Lichenizing Pedagogy: Art Explorations in More-than-Human Performance and Practice

This project of performative writing and visual inquiry proposes the concept of “lichenizing” as a collaborative methodology for engaging with the lively pedagogy of the more-than-human. Looking to the multispecies mosaic of Lichen as teacher and ally, this arts-based, collectively produced foray considers transcorporeal, intermingled relationships as a pedagogical tool for fostering a radical, ecologically-centered curiosity for learning and making. To support our theorizing, we present two collaborative art projects where tenets of lichenizing were utilized to instruct process and form, and suggest further exploration and research on the practice of “lichenizing.

Disrupting Art Museum Experiences: Interventions in a University Art Museum

In this paper, graduate students in an art education course and their instructor share a project created in response to an exhibition focused on themes of food in their university art museum. Students worked in groups to create interventions designed to offer alternative ways to engage with works of art through experimentation, sensory experiences, participatory practices, and humor. These interventions expand the ways visitors can approach works of art and give openings for participants to include their own voices in the exhibition. They also illustrate the potential for university art museums serve as laboratories on campus that challenge traditional authoritative museum practices and question whose voices are included in museum exhibitions

Phenomena of Place: An Arts-Based Exploration of Children's Drawing and Ecocultural Identity

We humans are cultural and ecological beings. This is a study about children’s drawing as a device for expressing intertwined cultural and ecological relations. Countless studies have examined children’s drawing from psychological, anthropological, linguistic, and aesthetic perspectives, while recently posthuman perspectives have put forward notions of drawing as material entanglement. Because of its apparent instinctual process and popularity as modes of expression and communication, drawing is often utilized as a tool for facilitating learning and instrumented as a momentary visualization of a child’s perspective. Few studies concerning children’s drawing have attempted to examine the possibilities of intersubjectivity between humans and nonhumans, or the affective forces that shape children’s participation in social and ecological systems. In this arts-based education research (ABER) study located in the southwestern high desert of the current U.S., I examine children’s drawing practices occurring within a science-informed environmental learning setting in connection with ecocultural identity. I employ a conceptual framework of place as sensed experiences amid relational assemblages (Booth, 2008, 2015; Casey, 1996; Tsing, 2015) and a theoretical foundation of sympoiesis, or making-with (Haraway, 2016). I submit a methodology of “lichenizing” inspired by the heterogeneous making-with of Lichens, consisting of methods drawn from visual ethnography, multispecies ethnography, and arts-based research. I ask the following research questions: How do children’s graphical meaning-making manifest the a/effect of the assemblage of place? How do human/nonhuman collaborations prompt and influence the formation of ecocultural identity? Data were generated over 10 months through participant and place observations, participant drawings, and unstructured interviews, and include video recordings and detailed memos of drawing events, and photographs of the children’s drawings created individually and collaboratively. In my interpretation of the data, I tell interspecies stories of drawing events and intersperse the writing with small drawing interludes. The illuminations of this study offer relational ways of understanding drawing as co-produced by multifarious forces and entities that link to the formation of children’s ecocultural identities. This study highlights a critical need to continually examine the ways in which multidisciplinary, ecocentric education for children is conceived, constructed, and carried out, and to be more attentive to the ways in which children respond

Community Ecology: Museum Education and the Digital Divide During and After COVID-19

This article considers the inequities of digital museum programming during the COVID-19 pandemic and their alignment with audiences historically excluded from access to STEAM learning opportunities, primarily communities with low incomes and people of color. We employ an ecosystem framework to assert the critical role museums can play within communities to address these issues during and after pandemic circumstances. We describe a case study from a STEAM-oriented children’s museum where staff provided out-of-school-time learning through reciprocal and collaborative community partnerships.No embargo COVID-19This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]