Michael Whittington

Unexpected Territories: The Entangled Learner, War Worlds and Empathic Knowing

Michael Whittington – The University of Newcastle, Australia

Abstract:

Visual arts learning ecologies both traditional and digital has emerged as a contemporary bridge between the entangled learner and their ‘becomings’ in the physical and digital worlds. War and conflict are popular choices for adolescent boys studying visual arts as they gravitate towards themes of violence and danger. At the same time these ‘war world’ themes are driven out in visual culture and mass media, affecting boy’s world views. This presentation speaks to some of the emergent data from the doctoral study ‘Contemporary art making: an affordance of empathic concern for boys.’ Year 8 boys aged 13-14 years who studied mandatory visual arts (No. 13) were invited to participate in a 10-week Critical Participatory Arts Based Research (CPABR) embracing their learning which culminated in an art exhibition held for the school community. This presentation focuses on the learning of the boys who chose the theme of war and conflict in the study. It explores the students’ engagement as they navigated through unexpected territories, shifting between traditional and digital materialities. It highlights the emergent findings and incorporates Haraway’s concepts of sympoiesis and worlding, examining how these ideas manifest in the physical and digital spaces of visual arts learning. It explores the students’ own critical reflections, material engagement, their social/cultural entanglements, as well as the audience’s perceptions of the boys’ learning, including how the boys perceive, imagine, experience, and act in the world as it emerges in their study. It applies Deleuze’o’Guattarian ideas using a post-structural lens considering the Neo-liberal forces at play in education. The findings suggest that for these boys, material-based studio learning and critical engagement afforded opportunities for navigating through the unexpected territories of visual arts materialities resulting in possibilities for empathic knowing.