Anita Sinner

• The University of British Columbia - Vancouver

This chapter maps how a visual journal activity of walking with public art as a pedagogic practice in art education evoked an emerging disposition of transnational a/r/tography, shaped by trait renderings that build upon an established body of a/r/tographic research. Rana, Susana, and Elly undertook individual walks in home-lands as expressions of...

In this chapter, we map a walking experience with undergraduate art education students and explain how encountering a familiar daily path on campus in a different way generates the potential to create a new form of mapping that is relational and entangled with more-than-human materiality. As an expression of affective cartographies, this mode of ma...

With an artographic disposition, we engage alongside wildlife in two distinct rural landscapes, the far west coast and the northern prairie of Canada, to articulate our theory–practice nexus through ‘desire lines’ that map movements in our situated geographies. Desire lines are known as social trails, or colloquially, as a cow path or goat track, w...

This article reflects understandings of artful encounters in relation to ecologies of practice and walking with public art. Introduced as a pedagogic inquiry among art education students training to become teachers in community settings, meaningful event‐encounters transpired while walking with the museum. Navigating spaces of becoming‐with between...

In this case study, we explore how a group of mature fibre artists, known as Fibres and Beyond (FaB), have made an ongoing contribution to their rural communities through art practice, both within the circle of group members and among the wider community. For nearly twenty years, FaB has successfully maintained their artist collective, generating p...

This proposition explores the potential of a pedagogy of affect as an arts- based research approach to museum education at the university level. Such an approach is predicated on a continuous movement of situated stories as the heart of the learning encounter, generated relationally between object-body-space, or artwork- learner-museum. As a forum...

For your purposes as an art educator, how do you define ‘art’ and ‘artist’? Some critics argue that, in today’s art world, the ‘institutional’ definition of art reigns. What other definitions of art seem credible and useful to you as an art educator?

This position paper explores how community art education students applied an a-r-tographic disposition as artists, researchers, and teachers to investigate the pedagogic potential of public art in their evolving practice. By actively engaging body-object-space, students reviewed their presumptions about art education and what constitutes curriculum...

Informed by understandings of affect theory, the pedagogic potential of object itineraries, or simply, the journey of things, is proposed in this case as a form of sensual a-r-tography. A pair of sporty shoes as mundane objects are at the heart of this deliberation, and the mechanism through which to consider the scope of conversations underway abo...

"Artwork scholarship" is defined in this context as a forum for inquiry that involves artful expressions, innovative experimentation and critical propositions informed by aesthetic characteristics as well as customary approaches for the advancement of the arts and education. ‘Latitudes’ in turn take into account the adaptations of artful expression...

A review of museum training programs was undertaken to assess the current state of professional museum education training in Canada. Out of 18 post-secondary museum studies programs, four programs include one museum education course and two programs include two courses. We found no evidence of museum education content in any of the eight Canadian c...

Ma is a curriculum. The Japanese concept of ma refers to the interval between two markers. Ma is somatically constructed by a deliberate, attentive consciousness to what simultaneously is expressed, repressed, or suppressed between two structures. In a dialectic exploration, the spaces between― private/public, teacher/student, old/new, self/other,...

This three-authored paper describes our individual responses to a video, Dwelling, by Japanese artist Hiraki Sawa. The nine-minute video is a wordless, but not soundless, presentation of jet planes flying within the confines of the artist’s apartment. We chose the Youtube video in order to be able to share an artwork although we were working in thr...

With the intention of expanding educational conversations through playful encounters, we braid curricular intensities inspired by wild profusions, written in our academic hair and offered as expressions of life writing. Through our hairatives, we share discomforts and provocations that are the stories of our scholarly identities, rooted in the body...

Third-age learning is a subset of lifelong learning enjoyed by individuals in the stage of retirement, and often 60 years or older. Community art education (CAE) for learners in the third age commonly occurs in recreational settings, nursing homes, museums, libraries and places of worship. In addition to these informal learning sites, there are CAE...

With art education at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) celebrating 50 years of program delivery, this article offers a self-study history of the university’s community art education program for undergraduate artist-teachers. Drawing on case study, archival, and oral history methods, this research situates key program events within their univ...

In this paper, seven Canadian curriculum researchers investigate and discuss life writing as a mode of educational inquiry and curricular theorizing through which educators can attend to the tensions and complexities of teaching and learning in a variety of curricular and pedagogical contexts. Drawing from their individual and collective research i...

This proposition concerning “just-in-time” teaching was initiated in the field where the practices of two student-teachers have inspired ongoing and continued study into community art education as a site of creative and innovative teaching and learning that contributes to forms of public pedagogy. Informed by the year-long practicum assignment of G...

In this review, articles and visual interludes included in three special issues of peer-reviewed journals form a body of scholarship that provide indicators of the movement and maturation of a/r/tography in educational research involving the visual arts. The special issues represent contributions to the vision of a/r/tography around core processes,...

We explore notions of empathy, caring and aesthetics in a conversation about Cindy’s lived experiences as a mature woman returning to learning in art education. As arts researchers, we collaborate to investigate Cindy’s visual journal and self-reflections on the role of identity construction from two core perspectives: 1) the personal challenges ma...

An in-depth analysis of the post-secondary learning experiences of three women revealed that their decisions to participate in college and university courses in Canada were interconnected with lived experiences of chronic pain. A causal link between chronic pain and returning to learning was an unexpected outcome of a study focusing on women’s lear...

In a case study of an undergraduate course in art education, modes of mastery learning and propositions of intellectual emancipation were explored as interventions in curriculum design. By adopting Rancière’s framework of a ‘will to will’ relationship between instructor and students, the core assignment—a visual journal—became a site of student pos...

In B. White & T. Constantino (Symposium organizers), Art, Empathy, & Education.

Exploring the role of archives in recovering the histories of teachers' lives and the potential of archival research as living inquiry, a non-traditional perspective is offered concerning life writing as a way into an epistemological storying of the past. Archival research as living inquiry is examined both as a methodological approach to theorizin...

Presentation for the Canadian Society for the Study of Women in Education.

Paper presentation for the Arts Researchers & Teachers Society special interest group

As an expression of arts research, this book explores the lived experiences of three women, Ruth, Ann and Nathalie (pseudonyms), as they became art teachers over the course of their certification year. Rendering their experiences as short stories from the field of teacher education brings a social research dimension to scholarship through the liter...

Unfolding the Unexpectedness of Uncertainty invites readers to share in the stories of Ruth, Ann and Nathalie as they transition from students to teachers. Rendering their experiences as short stories from the field of teacher education brings a dimension of social biography to scholarship. As creative nonfiction, these stories act as catalysts to...

Nathalie’s experience of becoming a teacher demonstrates how a counter-narrative contributes to negotiating dominant discourses that propagate stories of uniformity and reinforce the status quo within the teaching profession. By offering an alternate perspective of teacher culture as a liminal space, uncertainty symbolizes Nathalie’s transition to...

Poster presentation.

Peer-Reviewed

Peer-Reviewed.

Photography can be applied to life stories, making photographs a way to trace self in the world. In this case study, we explore Jade’s autobiographical inquiry and investigate the visual expressions she created in an introductory photography course. Jade’s story brings us into conversation about issues of childhood sexual abuse, and while her p...

Peer-Reviewed

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 wo...

Peer-Reviewed

This article explores how a triptych installation serves as a framework for interpreting and rendering enquiry and for expanding notions of arts research. The triptych format brings rigour to enquiry by focusing attention on the properties of the art form, organizing practice openly and transparently, and demonstrating how it relates to the broad f...

During a 1-year study, the visual journal of a preservice teacher was explored as an image sphere, or bildraum, in relation to teacher culture. Artworks created in the visual journal offered an anamorphic perspective on the materiality of teacher culture, tracing the lived experiences of a student of art in the process of becoming an art teacher du...

Pre-service teachers move through multiple learning communities during teacher education programs, arguably emerging as authentic insiders in teaching culture. In this case study, a critical perspective is offered by Ann, a First Nations learner who described her experience of teacher education, and how she came to question different aspects of her...

This visual journey, which revisits childhood art as an entry point to inquiry centred on my landscapes of meaning as an educator, represents a self portrait about identity and place that is told from the multiple subjective geographies of self. My collection of childhood artwork offers a different lens to understand historical conditioning and soc...

In this article the author shares a partial biography of Elizabeth Evans, who became a domestic science teacher in Britain during the First World War. This story begins with a small collection of artefacts—professional letters and personal photographs—which infuse our understanding of teaching and learning and Elizabeth's everyday life nearly a cen...

With this review, we explore the practices of arts-based educational research as documented in dissertations created and written over one decade in the Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia. We compile and describe more than thirty dissertations across methodologies and methods of inquiry, and identifiy three pillars of arts-based pr...