Fall 2014 is well underway and as students begin to find their place in the College of Arts and Letters, so do several new faculty and staff. Adrienne Boulton-Funke joins the college this semester after having completed a Bachelor of Education from the University of Saskatchewan, a Master of Arts in Art Education from the University of British Columbia and is finishing her PhD in Curriculum (Art Education) at UBC. She received the Killam Award for teaching excellence as a graduate teaching assistant. Her research explores contemporary art practices in research and pedagogy through arts-based educational research; she has presented her work nationally and internationally.
New methodology to expand delivery of art education
Boulton-Funke said she wants to help future teachers re-imagine curriculum to be able to go beyond the assessment-based learning found in classrooms today. “I hope to develop a methodology of visual inquiry that aims to disrupt our static perceptions of education and, through arts-based inquiry and research processes, expand the ways in which we understand and perform curriculum and pedagogy in K-12 art education.
“In an age of educational reforms that demand standardized learning and assessment, seeking representational and recognizable linear models of thinking, the arts provoke difference rather than sameness in thought and expression. Arts-based educational research creates opportunities to provoke rather than represent thought and to stimulate new thought in old ideas. In this pursuit of arts-based inquiry, teacher candidates as well as graduate students and researchers seek alterity of meaning and, in doing so, develop new and creative potentials for education in and through the arts.”