Abstract

This thesis explores ways in which the new materialist idea of the entanglement of materiality and meaning can be investigated in art education encounters. For this study, I developed a workshop with the methodology of Design Based Research that was implemented in two iterations in the Art Education graduate studio in Concordia University and in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts respectively. Five students enrolled in the BFA specialization in Art Education in Concordia University volunteered to participate. Their experience as students, art makers and teachers was key for pointing towards procedures and theory that could be applied to future educational encounters. Throughout the workshops it was possible to observe that our understandings of materiality and its relationship to meaning are deeply rooted in and performed by the way we position ourselves in the world and thus our learning and teaching. An important achievement of the exercises was providing opportunities to witness that things make sense together with and without us. Added to that, the research pointed towards the potentialities of a pedagogy of diffraction for articulating the relationship between materiality and meaning in art education settings. That is, it the exercises allowed for unexpected and unconventional approaches to materiality as a way to produce difference, rather than replicating sameness, and to give way for things to take shape and meaning in relations.