The Africa Project: A Collaboration between a Creative Movement Consultant, an Anthropologist, and an Art Educator

This article gives a brief background of where I come from and how my experiences in Africa and North America have framed the ‘philosophy of teaching’ that defines me as a visual art educator. I reflect on the postcolonial concept of ‘decolonization’ as a means to identifying possible pedagogical alternatives of practice. Acknowledging that my knowledge embraces both ‘western’ and ‘Indigenous’ ways of knowing, poses a question for me as an art educator about ways to design and implement pedagogies that embrace contextualized experiences in order to achieve meaningful learning within formal education. I conclude by stating that nothing will effect change within Uganda’s education sector, particularly in reference to visual art education and practice, without educators having a firmer grasp of their scholarly standpoint on knowledge and learning. Development of concrete ways of bringing together diverse ontological, epistemological and axiological positions of western and Indigenous knowledge systems as well as art pedagogies to facilitate learning, will require educators to develop structures and strategies that progress from the bottom up in order to benefit from the values, beliefs and ways of knowing within diverse local communities.

Download Full-text

Exploring Simple Machines With Creative Movement

Cases on Models and Methods for STEAM Education - Advances in Educational Technologies and Instructional Design ◽

10.4018/978-1-5225-9631-8.ch005 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 92-121

Author(s):

William Paul Lindquist ◽

Martha James-Hassan ◽

Nathan C. Lindquist

Keyword(s):

Science Content ◽

Creative Movement ◽

Urban Elementary School ◽

Simple Machines ◽

Movement Strategy ◽

Core Idea ◽

Past Experiences ◽

Unit Plan ◽

The Impact ◽

Science Investigations

This chapter explores the use of creative movement to extend meaning to inquiry-based science investigations. This process embraces the addition of A to STEM to realize the impact of STEAM. The chapter builds on the import of scientific and physical literacy, interdisciplinary learning, and the power of kinesthetic engagement. Students become active collaborative agents within a dynamic model using creative movement to bring meaning to the science of simple machines. The authors utilize working words into movement strategy to help students use their past experiences and motor memory to explore, interpret, and engage with as they seek understanding of simple machines. A Midwest urban elementary school provides the context for a unit plan culminating in a dance performance. The foundational ideas presented within this unit can be enacted within any classroom by creative movement (physical education or dance) specialists, science specialists, or classroom generalists. It follows with a presentation of science content on simple machines exploring the disciplinary core idea of force and motion.

Download Full-text

Legaspi, Cesar Torrente (1917–1994)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem851-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Eileen Legaspi Ramirez

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Working Class ◽

Subject Matter ◽

The Philippines ◽

Farm Workers ◽

World War ◽

Art Educator ◽

Internal Migrants ◽

Early Image ◽

Seasonal Farm Workers

Cesar Legaspi was a Filipino painter known as one of the 13 Moderns, a group of emergent artists whose work, according to artist-art educator Victorio Edades, was an alternative to the classicism and nostalgia-laced realism popular during the pre-World War II juncture of American colonialism in the Philippines. Along with peers Hernando Ocampo and Vicente Manansala, Legaspi was part of a generation of artists whose early image making engaged with questions of distortion, and the liberties artists could take in construing reality. In the early 1950s, these painters were regarded as the neo-realist triumvirate. While they produced works dealing with the same everyday subject matter as conservative artists of the period, they unselfconsciously took from other stylistic traditions that they encountered through research and peer exchanges. In doing so, they worked towards more individuated ways of rendering subjects, finding affinities with Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism. In the post-World War II period, the Neo-Realists manifested a cynicism toward the urbane, which they resolved visually in different ways. A well-known work of Legaspi’s from this period, Gadgets II (1949), depicts the mutant fusing of man and machine in an age where the industrial was both feared and mythologized. This work, alongside pieces imaging the working class (including stevedores, grave diggers, beggars, seasonal farm workers, and internal migrants) is associated with his early proletarian or proto-social realist phase.

Download Full-text