DIALOGUES ON ART EDUCATION

Speakers: Kristine Michael and Samina Mishra

Friday, June 2, 2017 | 5:30 pm
Vadehra Art Gallery, D-53 Defence Colony, New Delhi - 110024

FICA invites you to this closing event of ongoing exhibition For the Love of Art, an exhibition by young learners who were part of the year-long art education course developed by FICA in collaboration with Nilanjana Nandy.

Titled 'Dialogues on Art Education', the evening will focus on presentations by experienced educators discussing their creative modes of engagement with young learners. Samina Mishra and Kristine Michael will present case studies from the work undertaken to give their perspective on a series of crucial questions that all art educators face: How to create sustained modes of engagements for learning with children? What methodologies are appropriate in education for marginalized groups of children? What challenges are faced by the educators in formulating their objectives within the specific limitations of a workshop? The session will touch upon the various processes that these educators employ when teaching art to children through a range of different workshops.

Kristine will focus on her recent project of developing an Arts Education and Activity based learning in the Kashmir Valley. Kristine, who is a faculty at British School, worked with Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) Kashmir and Sir Dorabjee Tata Trust from June 2013- 2015 to develop training modules and sharing of pedagogical resources with middle school subject teachers in Jammu and Kashmir, especially content and delivery techniques, better teaching and learning strategies with differentiation for learning styles and assessments geared to critical and reflective thinking. The project’s goal was to improve the quality of learning opportunities, using visual art activities to enhance teaching pedagogy. The visual arts provide an enrichment for the whole curriculum, informing practice beyond the confines of individual subject areas. There were over 60 teachers trained in arts pedagogy that represented 25 schools in Srinagar and Kupwara area and 25 schools in Jammu and Rajouri area.

Samina will talk about the importance of listening to children’s voices and learning through creative practice. She will share the experience of working with diverse groups of children using text and images, and focus on the My Sweet Home project that she collaborated on with Sherna Dastur and 20 children from Okhla. Beginning with an art and writing workshop with the children, the project evolved into a book, My Sweet Home: Childhood Stories from a Corner of the City (Mapin/2017) that includes Samina’s stories and photographs to present a glimpse of childhood in Okhla. 

About the speakers: 

Kristine Michael is a ceramic artist, art educator and researcher, writer and curator of Indian ceramic art traditions based in New Delhi. Trained at the National Institute of Design under Dashrath Patel, she has widely exhibited her work internationally and her works are in collections of Cartwright Hall, Bradford, and The British Council, UK - The Clay Studio, Philadelphia, USA - National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, World Ceramic Forum, Icheon Korea, Essl Museum, Austria. She is a PhD scholar at School of Arts & Aesthetics JNU. Kristine is currently Curriculum Leader for the Visual and Performing Arts at The British School, New Delhi.

Samina Mishra is a documentary filmmaker, writer and teacher based in New Delhi, with a special interest in media for and about children. She has conducted workshops with primary level children living in slums, in association with Pratham, aimed at generating writing from the children about their lives and their world. She has also conducted workshops with students from several Delhi schools on issues of identity and belonging, as part of the Home and Away exhibition. She also conducts short filmmaking workshops with children and young people, focusing on visual storytelling skills. She is currently teaching the International Baccalaureate Film programme at Pathways School Noida, collaborating on Torchlight, a web journal on libraries and bookish love, and conducting a film workshop for the NGO, Ankur Society for Alternatives in Education, to create a series of short films by young women from working class settlements entitled Dilliwali.

This event is held in conjunction with the exhibition For the Love of Art.

Image Courtesy: Kristine Michael