I’m excited to be presenting information about the “Community & Context” class I taught last fall on the 2022 MACAA Conference panel From Local to Global: Crossing Borders to Create Place Sensitive Art Practice and Education. Here is the abstract:

Equity and inclusion in the classroom is a broad goal we are all striving for. A question that frequently arises is, ‘How?’ In this presentation I will be walking through a case study of a one-credit course, Community & Context, recently created and deployed at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design MFA program to promote cross-cultural competence, anti-racism, and place-based contextual awareness for our multi-national cohorts of interdisciplinary makers. I will be walking through discussion topics, exercises, resources, and field trip criteria used to help prepare students with their transition to a new place, introducing them to often overlooked histories of this place, and helping them to articulate the context of their own creative work. I will also distribute some zines and other handouts that help outline our program’s approach to designing this course and how the end-experience was structured, with hopes that participants will be able to use these materials at their home institutions to affect change to their own curricula.

I’ll be presenting March 31 from 1-3 pm (Register Here), along with Dan Jian (Texas Christian University) and Ryann Casey (Stockton University). The panel is co-chaired by Mariana Smith (Stockton University), and Boryana Rusenova-Ina (Texas Tech University). Here is the panel description:

This panel invites scholars, academics, and studio artists to engage in conversation around borders, migration, and place sensitive art practice and education. The current global crisis makes it particularly important to reflect on the relationship between the local and the global, especially in art practice that examines the effects of displacement on cultural memory, personal and collective identity. We welcome presentations that consider the politics, identities, and ethics, which different places can produce. Embracing interdisciplinarity, we also seek presentations from educators that highlight the pedagogical strategies, methods, and skills needed to promote cross-cultural competence in multilingual and multi-national environments.