Donal O'Donoghue

This study explores what can happen when a collective of art teachers come together to reside in a space that allows them to practice their impotential for nine months, deactivating the necessity to act as teachers, always in a mode of production (Agamben, 2013). Doing nothing at the site is not idle-ness but a radical gesture of conviviality (Illich, 1973). The distinction between what we cannot and can Not do is one I will emphasize in this dissertation, and is based on the philosopher, Giorgio Agamben’s (2013) distinction between (in)ability (something we can or cannot do) and (im)potentiality (something of which we can choose Not to do it). Through the creation of an experimental practice at a storefront site in Chicago called Spaces for Possibility, the artist collective enters into a heterotopic space (Foucault, 1984), a real place, where teachers can imagine what other worlds might be possible. As an artist collective made up of ten public school art teachers, and a researcher as participant, we put old uses, a building, to new use and queer use (Ahmed, 2020) as a space for possibilities to arise or not. In this experimental project, I employ research creation practices that support creative, affective and sensory processes of worlds unfolding, and being made, of stories accumulating and being re-arranged, of modes of responding and corresponding with each other (Ahmed, 2010; Haraway, 2017; Manning, 2014; Stewart, 2007). These practices afford me as a researcher the ability to create and design an experimental project that follows what is made or not made, documented and collected as events, scenes, and stories that build up as affects and other forms of accumulation at the site of this research, affording the researcher space to let emergent events unfurl without predetermined outcomes (Haraway, 2017; Stewart, 2007). The promise in this study is in how we come to the space permitting ourselves to imagine what other worlds we wish to inhabit as teachers, while we also put into question the ethical dilemmas of use and our potential to act.  

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This research explores the ongoing actions and commitments that make up responsive participatory practices at two community-based arts organizations—the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz, California. Two questions guide the study: “What are responsive participatory art museum practices and what could they be?” and “In what ways can education, learning, and pedagogy be understood in the context of responsive participatory art museum practices?” I engaged the guiding questions through a feminist research methodology that is informed by post-qualitative and arts-based methodologies and methods. This methodology was developed as I responded to research questions and data in production, and as I thought closely with scholars and their writings, especially Elizabeth Ellsworth’s (2005) Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy. Methods used to address my research questions included research conversations—some of which took place while walking—arts-based mapping, and narrative writing. Drawing on art, education, and museum scholarship, my understanding is that responsive participatory art museum practices embrace multiple commitments, including: sharing the authority of questions, interactions, and knowledge production between museum staff, collaborators, public audiences, and participants; sharing spaces and collections within museums and with the communities in which museums exist; and committing to ongoing, respectful collaborations and relationships with community members and collaborating organizations and individuals. In these responsive practices, works of art, museum objects, and carefully designed experiences and projects are dialogical points of encounter that provoke a proliferation of responses, which in turn precipitate transformational movements that are subtle, are not pre-determined, and impact individuals and communities in a relational manner. Education within responsive participatory art museum practices is an ongoing process of creating the conditions for potential learning through everyday practices. Embedded in responsive participatory practices is the expectation that change will occur as a result of taking part in museum programs, projects, and experiences. Mutual transformation in responsive participatory practices emphasizes that these potential changes are not one-sided; changes occur for participants and audiences, as well as for museum staff, systems, and practices.

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No abstract available.

Often within science education, Indigenous science is either excluded or included in ways that differ from or defer its intended meanings, as well as its pedagogical potentiality for all students. The central question that guides this dissertation is How is Indigenous science to-come with/in the context of science education? This dissertation draws from decolonizing, post-colonial, post-structural, and post-humanist theory-practices to address ‘to-come’ in three ways: a) Indigenous science on its own terms as not-yet and still-to-come with/in science education; b) Indigenous science as a relationship whose indeterminate arrival invites re(con)figuring of the lived constructs, concepts, and categories of science education; and c) practices (including pedagogy) that might allow for and nurture the possibility of Indigenous science to-come in its second iteration. To explore this triple(d) understanding of ‘to-come’, each chapter within the dissertation acts as an excursion through a path of science education. Journeying involves strategically straying off the beaten path or tactically taking the pathway in unintended ways to lose sight of the prescriptive and often problematic ways in which the path is regularly travelled. Further, each journey is iterative, travelling through, against, and/or beyond a particular path, wherein the learning is enfolded and carried forward into the next trip. Equipped with a plethora of deconstructive tools, science education is (re)opened through (re)considering its: a) oppositional, dialectic nature; b) critical modes as protective, rather than productive, of the status quo (i.e., through mirrored correspondence); c) ontological taken-for-grantedness (e.g., through its a priori and singular positioning); and, d) responsibility, as well as ability to respond. In response, I offer a call and analytical frames for: a) dialogue; b) critique as prismatic and diffractive; c) ontological plurality and co-constitutiveness; as well as, d) response-ability, respectively. Insights produced and scholarly contributions from wandering include: a) an exploration of curricular alternatives to scientific literacy, notably Karen Barad’s agential literacy and Gregory Cajete’s ecologies of relationships; b) re(con)figuring visual pedagogies to engage in decolonizing science education. This theory-practice bridging pursues design of a pedagogy of relationally storying nature well positioned to account for and be accountable to Indigenous science to-come.

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In this dissertation, I seek to understand how pedagogy and arts-based research might provoke the conditions for creative thought by drawing on experience as a sensory and affective event to disrupt perceptions and memory of teacher practice. I examine two secondary visual art teachers’ experiences of: (1) returning to their high schools and (2) filming their returns. Christen and Kelsie each returned twice, responding to prompts that I had provided: to explore the pedagogical value of school space, and to imagine the school as an installation designed to teach.The films, and the subsequent group dialogue sessions pointed the types of experiences that research and pedagogy might enact with teacher candidates to destabilize their tacit understandings of teacher practice. Through their filmmaking as art practice, Christen and Kelsie performed as nomads (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) in the school space, which triggered unique memories in and of place. My research suggests that rather than filming events of significance— described by Dewey (1934) as an experience—which form the basis of teaching narratives (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990), both participants filmed the lesser events formed in the everyday mundane spaces of schooling, such as halls and stairways. In doing so, each participant developed an individuated aesthetic of becoming in their films, which, during the dialogue sessions, provoked a consideration of their perceptions of teacher practices in novel ways.A significant implication of this research includes the emergence of an arts-based methodology of intuition to provoke alterity as a way of being in and of the world. Artistic practice and embodied experience offer new conceptualizations of time and experience that create the conditions for memory and perception to become amenable to change, and for intuition, as a disposition, to problematize, differentiate and temporalize experience. The methodology of intuition (Deleuze, 1991) develops intuition as an individual disposition to destabilize understandings gained through experience even as understanding of that experience is sought. I argue that the arts-based methodology of intuition holds significant potential for the ways in which both research and pedagogy might create opportunities for new perceptions of and capacities for visual art teacher practice.

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In conversation with a growing school gardening movement (Williams & Brown, 2012), this arts-based research draws on material feminist and posthumanist (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008; Barad, 2003; Haraway, 2004, 2008) scholarship to reconfigure what it means to become a teacher. In particular, I explore ‘becoming teachers together’ with a garden as a way to reimagine alternatives for the persistent and familiar figure of the teacher as a rational, autonomous individual working within the closed doors of the traditional classroom (Britzman, 2003; Jackson, 1990). Indigenous scholarship, particularly around gift giving (Kuokkanen, 2007) and decolonization (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2012), offers unsettling insights into human and nonhuman entanglements such as the ‘garden-as-teacher.’ In this work, I linger beside (Sedgwick, 2003) both the possibilities and impossibilities of teaching with gardens, compelled to respond (Simon, 2006) to the difficult history of school gardens, particularly during Nazi Germany and in the Canadian residential school system, and the etymological knots that link gardens with material and discursive practices of enclosure.The art theory and practices that shape this research are site-specific installation art (Augaitis & Ritter, 2008; Bishop, 2005, 2012; Bourriaud, 2002; Függe & Fleck, 2006; Kester, 2011), especially collaborations with Vancouver artist Sharon Kallis (Kallis, 2014) and an interview with Ron Benner (Benner, 2008). Responding to O’Donoghue’s (2010) provocation to consider classrooms as installations, I developed the installation series Threads sown, grown & given from April 2012 until August 2014 at The UBC Orchard Garden (a teaching and learning garden at the University of British Columbia) and in the teacher education building. The resulting métissage (Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers & Leggo, 2009) of narratives includes (a) the garden becoming a teacher, (b) student teachers becoming teachers during three research events related to the installation series, and (c) my own personal of becoming a teacher, scholar, and teacher educator. By attending to failure (Halberstam, 2011), this arts-based research creates conditions for what I term a ‘pedagogy of enclosures’ to engage with the ethical responsibilities and limitations of becoming teachers together, particularly in teacher education and garden-based education within the context of settler colonialism and the neoliberalization of the academy. Supplementary video material is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/52953

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