A Focus on Pedagogy
Abstract
The study while acknowledging the works of the Postcolonial scholars of the Global South, over the past two decades at least, in 1. creating the awareness about the traumatic past and 2. engaging the academics, thinkers, policy makers and other stakeholders in making conscious efforts to decolonize the society, reevaluates the strategies for a more comprehensive and result oriented approach in art and design education in Pakistan. In doing so it looks at the conceptual challenges, redefines terms and expressions and relocates the compass on imminent challenges then merely reiterating the cause and effect of being a colony. It proposes engaged-scholarship and not only community-engaged but contextually-engaged learning and systems of knowledge production as a promising approach towards a more stabilized society that is eager to create an impact on the global horizon. The deviating democracies, delipidated economies, technological advancements, human conditions and ecologies intensify the need to integrate teaching-learning-research-scholarship-communal development as a connected activity. This implies complex interactions between various streams of knowledge: physical, meta-physical, spiritual, philosophical and or applied. One system, one strategy and one approach is no longer a solution. There can be as many appropriate answers to a given question in art and design education. If history, politics, religion and economy had been the important integers while understanding the creative practices in the past, memory, archives, connectivity is the present while diversity, equity, empathy, sustainability and collaboration would be the future of art and design in Pakistan. Combining the preferred methods of historiography, ethnography and other sister disciplines of humanities, important art centers and cultural hubs are looked up as field of study.
Sadia Pasha Kamran is an art educator, a theorist and a published scholar. She has been teaching Art History and Art Theory since she graduated from the National College of Art, Lahore in 1995. She completed her M-Phil in 2011 followed by a PhD in 2019. During this time, she has taught at the National College of Arts, BeaconHouse National University, Kinnaird College for Women, Research Center, University College of Art & Design. Currently, she is the Head School of Art and the member Syndicate at the Institute for Art & Culture Lahore. Her research on contemporary art of Pakistan informs about her experience of teaching art and her appreciation of the indigenous teaching methodologies. She places the contemporary art of Pakistan within its socio-political and historical context to trace its development as it transforms from traditional to modern in contemporary practices. Conforming on the works of twentieth-century thinkers of Postcolonialism, she evaluates the systems of knowledge production and art making according to the local sensibilities of art and design pedagogy and practice.
5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
Wednesday 20th April, 2022