Nadine M. Kalin

Complexity thinking mentorship: an emergent pedagogy of graduate research development

In this article we articulate a view of mentoring that extends into interactive and relational forms, fostering a redefinition of traditional roles and practices within mentor‐protégé models. From the perspectives of a senior administrator and two assistant professors, we revisit the mentoring spaces and relations within which we were engaged while working in an approach to arts‐based educational research known as a/r/tography during dissertation research projects. From our interconnected experiences, we propose a framing of the intersections between a/r/tographic research and mentorship informed by complexity thinking. We analyzed our work together while deconstructing the ways in which we have supported and unsettled each other. Through narrative inquiry we share reflections from dissertation research experiences, while also describing patterns of an emerging pedagogy of mentoring within higher education that we term complexity thinking mentorship. Borrowing from complexity theory, this conception of mentorship attends to the specific conditions of redundancy, decentralized control and diversity as being facilitative of evolving change and insight within graduate student research development.

Art's Pedagogical Paradox.

This article contributes to conversations concerning art education futures through engaging alternative relations between art, education, and democracy that mobilize education as art projects associated with the pedagogical turn as sites of liminality and paradox. An analysis of the art project, Pedagogical Factory, is used to outline connections and disconnections between contemporary artistic practices, antagonism, current neoliberal logics in education, and art education pedagogies. Educational art projects reveal core contradictions and exclusions within the constellation of education, art, and politics that should be a central concern for those currently engaged in art education.

The Poster and the Poster Critical Arts-Based Research as Dissensual Aesthetics

This essay articulates how arts-based inquiry acts as dissensual activity holding possibilities for the redistribution of the visible, audible, and sensible within knowledge production and dissemination associated with research. Rancière’s conceptions of politics and aesthetics are used to analyze expanded relations among art, inquiry, and democracy within the academic poster session format at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting. We share how our reconceptualized poster defied institutionalized structures under the control of neoliberal logics through strategies of disidentification. This subversion of form and structure identifies exclusions in how we operate, so that we might redistribute spaces and processes associated with academic conferences for alternatives to be heard, seen, spoken, and performed. For these reasons, our poster serves as a generative locale from which researchers may articulate ways for representing data, engaging audiences, and undertaking critical arts-based inquiry with others that might further the practices of democracy.

Stretching Out Art Education Beyond Cruel Optimism

O ne definition of insanity (often attributed to Albert Einstein) is doing the same thing over and over again but anticipating different results. How this notion of irrationality might be contextualized within art education and its related research is dependent on the ontologicaland epistemological possibilities and limits of the field at any given time. But it may also circle around a collective amnesia regarding the historical present, pragmatic blindness associated with a social science paradigm, or the socialization of the field toward ongoing cruel optimism. This commentary attempts to shed some light on the shadows associated with the latter, wherein there is an attachment to certain promises within preset conditions of possibility that ultimately do little to enable the transformation of present circumstances (Berlant, 2011). The realization that any efforts toward change may only prolong the status quo presents an impasse of alternative possibility for emergent methodologies of the now. From the research questions asked of the field, to the types of research deemed valid, to the definitions of success and desired topics, a conventional hylomorphic model of art education extends an ontology and empiricism that establishes fundamental limits and practices of the field. Aristotle’s hylomorphism refers to the matter and form that make up phenomena—matter contains potentiality harnessed into a fixed form. This scheme focuses intents and “Cruel optimism... keeps us going through the motions anticipating that the same ways of being, researching, and knowingwill get us somewhere.”

Radical Critique’s Challenge to Art Education

This chapter takes up the notion of critique in relation to creativity. I delve into the state of criticism in art education at this time playing out in the coercion and contortion of criticality into critical thinking skills for practical solutions. Employing such mechanisms as pragmatic blindness, art education aims to maintain present versions of the field safe from reinvention. Global education reform has come to embrace creative and critical thinking skills toward innovation—the two skillsets need one another in order for innovation to thrive. Yet, both creativity and criticality are morphing into altered forms that actually limit the possible. Radical critique is proposed as a counter to the pragmatization of criticality, art education, and society at large.

Neoliberalized) Collaborative Turn and Art Education

This chapter lays out the broader contexts from which collaboration comes to the foreground at this time and sounds a number of cautions against the collaborative turn as evidenced in the 21st Century Skills, new Finnish National Curriculum Framework, and cultural industries. Collaboration’s promotion is due to post-Fordist labor models and the rise of network structures. Within this nexus, collaboration maintains a democratic aura of a horizontal, decentralized platform for learning and creating that resists and subverts more restrictive vertical power structures. To flesh out these movements, I consider the model of project work within post-Fordist labor along with precarious, post-studio practices associated with the cultural and creative industries. I assert an appeal for the autonomy of collaboration within art education apart from entrepreneurial ends.

Civic Literacy and Art Education: Resisting an Interpassive Civics Through Art’s Dismeasure

This chapter contemplates the police order of neoliberalism and its impact on democratic imaginaries of creativity education. The writings of Jacques Ranciere are used to grasp the frictions and potentialities between neoliberal forms of schooling and democratic pedagogies in art education. Throughout, I ruminate on the following question: What if art education could be reconceived as a site of experimentation with democratic political engagement so that civic learning might create and transform subjectivities? In this endeavor, I examine the interdisciplinary theme of civic literacy from within the Partnership for 21st Century Skills’ Map for the Arts in order to ponder the bringing together of creativity and citizenship education as a site of potential emancipation.

Educating the Artrepreneur

This chapter begins by asking: What if business remade creativity education on its terms? What would become of art and its education in the wake of creativity-for-business only? This chapter explores these questions in light of the intensifying entrepreneurialization of art and its education. I examine the Partnership for the 21st Century Skills’ push for entrepreneurial literacy through art and creativity education along with the rise of artrepreneurs within contemporary art. I end with a plea for the relative autonomy of art education so that it may not only be a mode of vocationalization, but also a site of struggle and critical creativity.

Governmentality and Post-Fordist Art Education

This chapter bears down on neoliberal ideology’s influence on contemporary conceptions of creativity and its education. Under the present post-Fordist system of economic production, artists—with their drive to innovate, flexible production practices, and tolerance for precarity—are being upheld as ideal workers. The resulting requirements of immaterial labor have obliged the restructuring of education through forms of neoliberal governmentality that set about instilling specific values and urgencies manifesting in the governmentalization of learning and economization of education. In my consideration of the convergence of these pressures I focus on how the Partnership for 21st Century Skills mandates the acceleration of post-Fordist economic goals for art education through government of self and others that greatly reduces the possibilities for the nurturing of creativity.

Decreating Creativity Education: Yet to Be Created

In the concluding chapter, I contrast creative destruction that runs capitalist economies with Agamben’s notion of decreation. I explore how educators, artists, and activists might reanimate their roles as creatives in this time through starving neoliberalized, entrepreneurialized, and economized forms of creativity. Proposed are alternative modes of decreation where productivity, innovation, and praxis are denied their pre-set ends toward a state of exception that allows us to begin anew in reimaging what creativity education might have been.