Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

In this paper, I will present the outcomes of my three-year research project titled “Drawing Outside the Lines: Challenging Representations of the Body Online in a Studio Art Classroom”. Emerging from a detailed analysis of hours of interviews with students, student artworks, artist statements and reflections, I will showcase how participation in a studio art course enabled students to rigorously challenge common conceptions of the body in social media. Taking up themes ranging from sexting, race, gender, diet and influencer culture, consent, bullying, privacy, and surveillance within their work, I will articulate how student’s studio research, informed by a generative combination of academic and studio-based inquiry, prompted students to critically examine, analyze and challenge their relationship to social media and image-based platforms like Tik-Tok and Instagram. Secondly, I will argue through concrete examples and in-depth student accounts, how studio research was crucial to student’s comprehensive analysis of themes relating to the body in social media in ways not possible through traditional academic engagement. Through this presentation, I will showcase the intricacies of how studio art practice, loosely informed by a research-creation framework, functions to produce critical insight for and by undergraduate students on topics of critical social and global concern. I will also provide evidence of how and why artistic practice, which by nature emphasizes the dynamic use of visual, material, performative, and participatory methods, is a particularly fitting vehicle for students to reflect, affirm, problematize, and challenge their views on social media and representations of the body online.