Beginning Semester 2, 2019

Tuesday 23 July, 2019

Expanded Curation is a new subject I have prepared for Semester 2, 2019. My students are Masters of Arts (Arts Management) students, from a wide variety of educational, cultural backgrounds, experiences and ages. This wide variety of global experiences, brings rich and interesting conversations to the class and I encourage the students to consider the class a shared space where they can all contribute to each other's learning by sharing their knowledge and perspectives. My hope is for this class to encourage the students to think about the huge possibilities in the field of curation, from the museological and traditional concepts of curation, through to the curation of new and emerging technologies and art forms. Tonight I will introduce my class structure, which this time focuses on introducing four exhibition case studies, which we will analyse and unpack during our classes, to consider the various aspects of curating an exhibition. We will consider, the curatorial framing and how the curator has bought meaning to a collection of items, artworks, artefacts through their framing. We will consider how the exhibition is relevant to today and how the curator/s have bought their audience in to the narrative through making the concepts relevant to the audience. 

This morning I discussed the connection between my own research activities and teaching with my Program Manager. This is an area, I have been thinking about recently, as I am trying to understand how to make better connections between research and teaching, this was also discussed in our recent school meeting and was encouraged. My program manager, suggested that I consider how the methodology of my research activities are impacting upon the structure and methods of my classes, which are quite evidently connected. To date, I am often seeing my research and teaching as quite separate activities, although I know they feed each other. Mostly I see how the structuring of classes, influences the organisational structure of my projects with community groups, but I am also starting to understand that my 'Thirdspaces' site-analysis methodology is certainly having an impact on how I structure and teach my classes. It's quite important that I acknowledge these relationships between my approach to research and how it is flowing through to the classroom.