Zoekresultaten

At the Heart of Art and Earth

In today’s technological world, human intertwinement with the rest of nature hasbeen severely diminished. In our digital culture, many people hardly have any direct experience of and sense of connection with “the real” of the natural world. The author assumes that when we want to find ways to mend this gap, arts-based environmental education (AEE) can play a meaningful role. In AEE, artmaking is regarded as itself a way of potentially gaining new understandings about our natural environment. As a reflective practitioner, the author facilitated three different AEE activities, at several times and at diverse locations. On basis of his observations, memories, written notes, audio-visual recordings and interviews with participants, teachers and informed outsiders, he interpreted the experiences both of participants and himself. To this end he employed interpretative phenomenological analysis paired with autoethnography.The artmaking activities researched here aimed to bring about a shift in focus. Participants were encouraged to approach natural phenomena not head-on, but in an indirect way. Moreover, the artmaking process aspired to heighten their awareness to the presence of their embodied self at a certain place. The research questions that the author poses in this study are: (1) What is distinctive in the process of the AEE activities that I facilitate?; (2) Which specific competencies can be identified for a facilitator of AEE activities?; and (3) Does participating in the AEE activities that I facilitate enhance the ability of participants to have a direct experience of feeling connected to the natural world?In this explorative study, the author identifies facilitated estrangement through participating in AEE as an important catalyst when aiming to evoke such instances of transformative learning. In undergoing such moments, participants grope their way in a new liminal space. Artmaking can create favorable conditions for this to happen through its defamiliarizing effect which takes participants away from merely acting according to habit (on “autopilot”). The open-ended structure of the artmaking activities contributed to the creation of a learning arena in which emergent properties could become manifest. Thus, participants could potentially experience a sense of wonder and begin to acquire new understandings – a form of knowing that the author calls “rudimentary cognition.” The research further suggests that a facilitator should be able to bear witness to and hold the space for whatever enfolds in this encounter with artistic process in AEE. He or she must walk the tightrope between control and non-interfering.The analysis of the impacts of the AEE activities that were facilitated leads the author to conclude that it is doubtful whether these in and of themselves caused participants to experience the natural environment in demonstrable new and deep ways. He asserts that most of their awareness was focused on the internal level of their own embodied presence; engagement with place, the location where the AEE activity was performed, seemed secondary. The findings show that AEE activities first and foremost help bring about the ignition and augmentation of the participants’ fascination and curiosity, centered in an increased awareness of their own body and its interactions with the natural world. The present study can be seen as a contribution to efforts of envisaging innovative forms of sustainable education that challenge the way we have distanced ourselves from the more-than-human world.

Designing research with creativity : arts-based methods as a way to co-create with destinations

Ways to listen to a river

Dit verkennend onderzoek, dat in opdracht van de provincie Utrecht werd uitgevoerd, richt zich op de pilot-residentie Ways to listen to a river van componist Nahuel Cano. Deze residentie werd geproduceerd door Residenties in Utrecht in opdracht van de Provincie Utrecht. Het doel van het verkennend onderzoek was het bevorderen van kennisontwikkeling rondom de waarde en impact van de pilot-residentie. Daarbij werden tijdens het onderzoek de principes van Arts Based Research (ABR) als theoretische lens ingezet. De deelnemers (beleidsmedewerkers en kunstenaars) van het onderzoek geven aan de principes van ABR in hun eigen werkwijze en/of in voor hen bekende artistieke praktijken te herkennen. In de beleidsontwikkeling rondom dergelijke artistieke trajecten lijkt een meer procesmatige, ‘bottom-up' benadering van belang. Daarbij kan het mogelijk helpen om per artistiek traject niet ouput-gestuurde, maar eerder proces-gestuurde afspraken te formuleren. Deze procesafspraken dienen vooraf en tijdens een traject, onder andere met behulp van aandachtspunten van ABR, gezamenlijk met de betrokkenen (bijvoorbeeld de kunstenaar(s), beleidsmedewerker(s), producent(en) en deelnemers) van een artistiek traject te worden geformuleerd.

Engaged Research-Led Teaching: Composing Collective Inquiry with Digital Methods and Data

This article examines the organisation of collaborative digital methods and data projects in the context of engaged research-led teaching in the humanities. Drawing on interviews, field notes, projects and practices from across eight research groups associated with the Public Data Lab (publicdatalab.org), it provides considerations for those interested in undertaking such projects, organised around four areas: composing (1) problems and questions; (2) collectives of inquiry; (3) learning devices and infrastructures; and (4) vernacular, boundary and experimental outputs.Informed by constructivist approaches to learning and pragmatist approaches to collective inquiry, these considerations aim to support teaching and learning through digital projects which surface and reflect on the questions, problems, formats, data, methods, materials and means through which they are produced.

Ways to listen to a river

Dit verkennend onderzoek, dat in opdracht van de provincie Utrecht werd uitgevoerd, richt zich op de pilot-residentie Ways to listen to a river van componist Nahuel Cano. Deze residentie werd geproduceerd door Residenties in Utrecht in opdracht van de Provincie Utrecht. Het doel van het verkennend onderzoek was het bevorderen van kennisontwikkeling rondom de waarde en impact van de pilot-residentie. Daarbij werden tijdens het onderzoek de principes van Arts Based Research (ABR) als theoretische lens ingezet. De deelnemers (beleidsmedewerkers en kunstenaars) van het onderzoek geven aan de principes van ABR in hun eigen werkwijze en/of in voor hen bekende artistieke praktijken te herkennen. In de beleidsontwikkeling rondom dergelijke artistieke trajecten lijkt een meer procesmatige, ‘bottom-up' benadering van belang. Daarbij kan het mogelijk helpen om per artistiek traject niet ouput-gestuurde, maar eerder proces-gestuurde afspraken te formuleren. Deze procesafspraken dienen vooraf en tijdens een traject, onder andere met behulp van aandachtspunten van ABR, gezamenlijk met de betrokkenen (bijvoorbeeld de kunstenaar(s), beleidsmedewerker(s), producent(en) en deelnemers) van een artistiek traject te worden geformuleerd.

Feltscapes

In this paper the Feltscaping-method is described, its characteristics and requirements, and some examples of how it was used and further developed. In doing so this paper aims at embedding feltscaping into the existing discourse of arts-based research. Furthermore, it will reflect on possibilities for further development of the Feltscaping method.The development of the method started seven years ago, as Cora Jongsma as a way of delving into the different layers of the landscape connected with the landscape. The product of this process is a feltscape, a representation of the landscape made up of several layers of wool that tells a story about a specific area. The layering in the feltscape, in the beginning, was purely the result of interaction between the creative process, conversations with land users, landscape research and visual experience, drawing a parallel to the formation process of the landscape. Starting as a personal search of the artist on how to connect the feltscapes to the landscape, after a few years, developed into an instrument to stimulate good conversation with people that in one way or another are connected to the landscape. In this way, feltscapes enable the researcher to test and exchange own sensory perceptions and to extent existing knowledge or questions about the landscape by eliciting social interactions.