Volume 21, numéro 1, 2025 Emerging Scholars

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In 2023-24 I facilitated a photovoice workshop as part of my thesis research, working with students in Grades 5 through 8 from Namur School. The workshop was a six-week extra-curricular activity held twice weekly during the students’ lunch break in the school library. The design research is a combination of Wang and Burris’ original method combined with contemporary variants to adapt the methodology to specifically fit my research, the participants and project location. The environment was the theme of the workshop, as we explored the forest behind the student’s school to engage in an eco-responsible relationship through photography and group discussions. The outcome was a group exhibit installed in the school, where the students invited the local and school community to attend their vernissage. The following discusses the participating student’s process, anecdotes from the workshop and photovoice as a methodology.

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Can silk inform us of the past, the present and a reimagined future? Jacky Lo explores this question through community art-based workshops, bringing together lost histories, family migration, and personal narratives. Lo examines weaving and embroidery to consider silk as a collaborative exchange of cultures alongside the exploration of family histories—silk’s production also represents diaspora and lost memories of Lo’s Chinese ancestry. The material of silk has been part of Chinese history and economies for centuries. In Canada, the first yard of woven silk was produced in 1922 by the Montreal-based Bruck Silk Mills at their Cowansville location. Connecting the history of silk with his own experiences, the public of Montreal are invited to create their own silk moth through the material consideration of silk and techniques of embroidery. The research confronts the inherent complexities and ethical considerations surrounding silk production. While silk is often considered a sustainable fibre, its production involves the extraction and, in many instances, the immolation of silkworms. Lo’s community gathering becomes a literal tapestry of interconnected narratives, where silk becomes not just a material but a medium for dialogue and cultural exchange. Through his workshops and research, Lo invites us to ponder the stories woven into silk, offering a glimpse into a reimagined future where the threads of the past and present converge, guided by a deeper understanding of our relationship with materials, heritage, and the self.

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In our experience, to offer our work up for critique asks us to be vulnerable, and as the critic, to operate from a space of extremes. Drawing from our personal experiences as undergraduate and graduate students (MFA and MAAE) and from the position of a post-secondary teacher and a socially engaged art facilitator, the authors reflect on their research on doing critique as creative process and generous offering. They share their experience in delivering a workshop that explores generative ways of doing critique that include play and embodied methods, and in the process define what critique as gift encompasses.

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This article reimagines teaching and learning through soundscape storytelling and soundwalking as inquiry-based, place-responsive pedagogies. Emphasizing listening, sensory engagement, and relational learning, soundwalking connects participants to the cultural, ecological, and historical dimensions of their environments. Drawing on a series of participatory soundwalks in Vancouver, British Columbia, the study explores how walking, listening, and storytelling can expand approaches to music-making, illuminating the interconnectedness of sound, place, and identity. The work highlights themes of Indigenous knowledge, environmental sustainability, and the sonic legacies of place, offering a framework for integrating ecological and community-based sound practices into arts and music education. Engaging in these reflective and creative practices, the article calls for a more inclusive and responsive vision of learning, one that nurtures curiosity, ecological awareness, and critical connection in an increasingly interdependent world.

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In this article I hypothesize that the role of the pre-application portfolio review goes beyond an assessment of an individual’s readiness for a postsecondary program, but also offers important insight for the prospective applicant into program culture and student experience, providing helpful information to guide them toward a postsecondary offering.

My central research question, which has evolved from my lens as a recruiter for NSCAD University and Nova Scotia Community College to arts education researcher, is:

How could a pre-application portfolio review affect the art maker when submitting post-secondary portfolio applications and choosing a postsecondary path?

On top of the academic requirements typical of postsecondary institutions, each institution and, in some cases, each program within an institution has written its own requirements for the portfolio portion of its application. As these requirements are conceived internally, they may present a window into the values and preferences of their faculty, and by extension the institution, as well as the limits of studio facilities. Engaging in a portfolio review is a way for prospective students to get feedback prior to finalizing and submitting their portfolio for application. At its best, the review is a critical support for learners and an institutional tool for recruitment and retention. What it also does, but may not always acknowledge, is offer students, for the first time in their careers, an opportunity for a one-to-one presentation of their work and lives, which can be fraught with uncertainty and a desire for direction and acknowledgement that their work and hopes are valid and worthy.

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Tell your story through art was a community-engaged art project with seniors at the Cummings Center in the winter of 2024; it used art as a testimony to their lives. This visual essay shares what the participants made over 10 workshops, in which they generated images from their real and imagined selves. The mixed media pieces the participants created were aesthetic interventions (hooks, 1995) that merged the shapes of memories with forms that could be decisively forged through creating works of art. The materiality of paints, photographs, collages, and papers was key to igniting the link between the stories they carried within themselves and their present reality. They filled gaps in time by engaging with hybrid systems of touching photographs, binding matrilineal collages to larger narratives, confronting traumatic memories, and unearthing buried nostalgia that straddled the uneven terrain of grief, forgiveness, and joy.

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This manuscript shares my experiences as an Indigenous educator walking the path of bringing Indigenous art practices into school settings, sometimes from my own Heiltsuk community and sometimes in collaboration with others. Living and working on Coast Salish territory, I reflect on what it means to share stories, artistic practices, and land-based teachings that are not always my own. Through projects such as spindle whorl design, Métis finger weaving, and natural yarn dyeing, I explore how these experiences have become invitations to learn alongside Knowledge Holders and community members rather than teaching in isolation.

This work is not about becoming an expert. It is about holding responsibility for creating space, crediting sources, and fostering conditions where students and educators can enter the work in a good way. I offer this manuscript as a reflection for others, especially those who are unsure of where to begin, to show how art can serve as a site of relationship, respect, and resurgence.

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This article shares a living poetically in the act of calligraphy practice with the character 静 jing in Chinese writing Xie Zi, the practice writing Lian Zi and Chinese Calligraphy Shu Fa. I explore the liminal space of silence and stillness in the character 静 jing. A meditation on the art of Chinese calligraphy and a personal ethnography on Asian identity and artmaking. What transpires when materials and memories are ephemeral?