Conversation, September 2018

f:

Where do you want to begin?

m:

Thanks for setting up the recording.

f:

It’s a pleasure.

m:

I’m really excited about this conversation and the whole project. In our first conversation, we were exploring where we might go with this. I’m really looking forward to ambling through these different categories of conversation and seeing where it takes us.

f:

Yes, me too.

m:

I know where you are in terms of your professional position. Tell me a bit about what you were doing right before this, and how you landed at Brock and a bit about how you came to be an art educator.

f:

Well, it began when I was a child. I loved to make art. My British family lived in South Africa then, at a very difficult time. I went to university and did an undergraduate degree in fine art, at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, majoring in painting and drawing with a minor in art history. I also did the equivalent of a B.Ed. This unfolded into making art and teaching high school art. I was showing paintings in solo and group exhibitions. Teaching in South Africa was very difficult. Under apartheid, all systems were segregated, and in schools segregation happened not just in terms of race but also in terms of gender. At one point, I taught art for a year in a public high school for boys and girls who were White, and then I taught art in a public high school just for White girls. South Africa was segregated in relation to all races, not just Black and White, but also including Indians originally from the Indian subcontinent, Asians and so on. There were 16 education departments, which was very complicated, one for each race within each province. It was a terrible system, and I didn’t like living and working in it at all. I moved to the UK, to London, to study advanced illustration at the Croydon School of Art and Design. In 1987, I was accepted into the master’s program in art education at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. I studied with Bill Zuk and Margaret Travis. I chose the University of Victoria because I knew Victoria a little. At the time, I was a practicing artist with my own rented studio, showing and selling. The MA program moved me to theory and away from making. After the MA, I spent a very happy year as an art educator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, educating docents and running art classes for people of all ages, from children to seniors. Then I was accepted into the PhD program at The University of British Columbia. This led me more deeply into theory and thinking about curriculum and assessment, which was really the direction my supervisor Ron MacGregor took me. And then a tenure track job came up as I was finishing my PhD, in 1992, and with it the pressure to write and to create an identity as a scholar, rather than as an artist.

m:

Right.

f:

And then . . . there was a huge turnaround for me around 2000, when arts-based research really began to emerge as a real possibility for engaging in scholarly work through the lens of making. I remember going to an InSEA (International Society for Education through Art) conference in Portugal in 2006 and meeting Donal O’Donoghue. Those conversations and then the reading I engaged in opened up a lot of possibilities. I turned from looking at aesthetic values inherent in criteria for assessment of studio art to a new exciting focus on social theory on the body and clothing. In this work, I continued to be interested in aesthetic values and how we make aesthetic judgments. I returned to art making, which was quite wonderful.

m:

So, when you were making art as a child, what kinds of things were you doing? Was it in school or out of school? What artwork were you drawn to, and what did you do as a kid?

f:

I...