Listening to the shapes of collaborative artmaking

or the last 4 years, five women artist-teachers1 and I have been examining gender issues in art education through an action research project2. The collaboratively designed project has enabled us to consciously integrate theory, practice and research not only for the practice of teaching but for the practice of artmaking. Recently, we collaboratively created an installation quilt for a group exhibition. The work was designed to symbolize many things, including: our social concern for gender issues, our collaborative processes, and our sense of community as artistteachers. In the following account I wish to share my reflections upon our installation not only as a visual-centered product but more importantly, as a listener-centered process. To do this, I integrate ideas from the artworld, such as connective aesthetics (Gablik, 1995) and enlightened listening (Levin, 1989) with ideas from feminist pedagogy (Sandell, 1991), including caring, connections, community, modeling, dialogue, practice and confirmation (Noddings, 1984, 1992). These ideas are richly connected and supportive of one another and may offer teachers interested in gender issues, and other social issues, a view toward a listenercentered pedagogy and artmaking. I begin by exploring connective aesthetics since a collaborative strategy for achieving such an aesthetic is a listener-centered practice of artmaking. CONNECTIVE AESTHETICS Recent collaborative work among artists has created new forms of art that concentrate on social creativity (Gablik, 1995) rather than on self-expression and the agency of the individual. In modernist art, the isolated genius who worked in his or her own studio space, separated from and completely independent of others, created work that was "art for art's sake," thus removing art from a social conscience. In a postmodern era, a shift is occurring from a locus of creativity within an autonomous individual to that found within dialogic collaborative, interactive, and interdependent processes. Gablik (1991) is an advocate for looking at art in terms of social purpose rather than visual style, thus nurturing a connective aesthetic.

In a connective aesthetic, enlightened listening (Levin, 1989) which seeks shared understanding, would encourage each of us to recognize and understand our interdependence as we give voice to ourselves and to others. Gablik (1995) speaks to this: "Giving each person a voice is what builds community and makes art socially responsive. Interaction becomes the medium of expression, an emphatic way of seeing through another's eyes" (p. 82). Art that is listener-centered rather than visioncentered (Levin, 1989) is founded upon dialogue and conversation in which one listens and is listened to. It means that artists stress interaction and relationship rather than art objects by cultivating a compassionate relational self who welcomes the Other as a beginning toward healing ourselves and our world (Lippard, 1995). Connective aesthetics resonates with the attributes of feminist pedagogy. FEMINIST PEDAGOGY

Pedagogy is a concept that draws attention to the processes through which knowledge is produced. Pedagogues consciously create learning experiences that organize and disorganize understandings of the world in particular ways in order to involve others in knowledge creation (Giroux & Simon, 1989). To do this requires a particular stance that evokes a relational significance. Pedagogy as relationship (van Manen, 1994) embodies tact (van Manen, 1991), respect, thoughtfulness, caring, concern, connection, and nurturance (Martin, 1992). The relationship between learner and pedagogue therefore becomes the unifying element for a caring community of learners. Borrowing from Noddings' (1984, 1992) notions of care, one recognizes that a caring relationship within a moral education is built upon modeling, dialogue, practice, and confirmation. These are the attributes and power of feminist pedagogy.

Renee Sandell (1991) and other art educators (e.g., Collins & Sandell, 1996; Zimmerman, 1990) have discussed feminist issues within the fields of art and art education. Sandell, in particular, has written about the potentialities of feminist pedagogy for the field of art education. Using feminist thought as a basis for pedagogical decisions, strategies are created to empower the self, build community, and encourage leadership while enacting social change. Recognizing that all experience is gendered, feminist pedagogy (see also Irwin, 1997) seeks to transform social and institutional relations through the removal of oppressions inherent in societal structures, stereotypes, and prevailing ideologies. Although feminist pedagogy is concerned with gender relations, it is not limited to that critique. Creating a liberating learning environment promotes a democratic process wherein learners are directly involved in an inquiry process. Sandell suggests that recognizing the self-as-inquirer is a useful approach to involve students in posing and answering questions, and learning and creating knowledge. Pedagogues and learners alike become actively involved in the act of inquiry within an interactive environment of collaboration.

LISTENING TO THE SHAPES OF COLLABORATION Connective aesthetics and feminist pedagogy overlap in many ways. Both are concerned with collaboration, community building, caring, social purpose, listening, dialogue, modeling, taking responsibility, nurturing, and social action. Both are also changing the world. On a theoretical level, bringing these aesthetic and pedagogical ideas together seems natural. But how might these ideas be seen and heard in practice, particularly within an art education context? As a result of reflection upon a recent art exhibition in which we created a collaborative installation piece, I realized how powerful these ideas can be for art educators, professionally and symbolically. It is difficult to share here a keen sense of our verbal dialogue.3 However, I can share excerpts from discussions in which two members of the group reflect on images they created for the quilt Although these excerpts represent a small portion of our dialogues, they exhibit the kinds of learning each woman experienced as a result of working with other women in a project designed to examine gender issues. HELEN Of the six pieces that I made for the quilt, the one that embodies the most meaning for me has the image of the pears on it The pears, both halved and whole, are visual metaphors for many aspects of feminism. Visually, the pear shape makes reference to the uterus: symbolically, the pear represents nurturing, caring, passion, and desire. As a fruit, the pear calls up the cycles of the seasons; spring with rebirth, summer with growth, fall with harvest, and winter with rest The halved pear exposes the seeds which if nurtured will become the fruit Nurturing, as a concept, is largely what shapes my teaching style, but so does the concept of making the ordinary extraordinary. My relationship with a pear becomes pivotal to what it will become. Feminist pedagogy recognizes the importance of relationships in teaching and as a result, the daily stories of our ordinary lives and the lives of our students become important, each story needing to be told and heard in order to enhance our understandings of ourselves and of each other. WENDY In this quilt triangle, I have tried to portray what I see as the development of feminist consciousness over approximately 75 years as represented by the attitudes and approaches of my mother, my daughter, and myself. The lettering "We are other" represents my mother's generation of women who assumed society was organized for the benefit of men, with women expecting to serve in a support role rather than living life according to a vision they created for themselves. I've used the word "preconsciousness" to represent this position. For my mother this meant not daring to become a P.E. teacher.

"Constructive consciousness" is the statement I have included to represent myself and those of us who came of age in the bra-burning era and who believe "We are not other," but rather that we should be working toward a society that values equal participation of women and men in the mainstream and of shared responsibility for home and family. "Direct action" is the term I have used to represent those of my daughter's generation who believe that women's voices won't be heard and acted upon until men and women are equally represented in the political process. These are the young women who are doing whatever is necessary to become politically involved. "We are central" represents their acknowledgment that women's contributions are required to make the significant changes needed to create an inclusive society that aims for the well being of all. Simply stated, the above excerpts portray women who, over time, nurtured themselves and others through acts of speaking and listening in a group while creating images with deep meaning. For many of us, involvement in this project called us to work collaboratively in a domain where we had been trained to work independently of others. We learned to listen to the shapes of collaborative artmaking. By listening to others our understanding of the world increased. Looking back over our collaboration, I began to reflect on the process of listening and how that process resonates with feminist archetypal shapes. Metaphorically, we visioned ourselves as quilters stitching together pieces of life stories, fragments of memories, aspirations, and intentions. In the act of speaking or listening, we celebrated our differences, our needs to reach within and find ourselves, yet we also celebrated being together in the act of making meaning. Our collaborative quilt (see also Stein, 1996) symbolizes our multiplicity within unity. When the quilt is draped across the oval table we have gathered around for dialogue, it symbolizes our circular unity and our desire as women "pedagogical-artists" (Robertson, 199D to find and/or to create unity within community. Our chairs represent our psychological selves, sitting as we have so many times before, in a circle equidistant from one another. The circle, as a shape, has been important to our process of collaboration: "The unity signified by the circle is a central unity in the sense of the lived space of shared beliefs that are meaningful not only in a fragmentary way but also fully and integrally" (Brenneman & Yarian, 1982, p. 31). We each viewed ourselves as important co-contributors to discussions and artmaking. Each of us shared stories of our gendered world, and each continue to collect stories that motivate us to enlarge our understanding of interrelationships among and between men and women. It was only as a result of the hours of listening and being listened to that we came to appreciate the depth and complexity of our acquired understandings. We wanted to share this new awareness through a process that resonated with the message. It was then that we decided to create a quilt Not a traditional quilt. Not a quilt whose design was predetermined by one member of the quilting group. Rather, we formed an aesthetic partnership wherein we designed and redesigned our collaborative work in and through time spent together. Our aesthetic partnership developed through a listeners' paradigm. We learned from one another and came to collaborative decisions.

The quilt speaks of quilted stories, quilted lives, quilted issues facing men and women in our gendered world. Each triangular piece is stitched, glued and appliqued into the quilt just as the complexity, diversity and multiplicity of our lives search for coherence and unity. The triangular shape, at first taken from a simple table napkin in our everyday lives, soon took on greater significance as we learned through research that in ancient Egypt the triangle was the hieroglypic sign for woman (Walker, 1983). Most ancient symbol systems recognized the triangle as the Goddess's virginmother-crone. Yet, in another spiritual vein, Gnostics signified the triangle as creative intellect. We soon realized how other women artists have used the triangle as a symbol of women, with Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party being the most familiar. The triangle asserts the trinity of life for each of us as we create or discover our past, present, and future, with our mind, body and soul, and with our personal, professional and political lives.

Our triangular quilt collects our stories, our experiences, our concerns of our gendered world and creates a trinity of personal, public and collaborative lives (Thurber & Zimmerman, 1997) that are held within a circle of meaning, a circle of community. The going back into our(selves) gave us a chance to come forward into our unity. LISTENING AND SHAPING AGAIN The triangular shapes within our quilt give voice to the creative intellect of each woman, within a collective of women. Symbolically draping the quilt over a rounded table represents the circle of community, the ever circling of learning in and through time. These shapes of collaboration are significant for women, and men, as they embark upon projects which seek social action through community building and collaboration. However, it is not enough to visualize these shapes and collaborations. We need to hear these collaborations through a listenercentered, connective aesthetic combined with feminist pedagogy. We need to listen, and to be listened to, as we learn to connect with one another and our environment

One of the greatest outcomes artistteachers seek is to translate understanding into action, to role model for students' collective and personal power as creators and transformers of the world. Listening to one another and ourselves within our circle has been vitally important, but the circle continues to enfold, inviting others into our circulations of practice (Irwin, Mastri, & Robertson, in press). The circle, after all, is not static, but alive with movement, circling as a spiral of learning moves through experience, understanding, judgment and responsible action (Brenneman, Jr., & Yarian, 1982, p. 50) always within hearing distance of others. Having said this, we encourage others, both men and women, teachers and students, to collaborate on artmaking projects which are listener-centred.

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[Author Affiliation]

Rita L Irwin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum Studies, University of British Columbia. The author is indebted to Nancy

[Author Affiliation]

Crawford, Rosa Mastri, Aileen Neale, Helen Robertson, and Wendy Stephenson, whose art practices provided the inspiration for this article.