Events, News

Call for papers: Public Pedagogical Formations of Histories

The Public Pedagogies Institute invites proposals for a forthcoming seminar series on the Public Pedagogical Formations of Histories.

The field of public pedagogy is still relatively new and emerging but has much to offer in how education is enacted. As a discipline public pedagogy looks to instances of learning and teaching outside of formal educational institutions. This includes but is not limited to spaces recognised as sites of informal learning. However, this does not indicate a binary, but rather porous moments where the contours of history are mitigated by public memorialisation, vigils, or other forms of representations. What are the pedagogical affordances and limitations of these respective representations of histories? Public pedagogy recognises the speaking subject in the instances of those who occupy the public realm and contribute to a public understanding of histories.

This seminar series draws on the field of public pedagogy and the educational affordances in the consideration of public memory and public history. It brings together presentations that examine both the relationship between sites of informal learning and the past, and that examine the histories of learning and teaching outside of formal education institutions.

  • How might history be informed by a public pedagogical framing?
  • What are the histories of learning and teaching outside of formal education institutions?
  • How might approaches to public pedagogies benefit from engagement with the history ofeducation?
  • How is the past remembered and in what ways is the past carried forward in the public realm?
  • What pedagogical responsibilities do we as communities have to bring a public into a relationship with the past and what might the public contours of this engagement look like?

This seminar series will be held via zoom and will run on a Friday Australian Eastern Standard time 10.00am—12.00pm beginning the 7th of March and concluding on the 4th of April 2025. If you would like to present as a part of this seminar series, please send a proposal no later than January 31, 2025, to Karen.Charman@vu.edu.au.

Seminar presenters will be invited to submit their paper to be published in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Public Pedagogies.

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Recommended reading in the field of public pedagogy:

Biesta, G 2012, ‘Becoming Public: Public Pedagogy, Citizenship and the Public Sphere.’ Social and Cultural Geography, vol 13, no 7, pp. 683-697.

Burdick, J, Sandlin, J and O’Malley 2014, Problematizing Public Pedagogy, Routledge.

Charman, K and Dixon, M 2024, Theorising Public Pedagogy: The Educative Agent in the Public Realm. Routledge.

Charman, K and Dixon, M 2022, Theory and Methods for Public Pedagogy Research, Routledge.

Charman, K, Dixon, M, Bellingham, R Thomas, M and Cooper, J 2017, ‘Educational Consciousness: Breaking Open the Category of Knowledge in Footscray’, Journal of Public Pedagogies, vol 2, pp. 54-63.

Sandlin, JA, Schultz, B and Burdick, J 2010 The Handbook of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning Beyond Schooling. Routledge.

News

Intergenerational Maps Project

This project is based around drawing together older, longer term residents with younger, newer residents in a local area they share.

Prior to the COVID pandemic, Gallery Sunshine Everywhere acquired funding from Brimbank Council and implemented the project in Sunshine, a suburb in Melbourne’s west. A report is available in the Projects section of www.gallerysunshine.com.

In 2019, Gallery Sunshine Everywhere joined with the Public Pedagogies Institute in a successful grant application to Moonee Valley Council to run a similar program in Flemington. 

With the various lockdowns in Melbourne, demolition of the Flemington Community Hub, the proposed location for the project, relocation of the Hub’s activities to other community settings, continuing preferences for online rather than in person activities along with staffing changes and considerable changes to the original plan, the Intergenerational Maps Project faced several false starts. Finally, in late 2022, it was decided to embed the project in the afterschool program conducted at Debney Meadows Primary School by the Edmund Rice Foundation. 

Finally, we conducted three sessions with large numbers of children each afternoon, along with the Edmund Rice Foundation mentors who work each week with the children.

Dr Iffat Khatoon welcomed the children to each session and gave them an overview of the project.

On Tuesday afternoon, local historian, Sheila Byatt led a wonderful session, capturing the attention of the Grade 3-4 children with the horseshoes and eucalyptus leaves she brought with her and lots of stories about local birds and more. Visiting artist Rhiannon Thomas then took over with a lively artwork session with students drawing their favourite local buildings.

On Wednesday afternoon, former Flemington PS principal, Rotary member and local identity, Lesley McCarthy spoke with the Grade 5-6 children, outside in the sunshine (competing with the loud building noise adjacent to the school). Together they looked at photographs of buildings and important past local events Lesley showed and which were displayed along the school walls. These told stories of old buildings, early images of familiar roads and more. Subsequently, Rhiannon Thomas led the students in an art session and they produced work to be added to the work from the other two days to form a collage documenting the Intergenerational Maps Project.

On Thursday afternoon, I shared stories from “The Stopover that stayed” by Grant Aldous with the young children, had them guess what the handmade nails I showed them were, talked about  Ballarat’s Sovereign Hill and how those who had visited had travelled there. We compared their travel experience with that of the gold diggers, looked at replica shakedowns from those days created by artist Dr Flossie Peitsch in acknowledgement of the shelter sheds Caroline Chisholm built especially for women and children making their way to the goldfields. After I showed the group a photo of my favourite local building, Flemington Post Office, the children shared theirs and with Rhiannon’s guidance produced their contributions to the collage.

Maureen Ryan
Director, Gallery Sunshine Everywhere

Conference, News

Aseel Tayah

As part of the Public Pedagogies Institute 2022 conference Sometimes Connect, we are excited to announce an hour with Aseel Tayah, creator of Bukjeh.

Aseel Tayah is a Melbourne-based Palestinian artist, creative director, and cultural leader who uses her practice to advocate for artists of colour, mothers, children, and young people, changing the world, one project at a time. She has recently been described as “an unstoppable force in the Australian cultural landscape.”

Through the power of storytelling, Aseel’s artistic practice creates awareness and facilitates connection by humanising the experiences of people who have been displaced.
As such, her work is embedded in the community and is often highly responsive to current issues. 

During Refugee Week 2020, Aseel curated produced, and presented a series of live online discussion panels featuring national and international artists and cultural leaders. The series attracted more than 40,000 views and led to an invitation to participate in the inaugural TEDx Melbourne PluggedIn event where she was awarded Best Speaker.

As a creative director and installation artist, Aseel has a wide range of experience; international highlights include We Too Want To Play, the establishment of Palestine’s first network of toy libraries and Fingerprint of an Arab Girl, an annual event showcasing the talents and achievements of girls living under occupation.

In Australia, collaborations include unique intercultural experiences such as Lullabies under the Stars, an Arabic/First Nations work for children, and the participatory installation Bukjeh, exploring stories of home and being forced to leave it.

Aseel exemplifies the use of art and creativity to achieve social justice and is renowned for her kindness, optimism, and generosity. She also has an incredible singing voice which she uses to connect hearts and harvest hope.

This event will be a feature of Day Two of the conference.

Public Pedagogies Institute Conference
November 24 -25, 2022, Footscray, Melbourne

Register Here

Aseel Tayah
Conference, News

Conference Registrations Open

Registrations are now open for the Public Pedagogies Institute 2022 conference – Sometimes Connect.

ABOUT

The annual conference of the Public Pedagogies Institute. The theme of this year’s conference is Sometimes Connect which seeks to explore what constitutes connection, how can alliances be built, what are the affordances for social change and what are moments of discord? The conference will include presentations, panel discussions and workshops, with a range of opportunities for participation. 

The conference will take place over two days and attendees are welcome to attend on one or both days. The conference is free for current students and there is a reduced fee for low income earners.

DATE

Thursday 24 November – Friday 25 November 2022

LOCATION

Victoria University Polytechnic, Footscray Nicholson Campus
238A Nicholson Street, Footscray

Keynote Speaker

Marnie Badham, artist-researcher

With a 25-year history of art and justice practice in both Canada and Australia, Marnie’s research sits at the intersection of socially engaged art practice, participatory methodologies, and the politics of cultural measurement. Through aesthetic and dialogic forms of encounter and exchange, Marnie’s collaborative social practices bring together disparate groups of people (artists, communities, industry, local government) in dialogue to examine and affect local issues.

Her recent collaborations include a participatory public performance following extreme weather events in the Dandenong Ranges; public art commissioning development on Wurundjeri and Bunurong Country with Vicki Couzens; expanded curation projects on food-art-politics; and a series of creative cartographies registering emotion in public space in the Yarra Ranges (AUS), Kamloops (CAN), and Cape Breton Island (CAN). Her book The Social Life of Artist Residencies: connecting with people and place not your own is soon to be released.

Marnie is a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Linkage Project Ambitious and Fair: towards a sustainable visual arts sector and contributes to industry standards on public art commissioning, artist residencies, and arts funding. She is Senior Lecturer at the School of Art, RMIT University. www.marrniebadham.com

Marnie Badham
Projects

Ped Talks


Hello and welcome to Pedtalks,  

This is the first in a series of podcasts presented by the public pedagogies Institute.

Ped Talks aim to contribute to the growing field of public pedagogy and interview artists, community educators and academics who identify with learning and teaching outside of formal institutions.

Our first interview is with Deb Bain King an artist who works in the west of Melbourne. 

Conference, News

Keynote speaker announced

The Public Pedagogies Institute is excited to announce Dr Marnie Badham as one of our keynote speakers for our 2022 conference Sometimes Connect.

Marnie Badham, artist-researcher

With a 25-year history of art and justice practice in both Canada and Australia, Marnie’s research sits at the intersection of socially engaged art practice, participatory methodologies, and the politics of cultural measurement. Through aesthetic and dialogic forms of encounter and exchange, Marnie’s collaborative social practices bring together disparate groups of people (artists, communities, industry, local government) in dialogue to examine and affect local issues.

Her recent collaborations include a participatory public performance following extreme weather events in the Dandenong Ranges; public art commissioning development on Wurundjeri and Bunurong Country with Vicki Couzens; expanded curation projects on food-art-politics; and a series of creative cartographies registering emotion in public space in the Yarra Ranges (AUS), Kamloops (CAN), and Cape Breton Island (CAN). Her book The Social Life of Artist Residencies: connecting with people and place not your own is soon to be released.

Marnie is a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Linkage Project Ambitious and Fair: towards a sustainable visual arts sector and contributes to industry standards on public art commissioning, artist residencies, and arts funding. She is Senior Lecturer at the School of Art, RMIT University. www.marrniebadham.com

Marnie Badham
Conference, News

PPI Conference 2022

Public Pedagogies Institute Conference
November 24 -25, 2022, Melbourne, Australia

The Public Pedagogies Institute invites proposal that respond to our 2022 conference theme Sometimes Connect.  The intent of this theme is to explore alliances that afford change.  At present there is an ever present necessity to consider how ‘we’ can work together toward mutual issues of concern. The Institute recognises the urgency for change that is increasingly stymied in prevailing dominant institutions.

This conference extends the call raised by Burdick and Sandlin (Journal of Public Pedagogies 2021, p.18) “Anker and Felski (2017) state, “[r]ethinking critique can . . . forge stronger links between intellectual life and the nonacademic world. Such links are not simply a matter of capitulation or collusion but can offer a vital means of influencing larger conversations and intervening in institutional policies and structures” (p. 19). This collaboration, employing what Latour (2004) calls an emphasis on “matters of concern [. . .] whose import then will no longer be to debunk, but to protect and to care” (p. 232) might abandon the wages, antagonistic nature, and insular interests of academic critique towards a pedagogy of care. Similarly, Charman and Dixon (Theory and Methods of Public Pedagogies Research, 2021) argue that within the public realm there is the circulation of knowledge and authority made manifest in the educative agent. The educative agent is the public pedagogue. “We do not see public pedagogy as necessarily being about a particular kind of political agency as the very act of knowledge circulation out-side of the bounded discursive power of claimed institutional knowledge is itself broadly speaking political (Charman and Dixon p.34, 2021). Max Liboiron writes “there can be solidarity without a We. There must be solidarity without a universal We. The absence of We and the acknowledgement of many we’s (including those to which you/I/we do not belong) is imperative for good relations in solidarity against ongoing colonialism and allows cooperation’ with the incommensurabilities of different worlds, values and obligations” (Liboiron, Max. 2021. Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press pp. 24-25).

Extending these prompts this conference seeks to explore what constitutes connection, how can alliances be built, what are the affordances for social change and what are moments of discord

Proposals may take the form of exemplars of practice, theoretical understandings of social movements both past and present, workshops or creative practice. The Public Pedagogies Institute works at the intersection of creativity, community education and theory.

Please note: the deadline has been extended to October 14, 2022. Submit a proposal to Karen.Charman@vu.edu.au

News

Call for Papers

Forms for Encounter & Exchange:
artist-led approaches to public pedagogy in the Asia Pacific region  

Call for Abstracts:
Special Edition of the Public Pedagogies Journal 202

Keywords: the commons, informality, community, ethics, publics, collectives, grassroots, art & activism, peer learning, public/private space, engagement, collaboration, radical pedagogy.

There is a burgeoning field of artist-led pedagogic practices in the Asia Pacific region that employs forms of shared knowledge production in the public realm as a core ethical responsibility of creative and scholarly practice. From community-led archives to public learning, collective studying to public art interventions, and collaborative approaches to art-making, the range of contexts from which these artist-led public pedagogies arise directly influence their form and the way they are encountered. These artist-led forms for encounter and exchange can engage publics by challenging hegemonies, critiquing power, and engaging communities in civil dialogue about urgent local concerns.  

As forms of public pedagogy, these practices tend to value collective approaches over the individualism imposed by western art education (KUNCI, 2020; Jurriens, 2020). While the relationship between socially engaged art and public pedagogy is typically positioned through Eurocentric traditions as an extension of avant-garde art movements, community arts, or popular education (Badham, 2019; Thompson, 2012), we extend this invitation to practices which emerge in culturally attuned ways in their respective geopolitical contexts. 

This special edition aims to stimulate a dialogue between artists, researchers and organisers who are engaged in these practices. We are particularly interested in practices of public pedagogy that: create sites for the emergence of new questions and the circulation and sharing of knowledge(s) in the public realm through artistic forms and relational pedagogical encounters (Charman & Dixon, 2021); are formed outside of institutional contexts, address social tensions, and build networks of solidarity; and are led by artists while privileging local aesthetics and community self-determination. 

We invite artists, researchers and organisers to submit critical, creative and/or experimental contributions to this special edition that explores the relationship between forms for encounter and exchange of artist-led public pedagogies and their contexts. We welcome scholarly articles (5000-8000 words), creative submissions (video, audio, or images), or a combination of creative and scholarly work.

We are particularly interested in submissions that intersect with the following questions:

  • How and why do artists organise collective forms of public learning? 
  • How do these practices activate and nurture solidarity?
  • How do artists describe and frame these practices in relation to their contexts – conceptually, politically and/or aesthetically?
  • How do these practices critique and challenge the institutions of art and education? 
  • How do publics encounter these forms for encounter and exchange?
  • How do these artist-led forms for encounter and exchange produce and circulate knowledge?

The Journal of Public Pedagogies is a peer-reviewed academic journal that is published by the Public Pedagogies Institute. The journal publishes research and practice in learning and teaching that extends beyond the boundaries of traditional or formal educational institutions. These areas may include arts, community engagement, social pedagogy, public history, work in and research on public institutions such as museums, libraries, neighbourhood houses, community centers, as well as practice, research and evaluation in public pedagogies.  

For more information: Please contact any member of our editorial committee to discuss your submission:

How to submit an abstract: send the summary of your article (500 word abstract) or creative work (300 words + and one web link to related artworks or attach three sample images) by April 30th to karen.charman@vu.edu.au. Full contributions are due July 30th. 

References

Badham, M 2019, ‘Spectres of evaluation indeterminacy and the negotiation of value (s) in socially engaged art,’ Co Creation, No. 5, pp. 205-216.

Charman, K & Dixon, M 2021, Theory and methods for public pedagogy research, Routledge.

Hussey-Smith, K (2022 forthcoming) ‘Towards community praxis in community-oriented art education’ McQuilten, G. & Palmer D. (eds.) The world we want: Dystopian & utopian impulses in art making, Intellect: UK.

Jurriëns, E 2020, ‘Indonesian Artivism: Layers of performativity and connectivity’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol, 20 no.2, pp. 231-252.

Kc, Diwas Raja (ed.) 2018, Dalit: A quest for dignity. Nepal Picture Library.

KUNCI Study Forum & Collective 2020, ‘The school of improper education’, Critical Times, vol.3 no. 3, pp. 566-578.

Thompson, N (ed.) 2012, Living as form: Socially engaged art from 1991-2011. MIT Press.

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Images:

1 One of the tools at the School of Improper Education, KUNCI (2019), Coffee and the Makers, illustration by Agen OH

2 Public Reading as Resistance (2019- ongoing) convened by Kelly Hussey Smith and Marnie Badham, RMIT University lawn, Melbourne, photo by Ceri Hann

3 & 4 An exhibition view of Nepal Picture Library’s The Public Life of Women from Photo Kathmandu 2018, photo by Chemi

Download Call For Papers 2022

Interconnecting public, learning and research