This year’s pedagogy caucus explores what is at stake in teaching art history and visual culture in 2020. As educators grapple with calls for Indigenization and internationalization, they also strive to foster inclusive and accessible learning environments. Simultaneously, there is increasing demand for experiential learning, high-impact teaching and transformational learning. Within art history, meanwhile, the place of the traditional chronological survey continues to be questioned as an effective instructional format. Amidst this environment, this session aims to spark a candid conversation addressing these, and other significant issues, which lie at the heart of teaching in our field. In so doing, we hope to provide a space for educators to raise difficult questions and share constructive strategies and approaches.
Topics may include: equity, diversity and inclusion in the classroom; reconciliation in and through pedagogy; difficult images and censorship; teaching across cultural competencies; grappling with the survey; and more. We also welcome contributions that address the labour of pedagogy, acknowledging that new approaches and transformational learning is difficult work, for both learners and instructors (Halonen and Dunn, 2018). Given this, how do we care for our students while fostering resiliency? How do we care for ourselves when our teaching hinges on being vulnerable? We are particularly interested in participants who might share practices and strategies that support diverse perspectives and foster inclusion. To emphasize engagement and discussion, the session format will prioritize audience involvement.
Canadian Art Matters: Revising the Survey
Our segment of the Pedagogy Caucus roundtable aims to pick up on Elizabeth Cavaliere’s two-part session at UAAC in 2018 which focused on collaboration as a means of interrogating the teaching of Canadian art history. The history of art is/has been strongly rooted in national narratives that often elide issues of connectivity to larger art historical discourses in the development of both historical and contemporary art history. We propose to discuss the ways in which we rethink Canadian art histories (and our survey courses) to emphasize transnational, transhistorical, and transdisciplinary connections rather than reinforce an outdated focus on nationalism and the visual arts. This is particularly important given the complicated and interconnected issues of regionalism, colonialism, and diaspora in Canadian art. Emerging from a national and chronologically-organized discourse in art historical education, this has not been easy work.
Our revisioning of Canadian colonial-settler art history survey courses ensures that they are more accessible, inclusive, and critical. We argue that to teach Canadian art history as part of larger, transnational and comparative history contributes to the decolonization of the discipline. Integrating diverse perspectives, other voices, and collaborative pedagogical approaches to teaching allows the development of knowledges in the lecture hall as relative to each other and nation-to-nation dialogue within the current borders of Canada. As Marsha Meskimmon has stated, this method of teaching forces us as educators “to address the question of how we claim to know (rather than what we claim to know) and to move away from ‘mastering’ a field of study towards creating epistemic communities through dialogue”(2019). During the roundtable we intend to offer brief tangible examples of just how we “transnationalize” Canadian art history while simultaneously teaching core visual analysis and literacy skills foundational to the discipline and which make students active learners.
Following the transition to remote learning in March 2020, we became interested in how we might move the active learning practices we had developed for our physical classrooms into the digital space. As in our other collaborative work, which is grounded in theories of radical and accessible pedagogy, we remained focused on the concrete and the practical, and hosted a series of workshops over the summer that aimed to develop assignments and activities that could be used in the remote classroom, and which would develop students’ skills in lateral thinking and collaboration. For our contribution to this year’s UAAC Pedagogy Caucus, we will be sharing some of the ideas generated during this workshop series, considering how they might meet the challenges of accessibility and inclusion in remote art history and studio classrooms. Since UAAC is held at the midpoint of the semester for most Canadian universities, we will also take this opportunity to discuss which of the strategies that we used worked, which failed, and how we might use the lessons we learn over the first months of remote teaching to improve them.
