Kit Grauer

The Rhizomatic Relations of A/r/tography

A/r/tography is a form of practice-based research steeped in the arts and education. Alongside other arts-based, arts-informed and aesthetically defined methodologies, a/r/tography is one of many emerging forms of inquiry that refer to the arts as a way of re-searching the world to enhance understanding. Yet, it goes even further by recognizing the educative potential of teaching and learning as acts of inquiry. Together, the arts and education complement, resist, and echo one another through rhizomatic relations of living inquiry. In this article, we demonstrate rhizomatic relations in an ongoing project entitled “The City of Richgate” where meanings are constructed within ongoing a/r/tographic inquiries described as collective artistic and educational praxis. Rhizomatic relations do not seek conclusions and therefore, neither will this account. Instead, we explore a/r/tographical situations as methodological spaces for furthering living inquiry. In doing so, we invite the art education community to consider rhizomatic relations performed through a/r/tography as a politically informed methodology of situations.

Beliefs of Preservice Teachers toward Art Education

The purpose of this case study was to discover and categorize the beliefs toward art education that prospective teachers bring to teacher certification programs and how or whether these beliefs change. We need to better understand the interaction between what student teachers believe and what and how they teach. An analysis of the teacher education literature on subject matter knowledge, beliefs and art education forms the theoretical framework.Using the Eisner Art Education Belief Index (Eisner, 1973) survey data from the total population of the teacher education candidates in a one year, post-degree, teacher certification program, were combined with interviews and observations, during and post practicum, of a smaller sample of four elementary generalist preservice teachers and four secondary art specialist preservice teachers. Subject matter knowledge and beliefs of preservice teachers toward art education form a dynamic and evolving relationship. Four main themes emerged from the data which led to conc...

Medicine Wheel Imag(in)ings: Exploring Holistic Curriculum Perspectives

Here is a call that yearns for what has been separated and one that also rings with a joy at the resounding rhythm of life. Possibilities are all around us— the empty, the full, and all that lies between— the choices among them are ours, a choice to wake up, a choice to hear the call of our own heartbeat. Surely we recognize the rhythm, the spirit that animates our deepest places and pulsates through every now moment, that rhythm which vitalizes our being from its prison of numbness. But do we feel that rhythm? Do we hear that call?

Artist-Teacher Partnerships in Learning: The in/between Spaces of Artist-Teacher Professional Development.

Artist‐in‐residence programs frequently act as professional development initiatives for teachers. Little understanding of the relational nature of artist‐teacher learning exists. In this article, we discuss Learning Through The Arts ™, describing conflicting expectations as artists and teachers learn from each other, and explore the relationship of artists’ growth and learning to teacher development. Using participants’ narratives, we illustrate existing tensions and challenges for visual art education. We present the need to open spaces for artists to construct new understandings of themselves as teachers in relation to themselves as artists, and for teachers to develop artist selves alongside their teacher selves.

A/r/tographic Collaboration as Radical Relatedness

In this paper the authors examine a/r/tographical collaboration in a community-engaged research study investigating immigrant understandings of home and place. The study, The City of Richgate, involves a complex collaboration between community members, community organizations, educational institutions, and a research team comprising artist-educators. The study crosses border zones of cultural, ethnic, geographic, institutional, public, private, and disciplinary boundaries, reflecting the ever-changing character of postmodern reality. In this paper the authors reflect critically and theoretically on the lived experience of radical relatedness found within the complex collaboration, particularly within the a/r/tographic research team. This offers a qualitative methodology of radical collaboration applicable to many fields of inquiry in the academy, art world, and community.

Lingering in liminal spaces: a/r/tography as living inquiry in a language arts class

In this article, we explore how we live among students and teachers as a/r/tographers and how we become creatively immersed in the wholeness of the classroom experience as a result. This is in contrast to our initial intentions of using ethnographic techniques and qualitative methods. As we began our project, it became apparent that another lens would be more appropriate for our study: this lens was a/r/tography. Exploring our research processes and practices as relational acts and ruminating on our ways of being in the academy as a/r/tographers, we explore the liminal spaces between the use of a/r/tography as practice‐based research and the use of ethnographic techniques, as qualitative research, and consider how shifting amid these realms can re/shape research in new and innovative ways.

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:

Richgate: Transforming Public Spaces through Community-Engaged Art

Our research involves community-engaged arts practices that explore issues of identity, place, displacement, community, and the changing nature of geography within the city of Richmond. It focuses on the expansion of processes and events that give landscape a sense of place in ways that resonate with lived experiences and cultural traditions.

Art Education Policy in Canada.

(1996). Art Education Policy in Canada. Arts Education Policy Review: Vol. 97, No. 6, pp. 15-22.