Arts Education and Curriculum Studies

The Contributions of Rita L. Irwin

Mindy R. Carter, Valerie Triggs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315466996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

Highlighting Rita L. Irwin's significant work in the fields of curriculum studies and arts education, this collection honors her well-known contribution of a/r/tography to curriculum studies in the form of arts based educational research and, beyond this, her contributions towards understanding the inseparability of making, knowing, and being. Together the chapters document an important beginning, as well as an ongoing transitional time in which curriculum understood as aesthetic text is awakening to the ways in which art practices stimulate a social awareness at the level of other embodied practices. Organized in three themes, gathering, transforming, and becoming, this volume brings together a selection of Irwin's single and co-authored essays to offer a variety of rich perspectives to scholars and students in the field of education who are interested in the ways in which arts-based research allows the possibilities of bringing together the artistic, pedagogical, and scholarly selves of an educator.

Theme 1
Gathering

Figure 1.1 Untitled, detail. Rita L. Irwin & Alexandra Lasczik Cutcher, Acrylic Painting 2016.

(Reprinted with permission)

Theme 1
Introduction

Gathering an Artful Curriculum

Valerie Triggs

“For me, an artful curriculum is a curriculum full of life”

Rita L. Irwin, 2004

A clearer statement of Rita L. Irwin’s passion and of her contributions to curriculum studies would be hard to find. Her work has focused for decades, on the integrated capacities of art for feelings of relational aliveness. There are consequences, of course, for choosing to go this route as an academic, including a necessity of foregoing a life of isolated and solitary scholarly pursuit. One must experience instead, educational practice in more “meaningful holistic ways” (Irwin, 2004a, p. 1) and Rita has never backed away from these responsibilities. In this section several papers have been chosen to highlight the significance of Rita’s tremendous and influential work in gathering: addressing the curriculum subject in its relational living and its shades of open-ended becoming, rather than solely into its representational value.

Irwin’s scholarship began in a time in twentieth century history, when curriculum theory had undergone a radical 10-year revolution. The revolution’s rebels who dedicated their careers to the labour of moving curriculum in the 1970s, from a practical and bureaucratic field to one that augmented the relational subject, were particularly impactful. Among her strong influences include curriculum reconceptualists William Pinar, Ted Aoki, Maxine Greene and Elliot Eisner, all of whom challenged the technical, narrowing movement of reform discourse characterized by instrumental rationality. Each worked to increase the complexity of teaching and educational practice by locating the curriculum field within the world, a dynamic world, rather than one closed off for uncritical applicability in the classroom. Reconceptualization focused on the future of curriculum as movement and intensity, opportunities to build on the vast array of work already done as well as to find oneself within its vast potential. From within this shift, William Pinar et al., (1995, 2004) invited and anticipated, a second wave of curriculum scholars. They encouraged engagement and study in curriculum as a vital and energetic field rather than a docile following of institutional documents neatly subdivided.

Irwin accepted this invitation to practice the major currents of reconceptualization including self-realization and society (in Pinar et al., 1995, 2004, p. 866) and she added the causal force of art and the aesthetic. Through her decades of commitment to this work, art has become recognized in curriculum scholarship as an intellectual endeavour. Working in the midst of curriculum’s charged field, Irwin’s research engaged scholars from around the world in a variety of research projects through which it is possible to trace movements of ideas that are reworked and generated in new ways. Her curricular gatherings are evident: place and time, indigenous and western European knowledge, the emergence of the self in collaborative work, knowing, doing and making, artists, curators, educators and researchers, research, teaching and artmaking, the visual, textual and the performative, technique and content, thought and action, art and life. Maxine Greene’s (in Pinar et al., 1995, 2004) prediction of the curricular work of the artistic-aesthetic to help fade “old either/ors” (p. 568) seemed to be accepted by Irwin as a challenge to address, and to live, throughout her career.

In The Spirit of Gathering, late 1990s work with indigenous artists and scholars on an international art exhibition is shared. The chapter describes the use of what were at the time, new videoconferencing methods to invite participant driven work of reclaiming indigenous histories in order to reconstruct futures. Irwin, Rogers and Reynolds employed these technologies as a way of understanding place and time in less fixed, more moveable ways and as a way of connecting geographically and physically displaced peoples. New media became places for perpetuating a more relational sense of time and the research gatherings were a means of making visual contributions of the possibilities that the connections generated in both the process and culminating exhibition. Drawing from the writing of John Dewey, Irwin highlights the paradox of how the self is created in the give and take: a practice of self in the midst. The creativity of expression does not bring the renewed self into existence from nothing; rather, it is in the aftereffects of composing forces of subject interaction, subjects with histories and stories, that something in excess is generated. George Littlechild, one of the participants, described this collaborative research process as sacred, a gathering that is about both the past and about living together now.

Irwin, Rogers and Farrell argue for the role of historical agreements between indigenous peoples and early European settlers in both Australian and Canadian multicultural policies in the chapter titled Multiculturalism Denies the Realities of Aboriginal Art and Culture. They bring to light the ideology of the dominant majority that is inherent in a multicultural policy focused on individual rights of cultural identity and social justice. The indigenous peoples with whom Irwin et al. collaborated, objected to the notion of rights and associated instead, an understanding of the individual only in relation to responsibility. While objecting to ownership of the land, the participants stipulated that they belonged to the land and that land claims were important in order to maintain traditional relationships to the land. Their responsibilities in these traditional relationships were evidence, for these particular participants, of gatherings that move beyond the individual as the sole locus of curriculum work.

Perhaps influenced by her early feelings of the connectedness between celebrating art and celebrating the aliveness of noticing beauty while living on her family’s farmland, Irwin’s curriculum contributions refrain from polarizing knowledge into conventional categories. Her sense of a curriculum full of life may have been part of the impetus of Irwin’s connections with others who engage art outside of already determined orders of representation. The research in Making Connections Through Cultural Memory, Cultural Performance, and Cultural Translation found that traditionally, the indigenous peoples with whom Irwin, Rogers and Wan collaborated never separated art out from life and in fact, that there was no word for art in any of their languages. Art, land, cultural performance and daily living were connected and celebrated. Art, as a conceptual category was created first in a non-indigenous ideology and subsequently brought to bear on a western European understanding of indigenous beliefs. The study found that it was instead, more appropriate for the participants to speak of art in terms of spirituality, the essence of life, the pulse of creation, something practiced in a communal evocation, and considered a means of passing on and renewing collective knowledge from one generation to another. Art was embedded in the performance of culture, something to be made of the body; it was part of sensitizing oneself to change by seeing oneself implicated in the lives of others, as well as in the unknowability and hope of what all might yet collectively become.

Focusing on the field of art education, Irwin and Chalmers in Experiencing the Visual and Visualizing Experiences review two interpretations of curriculum: curriculum-as-plan where one attends to experiencing the visual and curriculum-as-lived where the focus is on visualizing experiences. This chapter offers curriculum studies a literature review that gathers practices and policies of art education in several countries, and reconceptualises the various perspectives not as sharp distinctions but as trajectories of practice that push other bearings into conversation. The influence of Aoki (in Pinar & Irwin, 2004) is evident. Living in the tensionality between curriculum-as-plan and curriculum-as-lived-experience is the place, he argued, for the teacher to dwell; from out of this place of sensing one’s relation to a complicated conversation, flows one’s way of knowing, thinking and doing. Residing in a present with past experience that carries open possibility makes it less easy to fall neatly back into pre-assumed categories. Irwin (in Irwin & de Cosson, 2004) argues, “to live the life of an artist who is also a researcher and a teacher is to live a life of awareness, a life that permits openness to the complexity around us, a life that intentionally sets out to perceive things differently” (p. 33).

Curriculum reconceptualists profoundly challenged educational practice that anchored the self that was to be educated to an objective existence that was prior and exterior to the form of its expression. Working within the field of reformulated curriculum as the moving form of practice, the capacity to mirror things and to be separate from the world no longer made sense and the self could no longer be considered a fixed reference for understanding what was other. Individualism began to give way to relation. Irwin drew inspiration from this relational understanding as well as from the work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In each of the chapters in this section, one can trace Irwin’s focus on the practice of the self as a multiplicity in flux, a self still to come. Rather than addressing the subject through critique and narrowly defined language, Irwin engaged art in sensing the extra-linguistic forces that strike the body as it practices its events of change. The self emerges in its taking in of what it is not, as it re-makes itself. In later years, Irwin helped to develop a/r/tographic research and practice as a way to break the symmetry of representational modes, to open the field of curriculum studies to the surprise of what might emerge in the proliferation of practices of curriculum’s moving form, which both shed and cultivate their expressions of self.

For those of us fortunate enough to know Rita Irwin personally as a teacher, colleague, mentor or friend, we have been included in her gatherings of graduate students, colleagues, community people, research projects, conference presentations and celebration events. Her work has provided and continues to provide openings for the work of others: some for its critique, some for its relational and aesthetic potential. Looking ahead, it seems that Irwin’s second wave contributions move as Pinar et al. (1995,.2004) predicted, into other overlapping discourses that are hybrid and interdisciplinary, do not focus too narrowly, and build on what has already been done. In addition to augmenting the crashing of a second wave of curriculum reconceptualization, Irwin is also part of initiating a diffractive wave. Gathering, rather than delineating, her work offers a discernment of the present that is already being infected by a next carrier wave, inviting interference. This is an artful curriculum of living, and gathering is the shape of its fullness.

References

Irwin, R. L. (2004a). A/r/tography: A metonymic métissage. In Irwin, R. L. & de Cosson (Eds.). A/r/tography: Rendering self through arts-based living inquiry (pp. 27–38). Vancouver, BC: Pacific Educational Press.

Irwin, R. L., & de Cosson, A. (Eds.). (2004). A/r/tography: Rendering self through arts-based living inquiry. Vancouver, BC: Pacific Educational Press.

Pinar, W., Reynolds, W. M., Slattery, P., & Taubman, P. M. (1995/2004). Understanding curriculum: An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary curriculum discourses. New York: Peter Lang.

Pinar, W.F., & Irwin, R.L. (Eds.). (2004). Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted Aoki. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

1
The Spirit of Gathering, or L’esprit Du Rassemblement

Rita L. Irwin, Tony Rogers, and J. Karen Reynolds

Irwin, R. L., Rogers, T., & Reynolds, J. K. (2000). The spirit of gathering , Canadian Review of Art Education, 27 (2), 51–72. [Irwin, R. L., Rogers, T., & Reynolds, J. K. (2000). L’esprit du rassemblement. Critique de l’éducation artistique Canadienne, 27 (2), 51–72.] Reprinted with permission of Canadian Society for Education through Art.

In recent years, Canadian and Australian art educators have become sensitized to cultural pluralism (eg. Chalmers, 1996) and the related issues of identity, representation and appropriation (eg. Long & Dickason, 1996). Further to this, policies governing multiculturalism and First Nations have been critiqued in both countries (Irwin, Rogers & Farrell 1999). Yet, art education curricula have been slow to include issues related to Aboriginal cultural sources, identities and locations as a way to understand and contest assumptions, meanings, beliefs and values.

Elsewhere, we have written about First Nations and Aboriginal peoples and communities in Canada and Australia. In all of this research, it is apparent that to be truly involved in cross-cultural work, research must take on the characteristic of researching with people rather than researching about people (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Alcoff, 1991; Harding, 1987, 1991; 1993). Through the development of an international Aboriginal art exhibition, we have worked with artists, curators and gallery directors and programmers, to engage in socially relevant and personally meaningful work.

Our work with Aboriginal artists and communities began a number of years ago when we worked with several communities as they immersed themselves in the work of reclaiming histories in order to reconstruct futures (Reynolds, 1991; Irwin & Farrell, 1996; Irwin, Rogers & Wan., 1997, 1999). Over time, our roles as art educators and community workers developed and we became interested in exploring videoconferencing as a research and teaching tool (Rogers & Irwin, 1997 for Aboriginal artists searching not only within themselves but within a larger, perhaps even global Aboriginal community (Irwin et al., 1997).

Over the last few years we have been bringing together two Canadian First Nations artists, George Littlechild and Faith Louis Adams, and two Australian Aboriginal artists, Max Mansell and Heather Shearer,¹ two curators, Amir A little Alib...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor Introduction
• THEME 1 Gathering
• THEME 2 Transforming
• THEME 3 Becoming
• About the Editors
• List of Contributors
• Index