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UNSETTLING CONVERSATIONS PROGRAM

Friday, June 23 & Saturday, June 24

Session One

Friday, 10:00-11:30

Connie Blomgren, David Gibson, Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Karen Larter, Candace Lewko, University of Lethbridge, & Carl Leggo, University of British Columbia  

Evicting Us from Ourselves: Research/Pedagogy/Conversation in places of memory, migration, and differences - In this presentation, we attend to the other through unsettling conversations revolving in the space between self and other, opening ourselves to narratives that “…evict us from ourselves” (Cixous & Calle-Gruber, 1997). What are the events that evict us into the space between self and other? And, what are the narratives about memory, migration, and difference that disturb?

Session Two

Friday, 1:30-3:00

Tara Fenwick & Judy Sillito, University of Alberta

Aesthetic Representation as ‘Knowledge Mobilization’: Art for whom, over whose bodies? We are interested in exploring certain moral and social issues of artistic representation, in our case using theatre, of research participants and their stories. While theatre has proven a powerful and popular medium for ‘disseminating’ research – or ‘mobilizing knowledge’ in the new language of Canada’s research councils – we remain troubled by its forms of regulation through symbolic and rhetorical structures, the politics of display, and the knowledge that is ultimately circulated. What happens to collective and individual histories, and their tensions, when they become structured according to the genre demands of theatre? What knowledge(s) ultimately become mobilized in such theatric presentations?

Session Three

Friday, 3:30-5:00

Susan Walsh, Lorri Neilsen, & Allan Neilsen, Mount Saint Vincent University

Starting with Stillness - Our thirty-minute performance will involve photography, movement, and poetry intended to provoke meditations and conversations about our work as researchers. We hope to interrupt the structures of thinking—and also the language (and implied imperatives) of research and scholarship—that we inherit and perpetuate. We are aiming for simplicity and grace. The ensuing conversation will invite participants to explore insights through a range of possible activities such as improvisation, movement, and work with sound. How can we begin to unlearn what we think we know?

Session Four

Saturday, 9:00-10:30

Deborah Barndt, Margo Charlton, Heather Hermant, Maggie Hutcheson, Laura Reinsborough, & Diane Roberts, York University

Engaging Sticky Moments in International and Collaborative Research Opportunities for Unsettling Conversations in the VIVA! Project (An International Arts-based Collaboration) - The VIVA! Project is a three-year collaborative project which involves eight partners—from both NGOs and universities—in Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Montreal. We are each exploring “creative tensions of community arts and popular education” through participatory action research with select projects in our own contexts, as well as exchanging ideas and practices through annual workshops and meetings (Toronto in 2004, Panama in 2005, Mexico in 2006). Six Canadian members of the VIVA! Project look forward to naming and engaging in “unsettling conversations” about key tensions emerging in this work: ranging from process/product tensions to tensions between spiritual and political goals of our work, from different positions of institutional, financial, racial, class, and generational privilege to differences in the ways we work as embodied and/or mediated by technology. One key dynamic within the project as well as within many community arts projects is what we have called the “white ladies syndrome.” How do we problematize this hegemony while also challenging it— within ourselves and our projects?

Session Five

Saturday, 11:30-1:00

Warren Linds, Concordia University, Joanne Episkenew, First Nations University of Canada and Indigenous Peoples Health Research Centre, & Linda Goulet, First Nations University of Canada

The Image of the Real Is the Real of the Image—Un/settling colonization through arts-based research? - Traditional academic research privileges the written word as the form of documentation and as the source of material to analyze. It is important to reflect on that privileging when working with communities that value orality. In this interactive workshop we will be using a gallery of Images (static human bodies in relation to one another that tell a story) to involve participants in an embodied conversation with the key moments and issues that arise from our work as facilitators working in and with marginalized communities. What will emerge in this in-between, this performative space? What is our "place/space" as artistic researchers/facilitators working in marginalized communities?

Session Six: New Scholars Invitation

Saturday, 2:00-2:30

Marjorie Dunn, Kedrick James, Mia Perry, Sean Wiebe, Vincent White, Kathryn Ricketts, June Parnell-Parmley, Joanna Szabo, University of British Columbia & Camosun College 

"The Process of Peeling Away" - Eight new scholars have joined together in an arts-based collaborative inquiry in response to our call. What emerges will be a surprise to us, and to them, and our curiosity dwells in the journey and landscapes which emerge. Work in Progress!

Friday Night Dinner Hosts

Friday evening 5:30-7:30

Each table is hosted by a welcoming introduction and a provocative question to invite dinner guests to contribute to the conversation.

Dinner Table Sign: An Interdisciplinary Arts-based Research Centre!

Diane Conrad, University of Alberta

Successful application to the Canada Foundation for Innovation Leaders Opportunity Fund to develop an Interdisciplinary Arts-based Research Centre in the Faculty of Education bodes well for the future of arts-based research at the University of Alberta. The grant will provide infrastructure and equipment to support arts-based research across campus. That the proposed project received the backing that it did from my Department, Faculty and University was a welcomed endorsement. I hope that this success can serve as a precedent for promoting arts-based research efforts widely. What does the future hold for arts-based educational research in Canada?

Dinner Table Sign: Where There’s a Wool, There’s a Way: Unsettling conversations in a traditional MEd program milieu

Robin Enns, Brandon University

In winter 2003, I taught an MEd course in Curriculum Development through the tactile metaphor of all students crocheting (‘developing’) afghans big enough for themselves. My use of this aesthetic way of knowing was a contrast to the university’s largely cognitive approaches to teaching and learning, and, as a result, led in many quarters to unsettling conversations characterized by disbelief, sarcasm and anger. Over supper, I will tell you the story of this experience, and will ask you to share your own experiences of unsettling conversations concerning your non-cognitive teaching and learning approaches.

My questions to you are:

Have you run into serious opposition to non-cognitive teaching/learning approaches you have tried? What got you through the resistance you experienced? Have you used these approaches again? Has any resistance turned to acceptance … or, better yet, enthusiasm?

Dinner Table Sign: Explorations in Found Poetry

Monica Prendergast & Alison Pryer, University of British Columbia

We have been engaging in poetic inquiry practices of many kinds over the past few years, and have recently published examples of found poems that make use of theoretical texts as source material. We are interested in unsettling the understanding of how poetry has been situated in a research context. In our view, the placing of poetry into a research context is in itself an unsettling act, as it pushes inquiry from the empirical or interpretive to the lyrical and metaphoric.

What changes occur in both the researcher and the topic of inquiry when the move to poetry is made?

Dinner Table Sign: Body Affect—As it moves

Miriam Cooley & Elena Del Rio, University of Alberta

See Transition I (below) for description.

What continuities and discontinuities can one observe or feel when experiencing different media (film versus live performance/image versus sound)? Are these perceived in the form of thoughts or feelings?

Dinner Table Sign: Repeated Narrations

Alexandra Fidyk & Jason Wallin, National Louis University, University of Alberta

See Transition II (below) for description.

We offer a textscape of image, sound, and movement to speak of/to/about our manuscript, The Daimon, The Scarebird and Haiku: Repeated Narrations, a discursive braiding of three texts surrounding the lived experience of embodiment. We attempt to interrupt the binary idea of text as a mode of representation militating against artistic consideration and offer an example of writing with difference, with rawness and with raw aesthetic.

Dinner Table Sign: Naked Nurse: Strip-teasing artscience

Shona Lalonde, June Parnell-Parmley, Lynda McLeod, & Joanna Szabo, Camosun College

We reflect and consider how we will reveal and conceal the tensions between our nursing curriculum intentions in using simulated technology (for more information on METI-man see website http://www.meti.com/hps.html ) through our philosophical underpinnings (steeped in currents of humanism, feminism, phenomenology, and critical social theory).

We become unsettled with/in our process as we co-create re-presentations of a product…

We attempt a balance between parts as we envision an imperfect whole, peeling a/way through technology, exploring and exposing humanness, paying attention to layers and textures of awareness, expectations and assumptions.

How do we invite conversations about art and science in a way that values each equally and respectfully?

Dinner Table Sign: The Icing on the Cake

Dalene Swanson & Susan Gerofsky, University of British Columbia

Student teachers are located at an uneasy nexus of competing forces and internal conflicts around the construction of self and work, political tensions, educational conflicts and competing demands about the needs of learners.

Teacher educators face similar contradictory imperatives, including a desire to prepare new teachers for survival in real classrooms while acting as agents of change bringing innovation to schools, the wish to establish respectful relationships with students while at the same time challenging their preconceptions.

In negotiating this rough and dangerous ground, student teachers and teacher educators often experience a push towards the “path of least resistance,” which leaves the norms of schooling unchanged.

In this performance piece, at once mysterious, disturbing, and delicious, dinner guests will be invited to speculate on what lies at the heart of teacher education, and what is “just the icing on the cake.”

Transition I

Friday morning 11:30-12:00

Miriam Cooley & Elena Del Rio, University of Alberta

(also dinner hosts)

Body Affect: As it moves - In our performance we experiment with the effects drawn from combining dance and movement-based images from a variety of films with film sound and music, and with a live voice-over that relays/translates the affective impact of sound and image in a poetic sense. Our goal is to manipulate the time frame of the image (speed, beat, repetition, discontinuity) and the movement of the body/image to capture the affective intensity produced by onscreen moving bodies.

What continuities and discontinuities can one observe or feel when experiencing different media (film versus live performance/image versus sound)? Are these perceived in the form of thoughts or feelings?

Transition II

Saturday morning 10:30–11:00

Alexandra Fidyk & Jason Wallin, National Louis University, University of Alberta

(also dinner hosts)

Repeated Narrations - We offer a textscape of image, sound, and movement to speak of/to/about our manuscript, The Daimon, The Scarebird and Haiku: Repeated Narrations, a discursive braiding of three texts surrounding the lived experience of embodiment. We attempt to interrupt the binary idea of text as a mode of representation militating against artistic consideration against art and offer an example of writing with difference, with rawness, with raw aesthetic.

What is it about beginnings? Why does the printed word appear permanent, like etchings in stone? Or the ending of a story? Fixed. Finite. I reread the pieces and am both energized and paralyzed by the parallels yet resist the need to step into and stretch the gaps within the strands of another’s thinking, voice and writing in order for the project to proceed. How do I make their text my own, while maintaining the integrity of the work? Perhaps just follow my breath as I follow their texts, write with the rhythm…and work my words into their weave. Pause and flow.

Evening Musical Café

Friday 7:30 p.m. to dawn!

Peter Gouzouasis, Anne Marie LaMonde, Julia Nolan, Michael Toth, Chris Trinidad, University of British Columbia, & Lorna Ramsay, Simon Fraser University

Musicians Composing Narratives in A/r/t/ography

 Arts-based educational research has taken root in various educator circles over the past 15 years. Arts-based educational research, resonating principally in dance, drama, creative writing, and visual art over the past decade, is a vital means of investigation yet to be embraced in music education.

The session will be framed by a multimedia presentation elaborating some of the principles of a/r/tography. Briefly, the methodological underpinnings of our research are constructivist, phenomenological, and interpretive in nature. However, one important feature for our approach is that it is arts-based. We call our approach to research
a/r/tography (Irwin, 2004) because it starts from art and graphy, or art and writing. Ideally, it emphasizes action-oriented forms of living inquiry that stem from continuous reflection upon the artist, researcher, and teacher identities and roles by harnessing the arts as forms of inquiry and representation.

For a/r/t/ographers, the arts-based part of research is more than illustrative since we acknowledge that the arts not only "inform" learning, they also shape learning and qualitatively predict success in learning. Throughout our symposium, we will explore and elaborate:

• What these developments are and what they can become when musicians converge artistic, research, and teaching (a/r/t) identities.

• How we enact and re-enact narratives in music teaching and learning contexts, both from pedagogical and curriculum perspectives.

• How we perceive and understand our educator-learner self, committed to ongoing inquiry in music and education.

• How we prime the world within and without to continually re-envision ourselves as artists and educator/learners continually developing abilities, skills, and expertise over time.

• How we perceive and understand ourselves as artists committed to experiencing the art of music making within a community of artists-researchers-teachers, with other musicians and other artists converging multiple modalities.

The contrasting portions of the symposium will be composed of performances by six a/r/tographic researchers that focus on educational issues in both secondary school and university settings. Our narrative research will embody multiple and integrative forms: confessionals, autobiographies and autoethnographies, fictional and creative non-fictional representations, and poetic representations. Our forms are profoundly influenced by our music making, our research, and our teaching and learning (i.e., our a/r/t).

We will situate our work in performative contexts. Finally, we will look at the challenges facing researchers in the area of music education and highlight the arts-based research practices at our university over the last decade, focusing on the role that music, visual art, and poetry have played in these developments.