Teaching

I am a survivor. As a woman living with a disability, I have needed, as I age, to transform survival into celebration. This celebration is my learning in and through the arts and has been revealed through a passion-in-practice, in action, movement, writing, speaking and making. It is a practice in process - a praxis - in which theory is imbedded in living. It takes shape through  my teaching in studio, art history, art theory, liberal studies and interdisciplinary studies through complex relationships.

           

For years I worked in various capacities as artist, actor, director, movement coach, choreographer, mime, dancer, writer, curator, academic, visual and performance artist, professor, teacher and educator. But in coming to my PhD thesis work I focused, and became the confluence of this multiplicity. In the writing, researching, art making and performing of my thesis, I looked at my learning in/with an art educational community called the Bay Area Artists for Women’s Art. I came to see learning as embodied, dialogic, inclusive - not fixed, always open and evolving, multifaceted and complex.

This continues to inform my pedagogical practice. I see learning as thrilling in its implications - knowledge is always so, for through questioning, thinking, looking, listening, seeing we challenge our assumptions and learn to stretch who we are, what we know and what we believe we know. A creative self reflective practice is imbedded in my teaching process. While critical, it is also informed by an impulse which is open, inclusive, generous, respectful and unassuming.

This informs the development of a student who is self-aware, self-critical, self-directed and empowered in her own practice. My teaching is then student-centred and rooted in an understanding of the value of the individual experience and the relevance of this experience to art educational practice. It is a pleasurable, inclusive process.

I invite student-colleagues to take on an exploration which involves rigorously and joyfully pursuing an integration in art curricula of thought and action, artist and educator.  For art education, this means we engage with the writings (historical and contemporary) of those such as Suzanne Langer, Herbert Read, John Dewey, Elliot Eisner, Howard Gardner and Roger Clark exploring potential curricula and practices. Students then have the theoretical and practical tools to reflect on, and enact, directions and possibilities for the studio and classroom. Ah, to be a thinking, feeling individual ever-expanding self and practice, teasing boundaries to open, to discover oneself and one’s studio classroom to be multi-perspectival and multi-abled - now wouldn’t that be interesting?

Faculty Bio. OCADU
Courses taught at OCADU include:

    Learning in the Field 

    Art and Design Education Lab: AGO 

    Art and Design Education: Community 

    Life Studies Studio 

    Contemporary Issues: Art Today;

    Drawing Workshop 

    Materials and the Anthropocene

    Independent Studies: A Sense of Belonging and Identity, Angie Ma - (DRPT Undergraduate) 

    Independent Studies: Creation Research and Art Education: Vicky Talwar (IAMD Graduate) 

Other courses include:

   Teaching Art to Diverse Populations (Graduate)

    Women in the Arts 

    Introduction to Performance Studies 

    Intermediate Seminar: Visual and Performing Arts 

    Feminist Cultural Theory

    Introduction to Women's Studies

    Contemporary Art

    Contemporary Art: Art and Design Foundations

    Drawing

    Thinking Through Gender: Feminist Perspectives

    Visual Culture and Gender (Graduate)

    Drama and Art Education (Graduate)

    Advanced Studio Visual Arts

    Youth Studio

    Movement Awareness

    Gendered Movement

    Introduction to Somatics

    Experiential Anatomy

   Corporeal Mime

Other Visual/Multi/Inter-disciplinary teaching:

                       

                   1983-present: Designed and taught various workshops and programs in studio and academic practice for K - Grade 12 and post-secondary and community settings.  Programs include: contemporary drawing, professional practice, contemporary practices, site specific installation, the figurative in life drawing and performance, performance art/sculpture, costume design & construction from found material, multi-disciplinary projects in drawing, painting, and storytelling. Various institutions and organizations include: Studio Barn, The Baxter Centre for Creativity, Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, Inner City Angels, Abled/Disabled Gallery, Women’s Art Resource Centre, The Banff Centre, Art Gallery of Ontario, Centre for Women’s Studies in Education,  Three Schools of Art, Toronto School of Art, North York Board of Education.

Theatre/Mime/Movement:

1975- present: Various teaching/directing positions with youth and adults as: movement teacher, choreographer and movement coach, educational co-ordinator, artistic/administrative director, play polisher for various theatres and institutions including Theatre on the Move’s Summer Theatre School, Leah Poslun’s Theatre, Ryerson Theatre School, George Brown Theatre School, Theatre Ontario, University of Waterloo Dance Program, Stratford Theatre Troupe, Toronto High School for the Performing Arts, Faculty of Physical Education and Health University of Toronto.