Rita L. Irwin

University of British Columbia - Vancouver | UBC · Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy (EDCP)

In this article, we reflect on our teaching practices that include the development of an artist-in-residency program in one teacher education course and one graduate course in the Fall of 2022 at The University of British Columbia. During these residencies, Carrier Wit’at artist and printmaker Whess Harman and Indigenous scholar and a/r/tographer J...

This chapter offers an introduction to the history of the Arts-Based Educational Research Special Interest Group (ABER SIG) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) before summarizing the stories and essays written by award winners of the Outstanding Dissertation Award of the ABER SIG (2005–2021). The essays and stories cover a range...

Reflecting upon the ten chapters in the edited book and the co-authors own experience of mentorship and allyship in the field of Arts-Based Education Research (ABER) this chapter offers questions and suggestions for building and strengthening the field for future generations of ABER scholars and their scholarship. While many may have stereotypical...

In Part 1 of ‘Encountering Berlant’, we encounter the promise and provocation of Lauren Berlant's work. In 1000‐word contributions, geographers and others stay with what Berlant's thought offers contemporary human geography. They amplify an encounter with their work, demonstrating how a concept, idea, or style disrupts something, opens up a new pos...

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...

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 collaborative research chapter is based on a retreat of an a/r/tographic walking study group at The University of British Columbia. In an unfolding commitment to unsettle our collective walking and writing practice, we trouble everyday ways of working together. This includes centering Indigenous scholarship in our reading practice, and shiftin...

This book brings together visual arts educators working on an international research project titled Mapping A/r/tography: Transnational Storytelling Across Historical and Cultural Routes of Significance. Emphasizing a collaboratory model (Muff, 2014) that fuses concepts of collaboration and laboratory, the project underscores how a/r/tography facil...

This article explores walking as a form of inquiry within a study group at The University of British Columbia committed to a/r/tography. Three propositions are explored and as a result we think more deeply about being present, truly present, to that which we never anticipated. The first proposition, ‘Go for a walk outside, find an object and do som...

This chapter explores collaborative Arts practices as critical and creative vehicles for assembling a figure of the socioecological learner. We focus on developing the sensorial and affective dimensions of learning through aesthetic engagements with place, drawing on Deleuzian concepts of the “larval subject”, “carte”, and “rhizome”. In doing so, w...

This chapter considers the significance of a/r/tographic image‐making for pedagogical practice. Through inviting a pedagogy that is not just about eliciting behavior, we examine the potential in images for intervening in traditional notions of cause and effect between teaching and learning. We analyze the a/r/tographic invitation for pedagogy by co...

We have been making art and writing poetry together for many years. As colleagues in arts-based education research, we have journeyed together with many colleagues and students, in many research projects, in dreaming possibilities for teacher education, in promoting the value of a/r/tography as a way of understanding our intricate and composite ide...

In this article, we explore two comics that were produced in a province-wide teacher mentorship initiative in British Columbia, Canada. Comics-based research, undertaken through a collaborative approach, underscores the potential for this kind of research to highlight teacher stories and methodologically engage in an artistic collaboration within a...

This chapter works through a series of methodological experimentations with movement and materiality in order to explore the potentials of environmental arts pedagogies. We address the question of what environmental arts pedagogies might come to look like in the ever-changing contexts of children’s social and environmental worlds. This leads us to...

The flâneur as is assumed in this inquiry is not the idle explorer of literary imagery, but rather the contemporary, peripatetic artist-scholar. The project focuses on a/r/tographic propositional walking in order to observe the practices of the researchers, namely writing, artmaking, reading, documenting and thinking in movement, as they are experi...

Don MacDougall’s death was a rupture in our community of artist scholar educators. After all, how can we imagine our death? Heidegger (1953/2010) argues that death is ‘eminent immanence’ (pp. 241–251). For Derrida (1993), it is an aporia as it is something un/imaginable as a living being. Attached to Don’s research at the time of his death brought...

This book creatively and critically explores the figure of the flâneur and its place within educational scholarship. The flâneur is used as a generative metaphor and a prompt for engaging the unknown through embodied engagement, the politics of space, mindful walking and ritual. The chapters in this collection explore sensorial qualities of place a...

This visual essay portrays a walkings-through of experience, journeys, and engagements positioned as a c/a/r/tography. The assemblage of this c/a/r/tography draws upon Deleuzoguattarian notions of affect and the carte, the methodology of a/r/tography, and contemporary art and research ambulatory practices. The walkings-through are staged in the eve...

The ways in which teachers adjust to challenges in the process of becoming professionals are complicated. Teacher mentorship, however, is an important step to creating and sustaining a strong professional career. This article discusses new understandings from a Canadian research project: Pedagogical Assemblage: Building and Sustaining Teacher Capac...

This chapter attempts to capture a glimpse of how a/r/tography has been taken up around the world. Six individuals representing six continents share their experiences as university professors teaching undergraduate and graduate classes or supervising graduate students completing a/r/tographic dissertations, or as PhD graduates who used a/r/tography...

A great deal has been written about the representational use of metaphor to understand teacher candidates’/new teachers’ conceptions of teacher practice. This article will discuss recent research that explored secondary visual art teacher candidates’/new teachers’ visualising of visual metaphors to provoke their a/r/tographical inquiry into their p...

The authors present stories in motion, reminding all those interested in practicebased research of the importance of a/r/tography as becoming-intensity, becoming-event and becoming-movement. Embracing a métissage approach, this article provides an example of art educators co-labouring in order to understand their need for materializing, theorizing...

This article biographically describes the identity and artistic development of internationally known artist Gu Xiong. Stories of his life during the Cultural Revolution in China and his immigration experience into Canada are expressed and documented through his multiple roles in a community-engaged research study that explores issues of migration,...

In this article, we consider and discuss an artist-teacher residency staged at our university that explored and examined relations between art, learning and teaching. Comprising artists, pedagogues, becoming teachers and researchers, this residency was initiated to examine how becoming art teachers (teacher candidates) come to understand pedagogy i...

Through a year-long collaborative practice of walking as art, three artists/researchers/teachers investigated embodied perception in terms of its capacities for self-sustenance. Amidst the rush and routine of busy lives, familiarity with feelings of potential as the nourishment sustaining bodily movement is often forgotten. However, in immersive pr...

From September to December 2009, a class of teacher candidates completed a Bachelor of Education course titled English Language Arts: Secondary Curriculum and Instruction. The instructor introduced himself at the beginning of the course as an a/r/tographer who is an artist, a researcher, and a teacher. He invited students to think about the possibi...

This article explores moments of becoming a/r/tography. A/r/tography is a research methodology, a creative practice, and a performative pedagogy that lives in the rhizomatic practices of the in-between. Resisting the tendency for endless critique of past experience and bodies of knowledge, a/r/tography is concerned with the creative invention of co...

The purpose of this inquiry is to investigate how a/r/tography is uniquely situated to enact, develop, and problematize 'becoming pedagogical' in an arts-based cohort in a teacher education program. This particular study purposefully grapples with visual and performing arts, in an elementary teacher education program, as teacher candidates 'learn t...

Two artists involved in ‘socially engaged art’ practice were invited to work with art education teacher candidates and instructors in an effort to rethink notions of teaching, learning and art. We initiated this residency, which we called ‘The Summerhill Residency’, to examine how learning encounters might create environments for meaningful exchang...

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...

In this paper the authors examine a/r/tographical collaboration in a community-engaged research study investigating immigrant understandings of home and place. The study, The City of Richgate, involves a complex collaboration between community members, community organizations, educational institutions, and a research team comprising artist-educator...

Combining research and art in the public sphere can have an enormous impact on urban societies. In places like Richmond, British Columbia, Canada, where over the past decades globalization has radically altered the social landscape, new approaches to public art and modes of representation can begin to reflect complex individual everyday experiences...

(Eisner, Elliot W., 1979. The educational imagination: On the design and evaluation of school programs. New York: Macmillan.)

Using Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia as a basis for appreciating the rich opportunities the multiple voices of researchers and participants present, we posit that embodied heteroglossic spaces enhance the collaborative a/r/tographic research project entitled The City of Richgate. Working with visual, narrative, and performative forms of enquiry,...

This essay offers a conversation on mentoring within dissertation research from the perspectives of a graduate student, new assistant professor, and senior administrator. Specifically, we revisit the mentoring spaces and relations within which we were immersed while partaking in a form of arts-based educational research known as a/r/tography. We ar...

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...

This study offers an arts-based a/r/tographic inquiry using poetic transcription and representation of interviews conducted with a co-educational group of 14 students in a West Vancouver, British Columbia secondary school rhythm and blues band class. The decision to translate and analyse the interview transcripts into the Japanese poetry form of ha...

The City of Richgate project worked with eight intergenerational immigrant families and examined immigrant experiences and narratives through a community-engaged process that employed a/r/tography as a methodology. As such, the research also investigated the extent to which a/r/tographical research could visually and narratively portray the analysi...

Attempts to explore and articulate the role(s) of the arts in qualitative social science research, in particular, understanding the relationship between processes of the arts and the processes of research, present challenges because for an a/r/tographer, the relationship between the creation of artful representational forms and the crafting of artf...

Curriculum integration often appears complex and when this happens, those who are involved with providing professional development or teacher education, may be inclined to promote simplistic or solution-oriented approaches to facilitate integration. Many variants of a problem-solution model exist, and programs that encourage teachers to identify a...

Peer-Reviewed

Peer-Reviewed

Peer-Reviewed

Artist-in-residence programs frequently act as professional development initiatives for teachers. Little understanding of the relational nature of artist-teacher learning exists. In this article, we discuss "Learning Through The Arts ™," describing conflicting expectations as artists and teachers learn from each other, and explore the relationship...

The City of Richmond, British Columbia is a city that has recent-ly come to represent East meeting West, the Pacific Rim meeting Canada, farmland meeting urban landscapes. It is a city that is on the edge of the continent, on the verge of a new beginning, separated psychologically from the rest of Canada by the Rocky Mountains, bordering on the Ame...

Kathryn Ricketts is a doctoral student donning an oversized overcoat and hat and carrying a suitcase heavy with the weight of borrowed stories she tells through a methodology called a/r/tography. This paper serves as a living document of the years she has spent with the core members of the a/r/tographic team: Rita Irwin, Carl Leggo, Peter Gouzouasi...

A/r/tography is a form of practice-based research steeped in the arts and education. Alongside other arts-based, arts-informed and aesthetically defined methodologies, a/r/tography is one of many emerging forms of inquiry that refer to the arts as a way of re-searching the world to enhance understanding. Yet, it goes even further by recognizing the...

Abstract A/r/tography is a form of practice-based research steeped in the arts and education. Alongside other arts based, arts informed and aesthetically defined methodologies, a/r/tography is one of many emerging forms of inquiry that refer to the arts as a way of re-searching the world to enhance understanding. Yet, it goes even further by recogn...