PACT: Portable Art Connections Toolkit

Portable Art Connections Toolkit (PACT) is a kit for creating a collective experience of making stories and artwork about the things that matter to you and your community.

PACT provides tools for building creative agency and ethical storytelling, wrapped up in a hi-vis kitbag. It packages a starter set of props with a detailed user manual, prompting people to work together to make and share stories about things that are important to them. You can follow the workshop plan from the manual, or adapt it to use whatever elements are useful to your group and situation.

The user manual includes introductory information and a sequence of four workshops. There is an overview page for each of the four sessions, which expands out into a set of activities and discussion prompts to help activate the kit and facilitate the group’s collective experience. Each PACT artkit comes with six print copies of the user manual included and is suitable for use suits use with up to five participants, plus a facilitator. If you plan on working with a larger group, add more kits.

PACT aims to make visible how the practice of creativity is an enabler of personal, social, and collective agency. It was designed for young people aged 12 – 21 who have an interest in art or creative production of any kind, but you can use it with older or younger people too.

We’re giving away 200 artkits free of charge (including postage within Australia), so pop over to our website to find out more & request a kit! We’re hoping people will also use the website as a space to share images or blog about things they’ve done using the kit.

Vist us: www.pactup.org

Request the PACT artkit or start a conversation using the contact form on our About page.

Intangible cultural heritage and intercultural dialogue

The role of public pedagogies in transmitting intangible cultural heritage and promoting intercultural dialogue

Charlotte Courtois

As American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax warned, “if we continue to allow the erosion of our cultural forms, soon there will be no place to visit and no place to truly call home”. In this talk, Charlotte Courtois will discuss the role of public pedagogies in transmitting intangible cultural heritage as well as in promoting intercultural dialogue. Charlotte has been experimenting for 8 years, crafting workshops for children all around the world in order to develop their curiosity both about other cultures and about their own heritage. She will share the tools she uses and explain how the work of her association Konstelacio manages to put children in a position where they realize that they too – and not only adults – have cultural knowledge to share.

This presentation will take place on:

Friday November 23, 2018, 10.00am, Room T226

This session is part of:

Public Pedagogies Institute Conference 2018
November 22-23
Footscray, Melbourne

Register for the conference here

Exhibition and Activation

The Public and Touch
Victoria University, Nicholson Street Campus

Theatre Space, N222
November 22-23, 2018

Red Earth Dresses:
An exhibition around Touch, Place and Identity

Shelley Hannigan with associate dress creators 
Beatrix Rowe, Jane Bartier, Monica Moore,
Jo-Anne Britt, Amanda Rea and Karlee Blackburn

Knitting, twisting and knot-making with copper wire and thread, are some of the ways I have created this exhibition piece titled Red Earth Dresses. I create my art whilst entangled in a place I have co-constructed through experiences such as: being here, there, imagining, memory, creating, observing, listening, touching and feeling. In the process of creating Red Earth Dresses, I have handled materials, felt strains in my arms and hands from knitting six life size dresses and a range of miniature versions and twisted, knotted and woven copper wire into them. These images have emerged from a process of ‘free knitting’ where no pattern is used. I have responded to the emerging form, stretching the weave out to see and feel what is coming.

Dresses have emerged in my work for over forty years. In past works, dresses have represented my identity as a migrant moving over, in and through landscapes, embodying my past, but never laying claim to place. In Red Earth Dresses I share this experience and work around touch, place and identity as this work has come to represent my own and other women’s experiences and relationships with the earth/land of Australia. I have come to identify with these women as a regional Australian citizen for twenty years. It is my experience and in-sight that women of the past and of this land have adopted some of the colonial Victorian dress sensibility and aesthetics but also blended and connected with the earth through their place experiences. Their dresses were worn and torn and mended in parts. These traces of touch through wear, tear and mending are materials memories of place and bodily engagements on this land that I have captured and present in this work. (Shelley Hannigan)

Tread – Softly
Merinda Kelly and Soraya Mobayad
(Exhibition and activation)

Open to the possibilities of materiality, time, space and place, a series of objects and structures will be situated as provocations to prompt unfolding possibilities for playful encounter, social connection, experimental engagement or performative action. Experimental pedagogies will also be activated to catalyse individual and collaborative responses to the spatial intervention as it emerges over time.

Merinda Kelly’s current modes of practice are experimental, socially engaged and collaborative. Interventions, installations and experimental pedagogical encounters are positioned across specific sites, time frames and publics to entice public engagement, dialogue and collaboration. She has also worked extensively over the past six years with creative practitioners, researchers, and educators in the Geelong region to explore transitions and tensions emerging in response to staged processes of deindustrialisation.

Since undertaking a Bachelor’s degree in Visual Art, Soraya Mobayad’s artistic practice has extended to explore deindustrialisation, audio frequencies and the relationship of noise to information. Her work takes the form of drawings, public works, installations, bespoke electronic circuits and audio loops. Mobayad is currently undertaking a Masters of Teaching at Deakin University. She was previously Creative Program Coordinator at Courthouse Youth Arts, was selected for the Footscray Community Arts Centre Emerging Cultural Leaders Program in 2017, and currently works on arts projects involving the community and socially engaged practices.

This session is part of:

Public Pedagogies Institute Conference 2018
November 22-23
Footscray, Melbourne

Register for the conference here

Communities, Creativity and Public Pedagogies

Public Pedagogies Institute Conference 2018
Footscray, Melbourne

Friday November 23, 1.30pm – 3.00pm

Priming and Vibing Everyday Life: Tracking the Public Pedagogies of Footpath Gardens
Jesse Hsu

Abstract:
The notion that everyday spaces enable informal learning is a central theme within public pedagogy scholarship. How learning actually occurs in various sites is either theorized from the perspective of an individual’s immersive and aesthetic encounter (Ellsworth, 2005) or simply left unsaid—with pedagogy effectively seen as a ‘deus ex machina’ or a ‘black box’ that inexplicably catalyzes learning (Watkins et al, 2015). This presentation articulates an approach to understanding the public pedagogy of spaces as an ongoing interplay between a given site’s representation and social practices. Through a blend of visual and ethnographic data, this approach is demonstrated to the case of a single verge garden in the neighborhood of Glebe in Sydney. This research draws attention to the link between a space’s design and its pedagogy. In the case of edible verge gardens, attentive design increases the degree of ‘pedagogic agency’ a site has in affecting social change at an everyday level.


PACT: Portable Art Connections Toolkit
Nina Lewis

Abstract:
This session introduces the Portable Art Connections Toolkit as an apparatus for supporting communities in making art together and having creative agency over how the stories, information and practices that matter to them are shared.

Portable Art Connections Toolkit – PACT – is a kitbag containing props and prompts for creating a collective experience of making stories and artwork. It equips communities/users to shape narratives about the things that matter to them and to situate those messages as part of the cultural landscape.

PACT is like an ikea of arts participation: functional, hackable, purposeful, accessible.

PACT comes with a user manual describing one method for activating the kit. Guided to exercise choice, adaptability and negotiation in how they share what matters to them, participants gain agency over their creativity while learning to collaborate with others.

PACT’s point of difference is to both strengthen and see beyond personal narrative, positioning individual creativity on a pathway to collective and community-led process.

This is valuable for individual and social wellbeing. Because participants are encouraged to care about shared context (not just personal stories), they perceive themselves as connected into wider environments. Recognising shared stories as a way of being strong in community helps negotiate trust and respect, promotes social inclusion, and motivates people to work with others to create and sustain shared cultural narratives.

Session attendees will learn more about the method and theory of change underpinning the PACT artkit and the group will test out some of the props and prompts together. Following the session, attendees can request free PACT toolkits to use within their own communities.


This session is part of:

Public Pedagogies Institute Conference 2018
November 22-23
Footscray, Melbourne

Register for the conference here

Maker Spaces – Pedagogical Potential and Pitfalls

Public Pedagogies Institute Conference 2018
Footscray, Melbourne

Maker Spaces – Pedagogical Potential and Pitfalls
Friday, November 23, 1.30pm – 3.00pm

Maker Spaces are ripe with potential to redress pedagogical practices in the 21st Century within and outside of formal institutions. Researchers and educators share there thoughts, research and observations.

The presenters:

Greg Giannis, artist, researcher and educator.
Maker Spaces: Creativity, Civic Engagement and Critical Making

Garnet Hertz, Emily Carr University of Art and Design (remotely)
Critical Making

David Hyatt, School of Education, University of Sheffield.
The EU MaKEY project

Rebecca Wells, Leading Teacher,
Canterbury Primary School Maker Space

This session is part of:

Public Pedagogies Institute Conference 2018
November 22-23
Footscray, Melbourne

Register for the conference here

Read the related article:

Art & Technology: a Maker Space Experiment for Children
by Greg Giannis

Conference Program and Abstracts

Public Pedagogies Institute Conference 2018
November 22-23
Footscray, Melbourne

View and download the conference program
View and download the conference abstracts
What forms does learning and teaching take outside of formal institutions?

The annual conference of the Public Pedagogies Institute features presentations, performances and workshops across the diverse field of public pedagogies and is open to participants from many sectors.

What are Public Pedagogies?

We understand public pedagogies to incorporate the many sites in which teaching and learning occurs in the community or outside formal institutions. These may include museums, libraries, neighbourhood houses, community centres, public spaces, as well as through the arts, community engagement, media and beyond.

Topics of focus this year include: Maker Spaces, Activist Art, Creative Body Based Learning, The Public and Touch, Visual Thinking Strategies, Contemporary Social Movements, Community Art Practices and more.

Public Pedagogies Institute Conference 2018
November 22-23
Footscray, Melbourne

Register for the conference here

Register for the conference dinner here

View and download the conference abstracts

 

Education – business as (un)usual?

Public Pedagogies Institute Conference 2018
Footscray, Melbourne

Thursday November 22, 3.30-5.00pm

This session will challenge the current but restricting mainstream understanding of why and how education should be provided.

Beginning with a presentation by Peter Alsen, Education – business as (un)usual? Teaching and Learning Beyond the Mainstream, this forum will address the current notion of educational objectives residing in a mindset of getting everyone ready to enter the workforce. Secondly, that education will improve and advance if there is a marketplace of options someone can choose from. It will put forward a case for education beyond an area of competition, with teaching and learning as an economic transaction.

This will be followed by the Pop Up School and Knowledge Project presentation and forum with Mary Dixon and Karen Charman, outlining the ongoing project to assert learning and knowledge as local, community-based, and grounded in a notion of place. This project also seeks to document and offer an alternative understanding of ‘curriculum’ specific to each locality.

This session is part of:

Public Pedagogies Institute Conference 2018
November 22-23
Footscray, Melbourne

Register for the conference here

Creative Body Based Learning

Public Pedagogies Institute Conference 2018
Footscray, Melbourne

Thursday November 22, 1.30pm

Creative Body Based Learning (CBL) is a method that utilises arts based strategies to mobilise the aesthetic, cognitive and affective domains of participants. This workshop led by Belinda MacGill will use CBL strategies with participants to explore the affordances of public pedagogy and ways in which to mobilise arts based strategies in public sites.

Using embodied arts pedagogies to promote engagement (Dawson and Lee 2018) through meaning making strategies is a creative response to advance the power of collective community knowledge in the public sphere.

This workshop is underpinned by relational aesthetics through co-construction that will culminate in a set of strategies for participants to mobilise in their own sites.

Belinda MacGill is a lecturer, artist and researcher at University of South Australia. Her primary research interests draw on the fields of Indigenous education, postcolonial theory, visual methodologies, arts pedagogy (Dawson 2013) and critical race theory.

This session is part of:

Public Pedagogies Institute Conference 2018
November 22-23
Footscray, Melbourne

Register for the conference here

The Public and Touch

November 22-23
Public Pedagogies Institute Conference 2018
Footscray, Melbourne

This special program will take place over two days, beginning with a panel discussion on Thursday at 3.30pm, that invites you to join the conversation on the theme of The Public and Touch with the program creators: Raffaele Rufo, Paul Carter, Maya Ward, Elian Sellanes, Clare Walton, Merinda Kelly, Soraya Mobayad, Shelley Hannigan.

An ecological sensibility runs through the group, and so does a sensibility to the issues of migration, coloniality and the embodied imageries of indigenous Australia. The contributors to this session are creative practice-led researchers, and writers or creators of bodily or musical or visual performances.

There is a common thread with the potential for collaboration, discovery and change, as ways of finding and changing the place of our body in the material fabrics of the world.

This program will include presentations, exhibition, performance, workshop, and screenings.

This session is part of:

Public Pedagogies Institute Conference 2018
November 22-23
Footscray, Melbourne

Register for the conference here

The Story of the Disability Pride Mural in Footscray

Public Pedagogies Institute Conference 2018
November 22-23
Footscray, Melbourne

Social Activism and Public Pedagogies
Thursday November 22, 1.30-3.00pm

The Disability Pride mural project was led by Larissa MacFarlane and created by a large team of contributing artists. Barely a week after hundreds of hours were spent putting up the mural, the creators were shocked to find it had been removed.

Presenters Debbie Qadri and Larissa MacFarlane will tell the extraordinary story of the Disability Pride Mural in Footscray (the first of its kind in Australia), of its accidental removal . . . days later, and subsequent re-instatement!

This presentation will explore the meanings of the mural for the artists involved in making it, as well as how the art creates public pedagogy reflecting diverse experiences of disability.

View the Mural:
If you get a chance while at the conference or on your way, please take a look at the mural. It is located between Footscray Station and the Campus at:

Telstra Exchange building, 201 Nicholosn St Footscray
Google Map

For more information about the mural see:
https://melbournefringe.com.au/event/disability-pride-is-back/

Continuing the theme of social activism this presentation will be followed by:

Activist Art as Embodied Public Pedagogy for Social Change
by Shalin Krieger

Social Movement as Public Pedagogy: The Case of Adivasis
by Alankrita Chhikara

This session will include both a local and international focus around activist art, social movements, and public spaces.

This session is part of:

Public Pedagogies Institute Conference 2018
November 22-23
Footscray, Melbourne

Register for the conference here

Interconnecting public, learning and research