Teaching Beyond the Curriculum
Abstract
Large lecture classes come in for necessary criticism, particularly in art and design contexts where small studio classes are highly valued. As faculty delivering curriculum to the entire first year student body, we present our story of collaboratively creating a large lecture class that feels more like a small one. Our methods are multiple and responsive, but include a concerted effort to build in vulnerability and kindness, to focus on conversational style, and to approach a conventional art historical timeline in a self-reflexive way through a linked curriculum model that takes into account the labour conditions of a small university. As a result, the course has become a space to incite curiosity as well as a site for transformative justice where we co-author group agreements with students to create reciprocity and highlight instructor vulnerability to reveal the impossibility of intellectual scope. We issue invitations to learn alongside, not from instructors. We talk about how we create an anti-imperial critique through contemporary art examples, cultural studies analyses, and diverse literary texts that challenge Eurocentric structures, but also explain our decision to adhere to a conventional timeline out of a commitment to distributive justice. Our approach undoes the expert model, focuses on conversation and collaboration, uses writing as a process-based, iterative, experiment-driven activity to develop critical literacy and prepare students for their lived realities, and to undo the vocationalization of art school education.
Jacqueline Turner is a Writing Specialist in Critical and Cultural Studies where her research investigates the role of generous curiosity in creating conditions for collaboration. She is a co-researcher in a project exploring critical literacies and pedagogy-as-gift in post-secondary learning environments. She is the author of Flourish, a book of poetic philosophy, and her forthcoming eco-fictional novel The Daphnes features characters transforming as climates wildly shift. Her earlier books include: The Ends of the Earth, Seven into Even, Careful, and Into the Fold.
Dr. Jamie Hilder is Associate Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Culture + Community. His practice, which stretches across writing, video, performance, installation, curation, and sculpture, often addresses intersections of text and image, and is currently focused on how economic conditions function aesthetically in an era of global finance capital. His book Designed Words for a Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movement, 1955-1971 (McGill UP, 2016), contextualizes concrete visual poetry within a moment of emergent globalizing technologies such as nuclear weaponry, radio transistors, air travel, and commercial graphic design. He seeks to foster collaborative relations with colleagues, students, and materials where possible, and gratefully resides on the unceded, ancestral, and traditional lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Wednesday 15th November, 2023