The Allergic Bodies Conference: Postgraduate/Postdoctoral Research Conference, 2010

This is the programme document for the annual Postgraduate/Postdoctoral Research Conference with Keynotes: Dr Jennifer Bajorek (Goldsmiths), Marianne Sjelsford (National Academy of Arts, Oslo, Sweden); Dr Maarten Vanvolsem (Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Katholieke Universiteit, Brussels), Professor Pedro Lasch (Duke University)

Technology Criticism in the Classroom (Chapter in The Nature of Technology)

I first heard about a tragedy in Tucson, not from major television news networks, but from a direct message sent by a politically-active friend who was attending the political gathering where a mass shooting took place, including the shooting of an Arizona congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords. While the television news sputtered around trying to offer details (initially wrongly claiming that she was dead, likely from pressure to be the first to report big news), I found myself reading Google News, piecing together Facebook posts, e-mailing friends and reading Twitter updates

Takemusu Aiki: Insights into Optimizing Ideational Flow

The Fourth Art of Management and Organization Conference, Banff, Canada, 9-12 August 2008This paper will investigate how designers can connect broader understandings of ‘leadership’with specific design knowledge to enhance creative performance. The emphasis is on how designers can potentially ‘manage’ their thinking within the ideation process – maximise “ways”to spread ‘memes’. A meme is a rule, concept, or idea that can be spread from one person to another. Designers have been described as ‘memetic engineers’ (Dawkins, 1989) because they produce memes or units of cultural information that are recycled and evolve over time. Memes emerge through ‘imitation and recombination’ according to Blackmore (1999), by mixing up ideas to produce new combinations. One approach to understanding and reflecting on existing disciplinary experiences, as well as challenging creative potential, is through researching other conative “ways” – such as ‘Aikido’ – to embrace and reflect on ‘how’ we think instead of purely ‘what’ we think

Toward a New Creative Scholarship of Educational Development: The Teaching and Learning Project and an Opening to Discourse

This invited essay of To Improve the Academy’s special feature on Creative Scholarship presents one example of creative scholarship in educational development as a forward to other forms and approaches in the special feature. This example, the Teaching and Learning Project, merges documentary and art photography traditions with faculty consultation. Following a review of the literatures of visual interpretation and instructional consultation, along with their intersection, the essay presents the Teaching and Learning Project in three ways: (1) as images, analyzed using the disciplinary grounding of the visual arts; (2) as a consultation methodology and an educational development practice; and (3) as a research project using a social science-based approach (grounded theory) exploring the experience of the subjects photographed. Finally, as a segue to the rest of the TIA special feature, this invited essay addresses the transformative nature of creative scholarship and its implications for the field of educational development

A Case for Performance Art: An Artist/Educator Exploring Identity

How can vulnerability and censorship culminate into a teaching philosophy in art education? In the following thesis, a studio exploration from photography into a performance piece documents how presence and vulnerability play roles in performing and defining identity

An Autoethnographic Study of the Effectiveness of Teaching Art Appreciation through Pinhole Photography to Home Schooled Students

This research studies the effectiveness of teaching art appreciation to home schooled children ages 10-17 through a DBAE curriculum in pinhole photography via a weekend workshop. An autoethnographic approach to recording data about the students’ learning and my experience as their teacher was used in the research. Data was recorded as journal notes during and after each workshop from my experiences as their teacher and analyzed according to a grounded theory based on open coding. The workshop was open for registration of up to 25 home schooled students of any race, male or female, from the ages of 10 - 17. While the research reports a successful change in students’ appreciation of photography as a result of the workshop, parental values proved to be both an obstacle and area of potential future research