Abstract:
This presentation cuts a path through Visual Art educators’ responses to the Teaching and Learning in COVID-19 Times survey study. It explores their tensions and anxieties as well as their significant flexibility and creativity as they report on their art teaching/learning experiences as they flex, pivot and plan their teaching/learning across face-to-face and online/remote learning. The presentation explores the impact of quick-change-around scheduling; relentless work hours; the need to adapt quickly to new technologies, the impact of no shared art materials and the advent of designing ‘art at home’ activities where equal access to materials and digital programs needed consideration. At the same time art teacher’s increased capacities are explored across instructional dialogue, computer skills, management of time and management of anxiety, while developing creative options for visual art experiences within a pedagogy of care.In combination, the presentation calls on autoethnographic accounts of the presenter’s own experiences of lecturing in the visual arts during the same time period. The presentation becomes a conversation between the survey data and the presenter’s lived experience of teaching in COVID-19 times. As such, concepts born out of the loss of normality, the un, loss, lack that art educators feel through teaching in COVID-19 times are explored as ‘openings’ that ‘displace meaning’ and ‘allow for slippages’ that create a newly felt ‘presence through absence’ (Springgay, Irwin and Kind, 2005, p.898). Through the hazy effect of teaching art during the lockdown, pandemic, uncertainty, the unknown path; many questions are presented for our consideration:What is essential to art education and what is our shared responsibility?How can we call on radical relatedness (Bickel, 2011) in sync with the haze of our times to prepare pre-service/art teachers for the field?Can “(w)e”-who-are-not-one-and the-same-but-are-in-this convergence-together” (Braidotti 2020, p.469) act collectively as art-eductors?Bickel, B., Springgay, S., Beer, R., Irwin, R. L., Grauer, K. Xiong, G. (2010). A/r/tographic Collaboration as Radical Relationality.International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 10(1), 86-102.BraidottiBraidotti, R. (2020). “We” are in this together, but we are not one and the same. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. 17(4), 465-469.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-020-10017-8Springgay, S., Irwin, R. L., & Kind, S. W. (2005). A/r/tography as living inquiry through art and text.Qualitative inquiry, 11(6), 897-912.