Pedagogy in Focus
Culturally Responsive Teaching through Ethnography, Epistemology, and Ontology View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Zartasha Shah
The research investigates the effects of culturally responsive pedagogy, or CRP, through ethnography, epistemology, and ontology in education. The research explores the impact by checking the interpretations of the assessments, observations, and arguments about each part of them. The research also investigates the effects of each part on teaching and learning. Critical race theory, or CRT, helps in finding solutions to the problems of cultural identities, cultural accentuates, and CRP to support cultural heritage. The research informs more about CRP through cultural receptiveness, cultural resistance, and cultural reliability. Ethnography educates and informs more about the learners through the use of expressiveness, assertiveness, and creativity in education. Expressiveness will inform more about the use of different themes to create the artworks of learners. Assertiveness will inform more about the use of other ways to make meaningful artworks in education. Creativeness should be able to inform about the aesthetics, creativity, and artistic mindedness of learners. Epistemology will inform that the dimensions, use of materials, and methods can inform about the inspirations and the use of ways to incorporate the inspiration in art production. Ontology will inform about the importance of learners through cultural identity, cultural immersion, and cultural antiquity. Data collection is via interviewing my participants to know the process. The research revolves around a qualitative method, ethnography, ethnographic research questions, transcribed semi-structured interviews, and coded transcriptions to support CRT, ethnography, epistemology, and ontology through CRT in education.
Know Thyself: Fine Art Pedagogy in a Time of Crisis
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Martin Fowler
Taking as its starting point the doctoral research project PREFAB: Making Political Art Politically, this paper reports on the interim findings of the Know Thyself project currently used as pedagogical line-through within the BA (Hons) Fine Art programme at University of Cumbria. Applying Antonio Gramsci’s ‘inventory of traces’ in which biography serves as structured agency, Know Thyself seeks to provide an inclusive critical framework within which students can draw on their lived experience and the lived history of their communities. This socialist libertarian approach enables students to counter the homogenizing influence of the so-called ‘therapeutic institution’. Whilst challenging its cognitive failure to understand that digital pedagogy is no substitute for the social and sentient experience of acquiring and developing hand skills in an intellectually stimulating studio environment. Taking its lead from dissident exemplars such as Gramsci, Brecht, and the Glasgow poet Tom Leonard, Know Thyself’s theory-in-method nexus applies the political modernist credo of ‘things as they really are’ in order to demythify the ‘things as they are’ of ruling class ways of seeing, knowing and telling. In the context the legitimation crisis facing Western society, Know Thyself’s socially purposive pedagogy supports under-graduate students in their varied and instinctive challenges to the invented traditions of both the formalist avant-garde and the increasingly inauthentic and degenerated institutions of the nation-state. As such, it may offer a humanistic counter to the morbid symptoms of the neoliberal epoch in which ‘human = object = property = commodity’ (Leonard).
Enhancing Critical Visual Culture Education through AI-Assisted Visual Analysis
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sheng Kuan Chung
This paper explores an innovative AI-assisted visual analysis assignment in an undergraduate critical visual culture course. In our visually saturated arena, developing students' ability to critically analyze images is crucial. This study investigates how integrating AI tools into visual analysis tasks enhances students' critical thinking skills, deepens their understanding of visual culture, and prepares them for an AI-driven future. The research employs a mixed-methods approach, examining a three-step assignment: students conduct a personal image analysis, use AI tools for further analysis, and integrate insights from both perspectives. Data collection includes qualitative analysis of student work and surveys. This study contributes to the discourse on AI integration in humanities education, offering educators a viable lens for AI-assisted assignments and pedagogical insights into fostering 21st-century skills in visual culture studies.
