October 11, 2007 presentation: Pauline Sameshima

CHALLENGING LEARNING SPACES WITH COMPLICIT DESIGNS

The art of learning is the act of gathering text, image, and experience into a connection that adheres to one’s personal frame of reference. The use of visual-spatial reasoning skills to conceptualize ideas and then the transferal of those ideas into a rendered presentation concretizes that learning. Artful teaching is thus a sharing of that personal rendering which unlike closed curriculums, opens doors to complicit designs for knowledge production and acknowledgment.

Pauline will offer insights into the construction of her dissertation, Seeing Red, which challenged the form of the traditional research format. Pauline wrote a fictional epistolary novel (book of letters) incorporating poetry and 17 pieces of art. The work, now published, won national level American and Canadian awards in the fields of Arts Based Educational Research and Teacher Education, as well as the Ted. T. Aoki Prize in Curriculum Studies.

Pauline teaches in the WSU College of Education and heads the Arts Integration Courses. She is the associate editor of the International Journal of Education and the Arts and author of Seeing Red: A Pedagogy of Parallax, published by Cambria Press.

Click here for the 22MB PowerPoint.

September 27, 2007 presentation: Greg Turner-Rahman and Jayme Jacobson

VISUAL REASONING

Can reasoning be visual? What are the implications of trying to improve visual-spatial skills across the curriculum? How do we go about doing that? Please join us for a brownbag presentation/discussion to hash out these questions.

Based on a paper presented at the Global Conference for Visual Literacies at Oxford this summer, we argue that students need to develop visual reasoning skills to engage with emergent ideas that are often highly complex, abstract, and multidimensional. We note that passive analysis provides insufficient training for visual-spatial reasoning. Unfortunately, a major roadblock to improving visual reasoning through praxis is the age-old prejudicial distinction of “thinking” as intellectual and “doing” as vocational. In the academy, fundamental misconceptions about the cognitive strategies required for visual production, combined with simplistic disciplinary boundaries, create barriers to sharing problem solving strategies across disciplines. This week, we hope to prompt a discussion around how to create visual reasoning assignments that support multidisciplinary collaboration, engage students, and improve learning.

Greg Turner-Rahman is a professor of New Media Studies in the College of Art and Architecture at the University of Idaho; Jayme Jacobson is an Learning Design Consultant at the Center for Teaching, Learning, & Technology at WSU.

September 13, 2007 presentation: Ayad Rahmani

KAFKA AND ARCHITECTURE

"Kafka and Architecture" is a presentation that is just as much about Kafka as it about architecture; on the one hand, looking at architecture to analyze Kafka's central concerns in language and psychology, while on the other, appropriating the author's work as a way to explore new theories in architecture. To Kafka, architecture represented more than a means with which to locate his characters, giving them, say, a place to call home and a city to access friends and work; rather to him architecture offered a kind of obstacle course whose hurdling gave his characters, along with his readers, a way to become more aware of the world and their role in it. The presentation is in reference to a book by the same name and will travel more or less in parallel with it, briefly exploring each of its chapters and ultimately weaving a connection between architecture and literature.

Ayad Rahmani is a professor in the Washington State University School of Architecture and the author of the book, Place Meaning and Form in the Architecture and Urban Structure of Eastern Islamic Cities.