities that may accompany any attempt to develop critical makers.

Seeing Experiences of Interdisciplinarity Through Student Artwork

This paper explores visual response methods as a representation of student learning in a college-level interdisciplinary curriculum integrating art and engineering. The visual response methods, specifically visual journals and postcards, are examples of authentic assessment and alternative data collection methods embedded in a mixed-methods (qualitative dominant) practitioner research case study. In the paper, we focus on different means for analyzing these visual responses (e.g., through hermeneutic analysis, document analysis, and narrative analysis) and deliberate the contribution of diverse analysis methods to the researchers’ understanding of students’ experiences of interdisciplinarity in this course.

Becoming Openly Faithful: Qualitative Pedagogy and Paradigmatic Slippage

In this article, the authors consider the implications of teaching and enacting inquiry as an indeterminate event, one that interrogates the assumptions of paradigmatic fixity with the hopes of being other than we are. To do so, the authors articulate a sense of openly faithful pedagogical practice, blurring the boundaries of the classroom and inquiry site and promoting the possibilities inherent in “slippage.” The indeterminacy invoked in slippage creates opportunities for students to (re)consider the assumptions they carry, to individually and collectively critique, interrogate, and/or productively embrace such assumptions in a recursive project of ongoing positioning. Slippage is considered within a framework of ethical responsibility, with the authors’ asking: What does it mean to nudge students to slip and how might we do this ethically? Slippage, then, is a productive act, one that creates movement and vibrations with new possibilities for becoming differently.

The Undecided Narratives of Becoming-Mother, Becoming-Ph.D.

Entering into both motherhood and the academy were decisions I did not take lightly. Those who know me well might call me indecisive, but it was with careful deliberation that I decided to become a mother and decided what I would do with my Ph.D. Using the concept of becoming, the feminist notion of the countermemory, and an emphasis on embodiment, this chapter interweaves my entangled narratives in, with, and outside of academia. In an institution that often neglects both the body and the unique experiences of women, here, I place value on the body (my body) and attempt to make visible my experiences as a woman who is both becoming-mother and becoming-Ph.D.