More scholarships

Only two of the four of us are eligible to apply, but these awards could be great.

Canadian Federation of University Women has fellowships and awards for 2009-2010. Marta and I are each eligible for several of them. Applications due November 1, 2008, so I figure I can hit up my professors for references at the same time this summer.

funding denied

Well, no SSHRC for me, and am on the wait-list for OGS .

In the interest of full disclosure, here's the project i pitched--good enough to get me into Communications and Culture at Ryerson/York, but nothing else so far...

Insights, ideas, scathing criticisms, biting commentaries—all are welcome!

- k

Seeing Learning
Towards a Critical Visual Pedagogy of Classroom Learning

Background and Statement of Problem

Although we exist in a profoundly visual culture, there are relatively few contemporary examples of photography-based education in either public school or community-based settings. Each is rare, but each is also distinct: public school photography instruction typically emphasizes technological and vocational aims at only the most senior levels (or “vo-tech” [Goldfarb 2004; Newbury 1997]), while community-based photographic education has a rich history of innovative and critical practice across a range of sites and focused towards a diverse audience. Such practice includes community arts initiatives (Braden 1983, Barndt 2006), research projects utilizing “photovoice” (Wang and Burris 1997, McIntyre 2000) or “talking pictures” (Bunster 1978) techniques, and popular education practices (Barndt 1991). Where critical, school-based learning does exist it is often disconnected from similar practices happening both locally and around the globe (Isherwood and Stanley 1994, Brake 1996, Kist 2005). It is not clear whether community-based practice fares any better (Augaitis, et al. 1995). This project will document examples of photographic practice in public education and community-based settings from the Toronto area in order to articulate a critical visual pedagogy of photographic communication.

This doctoral research project has two primary aims. First, to depict what current practices of photography-based education look like in order to describe the various agents involved, the various pedagogical and technical activities in which they are engaged, and the stated aims and goals of such practices. Attention will be paid to the various traits that align or distinguish public education from community-based practice, and vice versa. Secondly, this research will assess the significance of photographic learning, both in local settings and more broadly across the Ontario education system. I will analyze what factors constitute critical photographic learning for teachers, students, community members, and at a local level, while also considering what such a visual pedagogy both offers and demands of a publicly funded system. Ethnographic interviews with key stakeholders from schools and communities from the Toronto area and photographic documentation of these learning spaces will contribute to this descriptive and analytical survey of the practices, agents, and technologies involved in photographic education. In addition, several action research projects will be initiated at these sites in order to develop of a theoretical framework which situates a critical visual pedagogy within discourses of institutional change and broader practices of social activism.

The goal of this research is to describe and articulate an alternative educational practice which emphasizes visual dimensions to learning in addition to traditional language- and text-based practices. The study will fill in a gap between media literacy education research focused on formal school settings and action research found in community-based practices. The notion of a “critical visual pedagogy” I will develop is clearly indebted to educators and scholars in the Freirian tradition, for whom becoming literate is an emancipatory process and “naming the world” (Freire 1970) is inextricably linked to the speech acts implied in the “photovoice” (Wang and Burris 1997) or “talking pictures” (Bunster 1978) methods I intend to employ. Yet this concept is also related to the tradition of critical theory, particularly as it has been applied to studies of power relations in institutional organizations (Smith 1993, Darville 1995), state-based systems (Lloyd and Thomas 1998, Sears 2004), and media networks (Enzensberger 1970).

Bibliography

Augaitis, D., Falk, L., Gilbert, S., & Moser, M. A. (Eds.). (1995). Questions of Community: Artists, Audiences, Coalitions. Banff: Banff Centre Press.

Barndt, D. (2006). Wild Fire: Art As Activism. Toronto: Sumach Press.

Barndt, D. (1991). To Change This House: Popular Education Under the Sandinistas. Toronto: Between the Lines.

Braden, S. (1983). Committing Photography. Pluto Press.

Brake, J. (1996). Changing Images: Photography, Education and Young People. Salford: Viewpoint Photography.

Bunster, X. (1978). Talking pictures: field method and visual mode. Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication, 5(1), 37-55.

Darville, R. (1995). Literacy, Experience, Power. In M. L. Campbell & A. Manicom (Eds.), Knowledge, Experience, and Ruling Relations: Studies in the Social Organization of Knowledge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press (pp. 249-261).

Enzensberger, H. M. (1970). Constituents of a Theory of the Media. New Left Review, 64.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Goldfarb, B. (2002). Visual Pedagogy: Media Cultures in and Beyond the Classroom. Durham: Duke University Press.

Isherwood, S., & Stanley, N. (Eds.). (1994). Creating Vision: Photography and the National Curriculum. Manchester: Arts Council of Great Britain.

Kist, W. (2005). New Literacies in Action: Teaching and Learning in Multiple Media. New York: Teachers College Press.

Lloyd, D., & Thomas, P. (1998). Culture and the State. New York: Routledge.

McIntyre, A. (2000). Constructing Meaning About Violence, School, and Community: Participatory Action Research with Urban Youth. The Urban Review, 32(2), 123-154.

Newbury, D. (1997). Talking about Practice: Photography Students, Photographic Culture and Professional Identities. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 18(3), 421-434.

Sears, A. (2003). Retooling the Mind Factory: Education in a Lean State. Aurora: Garamond Press.

Smith, D. E. (1993). Texts, Facts and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling. New York: Routledge.

Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, Methodology and Use for Participatory Needs Assessment. Health Education & Behavior, 24(3), 369-387.

Back to the Applicators: Payments and Restrictions

I'm still onto looking at all of my parameters for making a decision for Calgary vs. Waterloo and putting together my evaluation grid (incorporating Marta's expertise), and I am a bit confused about the funding component in terms of invisible funding "ceilings". Both Waterloo and Calgary have offered similar base funding, but now I am confused about the additional funding, which I would like to get.

For instance, at Calgary, if you receive a Faculty of Graduate Studies award, and then another award valued the same or higher, you have to GIVE BACK the FGS award. While I understand the concept, I'm now not sure if they make me reject my department award if I get a $15,000 award, and if this limits my funding possibilities.

According to Waterloo's funding guidelines if you get a provincial or national scholarship, they throw MORE money at you, not less. BUT you still have to check your departments funding guidelines on how they deal with awards (for instance, do they pull some of your base funding?).

So, while they currently both offer similar funding, I want to make sure that there is possibility of more funding potential, rather than a possibly low ceiling placed on my income for those years.
Has anyone else put some thought into this practical side?

For Chrisa Snow

I was thinking of newsletters that I'm signed up with (as if I actually read half of them anyway) and this one seemed that could be interesting for you: new economics foundation (nef). It is Europe-based, but then again, there is nothing wrong with Europeans.

Plus they have a fellowship programme:

nef (the new economics foundation) and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) are launching a Fellowship Programme to add to new thinking on the challenges of applying economics to environment and development.

The inaugural nef-IIED Fellowship prize will be awarded to an outstanding researcher through a competitive process. The Fellowship will be full-time, for a duration of four months and the successful candidate will divide their time between nef and IIED. This is an exciting opportunity for someone to make a real contribution to both theory and practice: to both help frame the debate and chart the way forward, and to play a part in moving us from an unsustainable to a more sustainable economic system.

The successful candidate will receive a bursary of up to £15,000 on successful completion of the four-month project.

survey from SSHRC on my funding

so in 2004 i was awarded a canada graduate scholarship (cgs) from the social sciences and humanities research council of canada in the amount of $17,500 for a year of my studies. not bad! i was hoping to get something more than a support bursary from ryerson the following year, but what can you do.

anyway, this morning i got a follow up email about a survey for scholarship recipients. a bunch of questions later (and there really were a lot of questions) i filled in the final "what are your comments?" box with the following response in an attempt to highlight a certain tendency and set of assumptions the survey (and in part the program) sshrc has about what grad research is. (so if they change funding in significant ways, particularly in ways i proposed, you have me to thank.) Anyway, my response is here:

"More funding needed to support graduate work that seeks to initiate autonomous research during grad studies, and continue it in community-based and non-profit settings following from graduation; the focus on "finding work" in this survey (and perhaps in the funding model more generally) cleaves a little too closely to the idea that grad work is merely another form of "job training," neglecting that this research may also lead to community/cultural leadership development, or other forms of social or collectivized knowledge production which exists outside a predominantly corporate domain."

thanks for joining the publicators (we used to be called the applicators)

so the idea was for four of us to develop a support mechanism and platform for exchanging gripes with the process as we went through the task of applying for PhDs.

the whole endeavour proved so successful (although none of us has, as of yet, received word about any scholarships or PhD programs, so the success is entirely subjective), that we decided to continue our collaboration as we try to present and publish our work in a variety of forums.

this blog, then, is a way for each of us to collect and test out our thoughts on the various, multi- and interdisciplinary, and often mutually exclusive topics in which we are interested.

think of it as a kind of Three's Company meets Perfect Strangers meets Golden Girls, although a little more dry since we're talking about academia, but with the potential at least for great slapstick and general amusement...