Installation, Cloud Collector Zines (a/r/tographer), Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, August 2016
Gazing, Forward
“The goal of education—any kind of education, but especially a humanistic education—is traditionally understood as being twofold. First, the students are supposed to acquire a certain knowledge, certain practical skills, and a certain professionalism in the field in which they are being educated. Second, the students are supposed to be changed as human beings, formed anew by their education—to become different, more accomplished, even a better example of humanity” (Groys, 2009, p.26-27).
This digital thesis as A/R/T (artist-researcher-teacher) Portfolio is a curated space where I have mapped, cartographically explored and archived my journey. This journey in and to W(w)wonderland as a/r/tographer has been archived here, curated as a personalised digital portfolio space and designed as a digital site to continue after submission, to create relational openings in art education for creativity, self discovery and identity. This curated and purposeful collection of digital identity a/r/tefacts is designed as a storied curriculum for art education. It is an authentic artefact of this inquiry, an archival site of a performed and interventionist pedagogical story as thesis for a PhD Candidate. Now, as I gaze forward, through both the metaphor and metonymy of a/r/tography, I am reflective of where I have been and where I am going within this rhizomatic and relational space. Here I have opened a digital provocation through the design of an intervention for personalised learning. This Portfolio has been created to critique the cultural norms, experiences and practices of creativity in art education and to document a turn to the digital, a turn to the art portfolio as a tool for creativity and the turn toward praxis for art educators.
When I set out on a researcher’s path a decade ago in Denver, Colorado the journey into w(W)onderland was an unknown. Wonderland was still an invisible space, yet to be discovered beyond my art teacher self. If I had known at the time what I was to discover down the rabbit hole, chasing the elusive rabbit, I may have not been prepared for what I would find out about myself. The rhizomatic digital world of wonderland has opened new ideas, new opportunities and new spaces and places for people to learn, and has allowed me to develop new skills, experiences and knowledge as an artist, researcher, teacher and as a/r/tographer. Throughout these mapped and rendered chapters I have explored this new embodied knowing through sharing this constructed narrative of self and my community for my colleagues of art educators and art education through a developing understanding of digital pedagogy, creativity and the storied self. These renderings continue to create reverberates and have shifted my sight/site/cite to creativity through the turn to digital portfolios as ongoing deep sustained creative artefacts of both process and product. This turn to embodied knowing and praxis can not be altered or erased, it is storied here as as art encounter in an artefactual auto-ethnography.
When I set out on a researcher’s path a decade ago in Denver, Colorado the journey into w(W)onderland was an unknown. Wonderland was still an invisible space, yet to be discovered beyond my art teacher self. If I had known at the time what I was to discover down the rabbit hole, chasing the elusive rabbit, I may have not been prepared for what I would find out about myself. The rhizomatic digital world of wonderland has opened new ideas, new opportunities and new spaces and places for people to learn, and has allowed me to develop new skills, experiences and knowledge as an artist, researcher, teacher and as a/r/tographer. Throughout these mapped and rendered chapters I have explored this new embodied knowing through sharing this constructed narrative of self and my community for my colleagues of art educators and art education through a developing understanding of digital pedagogy, creativity and the storied self. These renderings continue to create reverberates and have shifted my sight/site/cite to creativity through the turn to digital portfolios as ongoing deep sustained creative artefacts of both process and product. This turn to embodied knowing and praxis can not be altered or erased, it is storied here as as art encounter in an artefactual auto-ethnography.
When I set out into Wonderland, I made four commitments to a/r/tography:
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These commitments are rendered here within the story of my becoming as an a/r/tist in this a/r/tographic inquiry for art education and portfolio pedagogies. These four commitments support a turn to a curriculum that encompasses and embodies creativity. On this journey, my commitment to a/r/tography took a number of turns, shifts and lines of flight. I began down the rabbit hole, in the land of Alice, the white rabbit and the cheshire cat and each of these key characters of Alice and her Adventures, have been played by seminal thinkers and researchers who have guided, steered, or purposefully disrupted my path through wonderland. In this liminal digital space, the place of creativity and creative possibilities have shifted the site within a turn to the digital and through placemaking the self. I have experienced a becoming within this storied curriculum writing, within practice based embodied pedagogy as research, taking an affective turn toward praxis. The pedagogical turn to creativity, was found on a turn to embodiment, located within sustained creative practice within the collection of a/r/tefacts, reflection on the collections of praxis, and then re-framed and re-inforced by the curation of these artefacts, within the excess of this inquiry. Throughout this ongoing process of inquiry, in doing and being a/r/tography I have produced new knowledge for art education and the portfolio research community through weaving the discourses within and throughout my own, inside a deep sustained and personalised digital learning space.
This Portfolio is an exhibition of the a/r/tefacts written and created my the many identities and a/r/t selves of this inquiry. It is published here as a narrative of my experience of and in a/r/tography, blended and connected through an emerging methodology and embodiment of praxis as an a/r/tographer. This Portfolio not only presents my journey in the digital wonderland as an a/r/tist through a/r/tworks, rhizomatic a/r/t writing and a/r/tefacts generated from ethnographic videos woven through my narrative in conversation, it is a moment in time captured for art education. My travels to this moment, have been filled with joyous and adventurous sites and sights, explored as a Deleuzo-Guattarian (O’Sullivan, 2006) and supported by colleagues, mentors and researcher field guides who have supported my thinking, steered my travels, propped up my ideological pursuits, offered bigger and deeper questions and allowed me to deep dive beyond the plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
As a relational artist, researcher and teacher, the digital publication of this digital A/R/T Portfolio as thesis has been created and curated to allow the audience in this art encounter (O'Sullivan, 2001) to co-participate in the co-construction of meaning for my curated objects and artist identity artefacts designed and composed on site as a Portfolio. This curated space, has been designed and developed as a place of learning and teaching, to be affective and for the collaborative discourse found between the gaps of a/r/tography, auto-ethnography and ethnographic video to be rhizomatic and free from capture in the digital. Why? I want to bring creativity into artist-teaching, through an embodied understanding of a(A)rtist and sustained creative practice. I want artist-teachers (Duke & Simmons, 2006) to invite C(c)reativity and artful inquiry into teaching and learning, not to leave the artist self with creativity at the door of the art classroom. I want art education to claim creativity, to develop creative classrooms and creative identities through sustained deep, reflective personalised learning. To do this, I have (re)framed the self, (re)positioned, and (re)claimed (re)search to create new dialogue, and new openings for reverberations to resonate outside of the field of art education and to provide opportunities for openings into c(C)reativity through portfolios in art education.
My embodied praxis and performed ways of knowing pervade everything in a/r/t and can be found woven throughout this curated Portfolio.
Gazing forward into visual arts education in this new century, the digital demands new ways of learning and teaching visual culture, creativity and critical engagement with art practice, art criticism and art histories Our understanding and connection with art is increasingly taught through the visual aesthetic experience, and the visual affect (Deleuze, 1981) has shifted our relationship with culture. As we teach our artist-students to make, respond and critique this visual affect we can turn art education and its pedagogies toward a more experiential and personalised methodology through personalised learning and teaching (ACARA, 2016; Wright, 2015). This pedagogical turn has pushed the need for me to highlight that art education needs to focus on creativity, visuacy and criticality as a way of keeping art in schools relevant and rigorous for new generations of students to develop themselves and learn about their worlds through reflection framed by stories, memories and captured moments of the self as a learner, while learning to see as artist. The new Victorian curriculum, in response to the new Australian National Curriculum, asks that we all incorporate learner capabilities that include critical and creative thinking. The curriculum authority claim that they are inextricably linked and when taught explicitly, invite metacognitive thinking. “Thinking that is productive, purposeful and intentional” (VCAA, 2016). I propose that through personalised digital portfolios, art education can support identity development through becoming. Becoming artist by develop a way of being in the world as a creative that recognises skills, knowledge and experiences. How? Curating and documenting the learning journey through personalised, reflective, self directed, critical and deep sustained learning as artist in a portfolio.
This Portfolio is an exhibition of the a/r/tefacts written and created my the many identities and a/r/t selves of this inquiry. It is published here as a narrative of my experience of and in a/r/tography, blended and connected through an emerging methodology and embodiment of praxis as an a/r/tographer. This Portfolio not only presents my journey in the digital wonderland as an a/r/tist through a/r/tworks, rhizomatic a/r/t writing and a/r/tefacts generated from ethnographic videos woven through my narrative in conversation, it is a moment in time captured for art education. My travels to this moment, have been filled with joyous and adventurous sites and sights, explored as a Deleuzo-Guattarian (O’Sullivan, 2006) and supported by colleagues, mentors and researcher field guides who have supported my thinking, steered my travels, propped up my ideological pursuits, offered bigger and deeper questions and allowed me to deep dive beyond the plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
As a relational artist, researcher and teacher, the digital publication of this digital A/R/T Portfolio as thesis has been created and curated to allow the audience in this art encounter (O'Sullivan, 2001) to co-participate in the co-construction of meaning for my curated objects and artist identity artefacts designed and composed on site as a Portfolio. This curated space, has been designed and developed as a place of learning and teaching, to be affective and for the collaborative discourse found between the gaps of a/r/tography, auto-ethnography and ethnographic video to be rhizomatic and free from capture in the digital. Why? I want to bring creativity into artist-teaching, through an embodied understanding of a(A)rtist and sustained creative practice. I want artist-teachers (Duke & Simmons, 2006) to invite C(c)reativity and artful inquiry into teaching and learning, not to leave the artist self with creativity at the door of the art classroom. I want art education to claim creativity, to develop creative classrooms and creative identities through sustained deep, reflective personalised learning. To do this, I have (re)framed the self, (re)positioned, and (re)claimed (re)search to create new dialogue, and new openings for reverberations to resonate outside of the field of art education and to provide opportunities for openings into c(C)reativity through portfolios in art education.
My embodied praxis and performed ways of knowing pervade everything in a/r/t and can be found woven throughout this curated Portfolio.
Gazing forward into visual arts education in this new century, the digital demands new ways of learning and teaching visual culture, creativity and critical engagement with art practice, art criticism and art histories Our understanding and connection with art is increasingly taught through the visual aesthetic experience, and the visual affect (Deleuze, 1981) has shifted our relationship with culture. As we teach our artist-students to make, respond and critique this visual affect we can turn art education and its pedagogies toward a more experiential and personalised methodology through personalised learning and teaching (ACARA, 2016; Wright, 2015). This pedagogical turn has pushed the need for me to highlight that art education needs to focus on creativity, visuacy and criticality as a way of keeping art in schools relevant and rigorous for new generations of students to develop themselves and learn about their worlds through reflection framed by stories, memories and captured moments of the self as a learner, while learning to see as artist. The new Victorian curriculum, in response to the new Australian National Curriculum, asks that we all incorporate learner capabilities that include critical and creative thinking. The curriculum authority claim that they are inextricably linked and when taught explicitly, invite metacognitive thinking. “Thinking that is productive, purposeful and intentional” (VCAA, 2016). I propose that through personalised digital portfolios, art education can support identity development through becoming. Becoming artist by develop a way of being in the world as a creative that recognises skills, knowledge and experiences. How? Curating and documenting the learning journey through personalised, reflective, self directed, critical and deep sustained learning as artist in a portfolio.
As I have been on this PhD journey, the contemporary art world has shifted and turned. The arts in Australia have seen massive cuts and threats. There has been the risk of art school closures in higher education, the axing of A Level art history in the UK, and funding losses after the Australia Council budget cuts under a conservative government. A shining light in this dark space has been found within the Australian National curriculum, where the invitation and call for creativity, critical thinking and digital literacies is heard. Just as Bishop (2006) now a decade ago suggested, Deleuze and Guattari "have provided the foundation for several contemporary theories political action" (p.13) and this rhizomatic growth and change in art has shifted participatory spectatorship and art audience, a turn to active engagement with art has resulted in a discourse that is educated and highly politicised. I too have shifted, and turned as my sight lines found their way to new sites, new sights and new cites in learning, teaching and research, the rhizome is entangled, bundled and clumped at the centre where this living inquiry began. I have explored, investigated and captured all that I could harness and collect for my field here in a curated collection of digital identity artefacts developed over a number of years gazing, digital lurking and knowledge building in the rhizome. I have tried to serve as guide in this relational space through placemaking my knowledge, through presentations and papers where I have shared my pedagogical approach to community and active interpretation of the digital spectacle. The critical lens of a/r/t-auto-ethnography provides a spectator viewpoint allowing me to gaze inwardly while interpreting and creating language for my community.
Just as Alice’s sister called her to wake up and then listened intently to her curious dream, I recall Adele Flood’s note to me upon finding my path in the depths of wonderland.
The two questions, where did you come from and where did you go? Will inform your PhD writing.
Stay on your chosen path and enjoy the journey.
With love, Adele
W(w)onderland is a place of learning, a metaphor for the invisible digital spaces and places we can not see, but thrive behind the pages of our devices, not a place I seek to leave but to harness and capture for my community. This digital pedagogical turn is life long work that has been so important for my practice and turn to praxis as a/r/tographer that the outcomes of this study will continue to thread new woven inquiries in future sites. Sites in art education, and studios classrooms where the turn to the digital can support and extend learning, teaching and research beyond our physical sites and develop a personalised approach to education. I have been an educator in a range of roles in schools and universities for two decades. These stories are bundled here, and have been built on as the guide for my continuing story as it develops beyond this digital thesis. What excites me about the digital is making visible what we can't see, a site that has shifted and changed learning and teaching forever. Just as technology turned education and learning sites, the digital, participatory and collaboratory shifts the site again. The digital is rhizomatic, relational and open. The turn to art and a/r/tography opens new spaces for our disciplinary language to permeate through our education spaces and for us to claim the language of our discipline and shift others toward an understanding of art. The turn to portfolios in the digital space invites learning and teaching in art education to harness the digital through curation, placemaking and composition to create places that present and exhibit art process and product as sites of exhibition.
The turn to embodied praxis and performative research has provoked me to continue on my journey to build deep personalised learning for art education through sustained creative practice and reflective digital portfolios. As a rhizomatic educator, I am always working from the centre of the rhizome where the living inquiry develops, and then following the continuing growing line of flight and weaving sight and story lines in the multiple directions that is leads me. Here in this Portfolio I have recorded the lines of flight that this story led from within the centre, where the self as artist, as researcher, as teacher, and as a/r/tographer are intertwined with the digital, in a space that will continue to be explored and mapped for art in the future The provocations that began this inquiry continue to pose and provoke new questions at each site of growth and have prompted me to continue on my journey as a/r/tographer to develop learning and teaching openings through relational, participatory and community driven learning and teaching.
The two questions, where did you come from and where did you go? Will inform your PhD writing.
Stay on your chosen path and enjoy the journey.
With love, Adele
W(w)onderland is a place of learning, a metaphor for the invisible digital spaces and places we can not see, but thrive behind the pages of our devices, not a place I seek to leave but to harness and capture for my community. This digital pedagogical turn is life long work that has been so important for my practice and turn to praxis as a/r/tographer that the outcomes of this study will continue to thread new woven inquiries in future sites. Sites in art education, and studios classrooms where the turn to the digital can support and extend learning, teaching and research beyond our physical sites and develop a personalised approach to education. I have been an educator in a range of roles in schools and universities for two decades. These stories are bundled here, and have been built on as the guide for my continuing story as it develops beyond this digital thesis. What excites me about the digital is making visible what we can't see, a site that has shifted and changed learning and teaching forever. Just as technology turned education and learning sites, the digital, participatory and collaboratory shifts the site again. The digital is rhizomatic, relational and open. The turn to art and a/r/tography opens new spaces for our disciplinary language to permeate through our education spaces and for us to claim the language of our discipline and shift others toward an understanding of art. The turn to portfolios in the digital space invites learning and teaching in art education to harness the digital through curation, placemaking and composition to create places that present and exhibit art process and product as sites of exhibition.
The turn to embodied praxis and performative research has provoked me to continue on my journey to build deep personalised learning for art education through sustained creative practice and reflective digital portfolios. As a rhizomatic educator, I am always working from the centre of the rhizome where the living inquiry develops, and then following the continuing growing line of flight and weaving sight and story lines in the multiple directions that is leads me. Here in this Portfolio I have recorded the lines of flight that this story led from within the centre, where the self as artist, as researcher, as teacher, and as a/r/tographer are intertwined with the digital, in a space that will continue to be explored and mapped for art in the future The provocations that began this inquiry continue to pose and provoke new questions at each site of growth and have prompted me to continue on my journey as a/r/tographer to develop learning and teaching openings through relational, participatory and community driven learning and teaching.
Now as a practicing a/r/tographer curating in a relational digital space, this re-reflection, where I have reflected on reflection on reflection, as curator, in this curatorial digital imaginary has re-framed and re-imagined my thinking. I have been affected (O’Sullivan, 2006). Affected through an embodied art encounter with metacognitive knowledge found in the restructure and curation of my new knowledge about creativity, identity and digital portfolios, generated in the reflection on the collection I captured during the study and again through the lens of curatorial practice, as I exhibit my artist-identity artefacts and wrap my accidental ethnographic videos around my thinking. All of the artefacts generated in this thesis as study have been rhizomatically written, and created as documentation through synthesis and sense making. This reflective process as a/r/t-auto-ethno-grapher have reifed and re-positioned, re-framed and re-contextualised the common threads of my practice.
“Affects are (to use Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, and to move the register away from deconstruction and away from representation) the molecular “beneath” the molar - the molecular understood here as life’s, and art’s, intensive quality, as the stuff that goes on beneath, beyond, even parallel to, signification” (O’Sullivan, 2013, p.11).
My approach to being and becoming include provocations to be activated as a participant, it is an a/r/tographical approach and philosophy highlighted within this relational inquiry to support portfolios as personalised spaces for art education. In the curation of artefacts, as a/r/tpgrapher I have created a space to see how learning in and through a personalised portfolio as both process and product affects creativity and aids in forming identity as a/r/tist through learning to see, reflect on and notice the common threads in practice over time for my community and field. Being within this living inquiry, I have searched and re-searched to get to the core of portfolios to support this implementation in art education that I propose as a practioner by building, designing, creating and curating my own. Thinking back to the initial provocation - Is what I have been teaching, developing and designing what other artists do? What do other artists think that a portfolio enables and actions in their practice? How can this knowledge help my field and a new generation of artists?
To begin the mapping of this trip into wonderland, I posed four questions to provoke my a/r/t encounter:
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These four questions have been both a provocation, and a guide on this journey on my exploration of wonderland as a/r/tographer for art education. Where did I go? I went out to my community to see whether what I was doing, designing and teaching was what other artists were developing in this new digital space of portfolios Nine co-participant artist's began this journey alongside me, their voices captured and curated here in the rendered chapters of a/r/tographic practice and woven amongst my own, captured here as they shared their explorations into the digital as portfolio developers and designers to shift pedagogy and invite a turn to the self as artist. Now here as I look back at this mapping and the journey to embodied knowing, being and becoming I reflect on the provocations of the exploration.
What are the characteristics of an artist’s digital portfolio?
As Ahmad, Pamela, Glenn, Pam, Flavia, Zahrah, Laurie, Belinda and Samuel have shared, the characteristics of an artist’s portfolio are contextual to their practice, while representing and symbolising their practice to a range of audiences in a variety of ways. Each of the portfolios are purposefully curated, as coherent and clear presentations of practice as exhibitions of work created over time. Our current curriculum policies and programs already suggest portfolios as visual diaries, are pedagogically significant reflectional spaces for developing process as artist. As the co-participant artists in this inquiry add, the turn to the digital adds another series of reflective layers to the visual diary through deeper reflection, reflection in action as curation and reflect on the self through digital publication of work for a further audience in the digital space. Digital portfolios in art education provide the space to tell the story of artist, to create a space for self discovery through a personalised investigation of art as artist for an art audience. As the nine co-participant artist digital portfolios show us the exhibitions are presented to invite an audience to their practice while engaging with the audience as relational spaces. Harnessing the artist digital portfolio and creating an opening in art education have the potential to shift learning toward the self and personal learning journey, support reflection through a presentation of the self, while exhibiting and presenting a digital story of learning, through personalised learning as artist. As de Vuve (2009) suggested, “by addressing everyone as if each person were a lover of art, indeed, an artist, we liberate desire and enthusiasm” (in Vella, 2016, p. xiii).
As Ahmad, Pamela, Glenn, Pam, Flavia, Zahrah, Laurie, Belinda and Samuel have shared, the characteristics of an artist’s portfolio are contextual to their practice, while representing and symbolising their practice to a range of audiences in a variety of ways. Each of the portfolios are purposefully curated, as coherent and clear presentations of practice as exhibitions of work created over time. Our current curriculum policies and programs already suggest portfolios as visual diaries, are pedagogically significant reflectional spaces for developing process as artist. As the co-participant artists in this inquiry add, the turn to the digital adds another series of reflective layers to the visual diary through deeper reflection, reflection in action as curation and reflect on the self through digital publication of work for a further audience in the digital space. Digital portfolios in art education provide the space to tell the story of artist, to create a space for self discovery through a personalised investigation of art as artist for an art audience. As the nine co-participant artist digital portfolios show us the exhibitions are presented to invite an audience to their practice while engaging with the audience as relational spaces. Harnessing the artist digital portfolio and creating an opening in art education have the potential to shift learning toward the self and personal learning journey, support reflection through a presentation of the self, while exhibiting and presenting a digital story of learning, through personalised learning as artist. As de Vuve (2009) suggested, “by addressing everyone as if each person were a lover of art, indeed, an artist, we liberate desire and enthusiasm” (in Vella, 2016, p. xiii).
Is an understanding of the self important for an artist? If so, what does a sense of self bring to a curriculum conceived as a journey? (Wang, 2004, p. 122).
As my own becoming and turn to praxis through an embodied understanding of creativity and creative praxis has reified, identifying the common threads of your practice, seeing them in front of you, through reflection, curation and presentation (visible or invisible) is a profound reflection of identity. This sense-making is supported by reflection and reflection as curation through personal storytelling. One of the converging ideas that found its way rising to the top of my reflections on the stories told here in this study, is the artist self and the self as artist, as a significant aspect of an artist’s becoming. As each of the co-participants have shared, they had always made art and had a good sense of self as artist, verified by family, friends or teachers who recognised their ability to see the world a particular way, there had been an affect, a becoming as artist after a verification, an assertion from an other, that you are artist. This turn to embodied knowing of the self is an important aspect of artist and artistry. As Archer (2000) tells us, if there is no embodied knowing, no embodiment of knowledge within the field through seeing the self, there is no development of identity. My own becoming in this study has included a turn to using the term artist-student for art education, for the use of the word, term, descriptor 'artist' for becoming. I have asked that my teacher candidates claim the word artist for their definition of self as Artist-teacher also. Artist-teachers and artist-students as a metaphor for creativity in action in schools, is an outcome that I want to pursue for creative practice and embodiment. As art-theorist de Vuve (2009) asks us to consider, teaching the ‘artist as artist’ is a significant shift in art education to an inclusive, open and creative space where imagination, creativity, critical and divergent thinking can thrive in a storied curriculum.
As my own becoming and turn to praxis through an embodied understanding of creativity and creative praxis has reified, identifying the common threads of your practice, seeing them in front of you, through reflection, curation and presentation (visible or invisible) is a profound reflection of identity. This sense-making is supported by reflection and reflection as curation through personal storytelling. One of the converging ideas that found its way rising to the top of my reflections on the stories told here in this study, is the artist self and the self as artist, as a significant aspect of an artist’s becoming. As each of the co-participants have shared, they had always made art and had a good sense of self as artist, verified by family, friends or teachers who recognised their ability to see the world a particular way, there had been an affect, a becoming as artist after a verification, an assertion from an other, that you are artist. This turn to embodied knowing of the self is an important aspect of artist and artistry. As Archer (2000) tells us, if there is no embodied knowing, no embodiment of knowledge within the field through seeing the self, there is no development of identity. My own becoming in this study has included a turn to using the term artist-student for art education, for the use of the word, term, descriptor 'artist' for becoming. I have asked that my teacher candidates claim the word artist for their definition of self as Artist-teacher also. Artist-teachers and artist-students as a metaphor for creativity in action in schools, is an outcome that I want to pursue for creative practice and embodiment. As art-theorist de Vuve (2009) asks us to consider, teaching the ‘artist as artist’ is a significant shift in art education to an inclusive, open and creative space where imagination, creativity, critical and divergent thinking can thrive in a storied curriculum.
What does an artist think the portfolio reflects about practice and/or process?
Portfolios are sites where the processes, products and reflections on both can be archived, recorded and exhibited in a personalised site, owned, composed, curated and created by the artist, artist-teacher and/or artist-student. They are pedagogical sites, sites of artful inquiry and sites of re-search for the self and then re-framed and re-positioned in a site specific exhibition for an audience. In this sense, digital portfolios are a cabinet of wonder for artist-students to compartmentalise, organise, frame and collect identity-artefacts developed as artist over time while exploring their creative practice. The portfolio reflects the development of creative capacity through learning to see, notice and create art that reflects a personalised view of knowledge and understanding of self through sense-making and storying learning. A digital portfolio for an artist is a site for metacognitive experience and knowledge creation as they select image and text, and make material practice selections, choices and compositional decisions as digital self-curator to thread a narrative through the re-framing of identity artefacts to present and exhibit. Through the curation and reflection on practice, re-framed and re-conceptualised in a new site, the portfolio developer and curator presents a copy of their practice for an audience. The copy of the practice is a new story, where process and product are storied like never before, now wrapped and displayed in a new story for a new audience beyond the walls of the studio. Portfolios as digital sites like this, are relational and dependant on an audience to be activated, have purpose, context, meaning and rhizomatically create a new node, growing outward in a new space as sites of embodied and performed knowledge for a/r/t.
Portfolios are sites where the processes, products and reflections on both can be archived, recorded and exhibited in a personalised site, owned, composed, curated and created by the artist, artist-teacher and/or artist-student. They are pedagogical sites, sites of artful inquiry and sites of re-search for the self and then re-framed and re-positioned in a site specific exhibition for an audience. In this sense, digital portfolios are a cabinet of wonder for artist-students to compartmentalise, organise, frame and collect identity-artefacts developed as artist over time while exploring their creative practice. The portfolio reflects the development of creative capacity through learning to see, notice and create art that reflects a personalised view of knowledge and understanding of self through sense-making and storying learning. A digital portfolio for an artist is a site for metacognitive experience and knowledge creation as they select image and text, and make material practice selections, choices and compositional decisions as digital self-curator to thread a narrative through the re-framing of identity artefacts to present and exhibit. Through the curation and reflection on practice, re-framed and re-conceptualised in a new site, the portfolio developer and curator presents a copy of their practice for an audience. The copy of the practice is a new story, where process and product are storied like never before, now wrapped and displayed in a new story for a new audience beyond the walls of the studio. Portfolios as digital sites like this, are relational and dependant on an audience to be activated, have purpose, context, meaning and rhizomatically create a new node, growing outward in a new space as sites of embodied and performed knowledge for a/r/t.
What can we learn from artist portfolios to inform art education?
Digital portfolios ask the creator and curator to take on the role of the artist, researcher and teacher, in a relational and creative space through placemaking and mapping of a journey. Digital portfolios are live exhibition sites where image and text are art and research, where they archive, record and keep digitised content within a story as learner as artist and, allow for new openings to create the opportunity for art and artists to create relational discourse in the digital space. As the nine co-participant artist's have shared, we can learn about the lives of artists, about embodied knowing, about practice and about community through an auto-ethnographic collection of artefacts.
Through the exploration of my own creative practice, and reflection on my processes and products as a/r/tographer, and again as critical auto-ethnographer and curator, I have been affected. This metacognitive experience and self-regulation through metacognitive knowledge (Flavell, 1987) is an associated outcome of a number of portfolio studies in a range of contexts and types of folios (Mills-Courts & Amiran, 1991; Zellers & Mudrey, 2007; Peet, 2012; Wozniak & Zagal, 2013). As Bokser, Brown, Chaden, Moore, Navarre Cleary, Reed, Seifert, Barro Zecker and Wozniak (2016) found when exploring the role that portfolios play in students' reflection, “metacognition is an individual’s awareness of and thoughts about his/her own thinking and learning processes; it is also an ability to monitor, track, evaluate, and change those thinking and learning processes” (p.34). As they present in their study, “metacognition is key for 21st century learners to succeed in academic and professional contexts and reveals the need for metacognitive support” (Bokser et al., 2016, p.35) in learning and teaching. This metacognitive knowledge has presented me as a creative practitioner, with the common threads of my work, made visible in my praxis, through ongoing and cyclic reflection as curator and shifted a turn to toward embodied knowledge. My stories make me who I am, my stories and the (hi)stories of the artists, the art world and art participant as audience make the stories for art education to add to their own and generate new histories in new contexts. Storying these (hi)stories as research is “a way for us [a/r/tographers] to be present to each other; the act provides a space for us to create a relationship embodied in the performance of writing and reading that is reflective” (Adams, Holman Jones & Ellis, 2015, p.5) and offers us the space to create new stories in new contexts for affect and becoming, through artistry and artful inquiry.
Digital portfolios ask the creator and curator to take on the role of the artist, researcher and teacher, in a relational and creative space through placemaking and mapping of a journey. Digital portfolios are live exhibition sites where image and text are art and research, where they archive, record and keep digitised content within a story as learner as artist and, allow for new openings to create the opportunity for art and artists to create relational discourse in the digital space. As the nine co-participant artist's have shared, we can learn about the lives of artists, about embodied knowing, about practice and about community through an auto-ethnographic collection of artefacts.
Through the exploration of my own creative practice, and reflection on my processes and products as a/r/tographer, and again as critical auto-ethnographer and curator, I have been affected. This metacognitive experience and self-regulation through metacognitive knowledge (Flavell, 1987) is an associated outcome of a number of portfolio studies in a range of contexts and types of folios (Mills-Courts & Amiran, 1991; Zellers & Mudrey, 2007; Peet, 2012; Wozniak & Zagal, 2013). As Bokser, Brown, Chaden, Moore, Navarre Cleary, Reed, Seifert, Barro Zecker and Wozniak (2016) found when exploring the role that portfolios play in students' reflection, “metacognition is an individual’s awareness of and thoughts about his/her own thinking and learning processes; it is also an ability to monitor, track, evaluate, and change those thinking and learning processes” (p.34). As they present in their study, “metacognition is key for 21st century learners to succeed in academic and professional contexts and reveals the need for metacognitive support” (Bokser et al., 2016, p.35) in learning and teaching. This metacognitive knowledge has presented me as a creative practitioner, with the common threads of my work, made visible in my praxis, through ongoing and cyclic reflection as curator and shifted a turn to toward embodied knowledge. My stories make me who I am, my stories and the (hi)stories of the artists, the art world and art participant as audience make the stories for art education to add to their own and generate new histories in new contexts. Storying these (hi)stories as research is “a way for us [a/r/tographers] to be present to each other; the act provides a space for us to create a relationship embodied in the performance of writing and reading that is reflective” (Adams, Holman Jones & Ellis, 2015, p.5) and offers us the space to create new stories in new contexts for affect and becoming, through artistry and artful inquiry.