Actions for User Experience with Archives and Feminist Teaching Conversations with The Judy Chicago Art Education Collection

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User Experience with Archives and Feminist Teaching Conversations with The Judy Chicago Art Education Collection

Author
Holt, Ann
Published
[University Park, Pennsylvania] : Pennsylvania State University, 2015.
Physical Description
1 electronic document
Additional Creators
Keifer-Boyd, Karen T., 1955- and Amburgy, Patricia
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Open Access.
Summary
This is a case study of three university professors' archival experience with the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection through their participation in feminist Teaching Conversations. The Judy Chicago Art Education Collection is a living archive of materials on feminist art pedagogy. Teaching Conversations is a feminist orientation to archives that is ongoing and involves participatory engagement and transdisciplinary dialogue to support teaching and using the collection for creating living curricula. The professors are situated in different disciplines and, differ in their teaching and research foci. Using theories of archival experience (Ellsworth, 2005; Latham, 2007; 2011), I analyze conversational interviews for the purpose of understanding archival user experiences of feminist Teaching Conversations with the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection. From conversations with the participants in this study, I present insights on dialogic, feminist, archival orientations that enhance access to archives for teaching and learning. My study reveals the use and engagement with archives as a social practice, where outreach, both on a personal and public level is vital to creating and sustaining a living archive. Through the exploration of three individual journeys with the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection, the study reveals the impact of the invitation to an archive as a sustaining and transformative force for teaching, learning, and community around collections. The participants' accounts reflect the complexities in the way information, ideas, and ways of approaching a subject in archives can be put into practice. As the three participants engage and meaningfully learn about the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection in different ways, they prove that there are many ways of being in archives and many ways of using and engaging with archives. In the case of one participant (Ginny), her attraction to the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection and the feminist Teaching Conversations project is for the purposes of finding a community for feminist dialogue about teaching and intersecting disciplines to see new possibilities in teaching and in promoting social change. Her archival process is a social process as she learns about and engages with the collection through dialogue with her faculty peers and through her students. She contributes to the living archive by setting up the opportunity for students to be teachers with the materials. Another participant (Margo) comes to the collection looking for opportunities for scholarly activity with others, and to explore what feminist pedagogy is in practice. In Teaching Conversations, she seeks answers to the question of how best to apply the collection to her own practice and has difficulty finding direction. However, when she turns this process around and meaningfully applies herself to the collection from the standpoint of her own personal interests, she comes to a deep appreciation of the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection and Chicago's feminist work. Through combined social and personal archival processes, she finds her own contribution to the living archive and the added bonus of a potential opportunity to create work with another colleague outside her discipline. The third participant (Rebecca), is a story of transformation through feminist Teaching Conversations, where she slowly finds a sense of empowerment as a teacher and renewed vision for her work. Through her experience of working on her own, to then sharing curriculum, and dialoguing with other teachers also interested in the collection, she discovers her own potential--that her work is a valuable contribution to teaching the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection, and a valuable contribution to the teaching profession that even transcends her own discipline. Overall, this study broadens understanding about using art education archival records for transdisciplinary purposes and demonstrates the value of art education archives. It also contributes to current archival scholarship that seeks to expand on notions of art education archival materials as forms of information and things to experience (Latham, 2007; 2011), and archives as spaces for experiential pedagogy (Ellsworth, 2005), feminist scholarship, and activism (Eichorn, 2010; 2013). Based on the participants' individual perspectives of the living archive, I suggest emerging qualities of a feminist archival orientation and a feminist archival sensibility. A feminist archival orientation involves flexible, iterative, dialogic, comprehensive, user-centered, and inviting methods, and frames the archive as living, participatory, and transdisciplinary. Feminist archival sensibilities conceptualize the archive as social, inclusive, democratic, and living.
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Dissertation Note
Ph.D. Pennsylvania State University 2015.
Reproduction Note
Microfilm (positive). 1 reel ; 35 mm. (University Microfilms 37-15513)
Technical Details
The full text of the dissertation is available as an Adobe Acrobat .pdf file ; Adobe Acrobat Reader required to view the file.
View MARC record | catkey: 15420715