Abstract

This dissertation explores how the educational tools of mobile sensory photography and creative cartography can be used in art education settings to encourage youth to attend to their everyday surroundings. Mobile sensory photography utilizes the connectivity of mobile devices to enable learning collectives to create and share photographs of their everyday surroundings. I anchored this process in Sensory Studies as a strategy to engage learners with the everyday places they inhabit. I use creative cartography as an umbrella term to describe a diverse set of practices that use maps to represent subjective, social, collective, political, and spatial experiences. A central question I examine is what kinds of spatial and collective learning occur when integrating these tools in art classrooms. My understanding of spatial and collective learning is rooted in the complementary theoretical frameworks of complexity thinking and spatiality, which regard learning as social, relational, and situated within existing spatio-temporal relations. I used the methodology of Design-Based Research (DBR) to integrate these tools in high school art classrooms. I worked collaboratively with two art teachers at two different schools in Montreal to design and test a series of educational activities that involved taking sensory photographs of everyday places and sharing these images on social media and online mapping networks. By analyzing student and teacher interviews and their artistic productions, I was able to develop pedagogical strategies and a spatial theoretical framework for using mobile devices to enrich teaching and learning in art classrooms. This research has convinced me of the pertinence of attending to the spatial and temporal dimension of teaching and learning in physical and online spaces, and the symbiotic relationship between photography, the senses, and place-based learning. I also found the particular form of creative cartography that I termed Collective Online Sensory Mapping (COSM) to be a powerful tool for enabling a group of learners to attend to their everyday surroundings, express their identities, and learn about others.
Keywords: Mobile sensory photography, creative cartography, spatiality in education, senses in Art Education