The project Changing gendered patterns of power through creative dialogic pedagogies of the Canada-Italy Innovation Award 2020 of the Embassy of Canada in Italy funded our Visiting to the University of Victoria (BC), Canada, between November 12th-19th, 2022. The logic of the project was to experiment in Italy with feminist, creative and dialogic pedagogies and bring it to Canada to share and discuss it with a different population. The methodologies that we brought to Canada include:
– Cooperative inquiry through contemporary feminist photography
– Poetic collaborative writing starting from embodied experience of art
– Experiential translation with an educational perspective.
In L’altro sguardo/The other gaze in a class room talk we presented a pedagogical practical theory that celebrates complexity, and triggers deliberate action, starting from the participants’ reflexive writing from photographs taken from the internet. ‘Aesthetics’, or different media and languages, reveal through presentational knowing (Heron, 1996) and abduction (Bateson, 1979) how our perception and our subjectivity are shaped by culture, by our webs of affiliation. They may also offer ways to collectively interrogate what we know, and how we know.
Through a cooperative method of writing-as-inquiry (duoethnography, Sawyer & Norris, 2013) we invited students to a dialogic exploration in pairs and in plenary of feminism in our lives, and share ideas for applying aesthetic methodologies in social research (Leavy, 2015) and adult education for social justice (Clover, Sandford & Butterwick, 2013). The talk was based on the article:
Formenti, L., Luraschi, S., & Del Negro, G. (2019). Relational aesthetics. A duoethnographic research on feminism. European journal for research on the education and learning of adults, 10(2), 123-141.
In this class, the students were all from different migratory backgrounds. Two were men: the English-Canadian lecturer and a Canadian student from Ontario with Swedish origins. To the question “Are you a feminist?”, they replied that their relationship to feminisms (theory and practice) developed thanks to women in their lives. Picking photographs from the internet as well as from personal archives to talk about feminisms allowed new intimate conversations in the classroom which then continued at the pub.
L’altro sguardo/The other gaze. Reflexive writing from women photography in arts-based research. Talk in Tim Hopper’s research class (EPHE 585 (PO1): Qualitative research genres applied to education, health and society – Thursday, November 17th, 16:30 18:00, McKinnon Building, #092