The BCcampus Research Fellows program provides support for B.C. post-secondary educators to conduct research on improving student learning and to share their results and experiences with peers in B.C. and beyond.
Project Lead/Fellow: Allison Yakusawa
Institution: Emily Carr University of Art + Design
Project Title: Critical Critique Praxis: Co-Creating Student-Centered Feedback Methods for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Art and Design Classroom
Research Focus: Studio critique is a signature pedagogy of the creative arts (Klebesadel & Kornetsky, 2008) and key pedagogical genre of peer and instructor feedback in art and design post-secondary education (Costantino, 2015; Barrett 2010). Art and design studio courses include multiple critiques per semester, yet they often reproduce problematic aesthetic, linguistic, and epistemological systems of power that disproportionately disadvantage students with minoritized identities (Unkefer et al., 2021; Salazar, 2013; deSouza, 2018). This project will enhance the teaching and learning of studio critique via a faculty research group that will address the ideas and assumptions that guide critique practices and co-create more liberatory models that prioritize equitable, diverse, inclusive, and accessible approaches to critique.
Biography: Allison Yasukawa (she/her) is an interdisciplinary maker, liberatory educator, and deep language nerd. She investigates asymmetries of power in language and interaction and examines crossings of various kinds, from the personal to the global. She has exhibited in the United States and internationally at spaces including the American University Museum (Washington D.C., USA), High Desert Test Sites (Joshua Tree, CA, USA), and Dak’Art OFF (Saint-Louis, Sénégal). She has presented workshops internationally on artmaking and language-making in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Grand-Bassam, Ivory Coast; and Changsha, China and is working on a book about language and/as creative practice.