Tag Archives: featured

Gallery Sunshine Everywhere

Gallery Sunshine Everywhere is a project that promotes engagement with art-making and art education in schools and the broader community in the Western suburbs of Melbourne.

The project’s director, Maureen Ryan, is a Professor in the College of Education at Victoria University and an active member of the Public Pedagogies Institute. Maureen is committed to collaborative and community focussed teaching and research.

Dozens of schools and hundreds of students have been involved in the many exhibitions and other activities Gallery Sunshine Everywhere has conducted since it was established in 2007. Most of the exhibitions have been held at the Granary Cafe in Sunshine . The exhibitions mainly feature the work of pre-primary, primary and secondary school students and sometimes, local artists.

For more information contact  Maureen Ryan.

Kelabit Community Museum Development

PPI member Dr Meghan Kelly is a senior lecturer at Deakin University in Visual Communication Design whose current interests investigate the intersection of design, museums and public pedagogies. One of the projects she has been involved in is the development of a community museum in the Kelabit Highlands of Borneo, Malaysia.

The Kelabit Community Museum Development, located in Bario, in the Highlands of Borneo, was initiated by the Kelabit people’s strong sense of need to preserve their cultural heritage. This understanding was bought on by an awakening of how their traditional tangible and intangible knowledge is being lost in the transformation of the Kelabit people by progress. The aim of the Kelabit Community Museum is to provide the opportunity for the Kelabits to assert their authority over the representation and commodification of heritage and associated knowledge of their region.

Since 2010, Deakin University has been in consultation with the Kelabit community to assist in the development of this project. A deepening understanding of the museum requirements has emerged through the consultation process. Currently under investigation are the curatorial requirements of the museum, governance and management of the resources, and creation of a strong infrastructure to support the development. In addition to this, there is a focus on the creation of concepts for the built environment and the visual communication design strategies to brand the museum and represent the projected identity of the community.

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Affective Spaces – the contribution of memory to place

In a research paper delivered at the 2014 Public Pedagogies Day at Victoria University, PPI founding member Dr. Karen Charman examines through a psychoanalytic frame a Memory Space Project (2012) set up for the expressed purpose of evoking memories.

As Charman explains:

As an extension of my interest in learning that occurs outside of formal institutions, such as schools and universities, I have developed a conceptual practice called  A Memory Space.
I have undertaken this approach in Sunshine and Fawkner.  A Memory Space is a physical location in each of these respective suburbs where visitors to the space are encouraged to share a memory. Each of the iterations of this concept has resulted in curating an exhibition that reflects these memories. I am currently writing up these projects and theorizing what is occurring when someone shares a memory.

Psychoanalysis can account for the emergent unstructured reservoirs and contours of memory. Occurring in a memory space is a re-inscribing of the selves that continue to inhabit places. Further, this paper suggests that a psychoanalytic attentiveness to space, psychic interiority and the relationship to the outside world can form a spatial and temporal awareness of place.

Click below to download the 2014 Public Pedagogies Day program:

Public Pedagogies Day 2014

Exquisite Me

Public Pedagogies Institute member Debbie Qadri is involved in a number of community-based art projects.

Exquisite Me is an arts project she developed that explores the collective experiences, stories and representations of identities of young people in Sunshine and Brimbank. These experiences, stories and representations are explored during various art and writing workshops run by  community artist Debbie Qadri. The artwork and writing is displayed as a large collaborative work, in a number of venues in Sunshine, including Gallery Sunshine Everywhere. Some of the artwork and writing will be published in a zine format and also made into an artist’s book for the Sunshine Library. Workshops are held at schools, community groups and at Council facilities such as the Sunshine Library.

The project thanks the support and involvement of AMES (Adult Migrant Education Services), Marian College, Ardeer Primary School, Sunshine College, Sunshine Library and  Gallery Sunshine Everywhere.

The Exquisite Me Project and Gallery Sunshine Everywhere kindly acknowledges the support of the Brimbank City Council Community Grants Program.

For more information visit the project’s website.

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(Images courtesy Debbie Qadri)

Learning and Teaching in Public Spaces

This is a national collaborative exchange project between universities and museums to engage post-secondary Humanities and Education students in experiential learning and citizenship 2011 – 2013. The project was initiated by PPI member Dr. Karen Charman.

This ambitious project partnered with a number of universities and museums/libraries across Victoria, NSW and Queensland.

Each site is working with a curriculum designed to embed post-secondary students in a museum and or library space.

The exciting challenge of this curriculum model is the capacity for adaptation from tertiary preparation programs at Victoria University and Deakin University to pre-service teacher education courses at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and Charles Sturt University (CSU).

For more information visit the project’s website.

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