FRIDAY 3 July 2020
13:00-14:30 GMT+1 Online session via Microsoft Teams 
Image: Courtesy of George Vasiliou
How has the pandemic challenged art lectures and trainee art teachers in higher education? How has it impacted on the shaping of their identity as learners?
The sudden pandemic of COVID-19 has rapidly transformed the ways we experience the world and how we communicate with each other. This has significantly impacted on the ways we teach and learn in educational settings, requiring a complete redesign of the learning experience as part of the new turn to online interactive art lessons.
In this session, Dr Markidou from the European University of Cyprus discusses how a group of postgraduate art students negotiated their identity as artists and educators through the creation of digital reflective journals. The analysis of the students’ work has attended to how they responded to the new realities and how they have rethought the social functions of art as a school subject taught remotely.
The move to online art training involves distancing from the multimodal experiences students are required to have in cultural spaces, entailing physical interaction cultural artefacts and art resources in art galleries and museums. The new reality necessitates the use of screen-based, digitalised resources and engaging with digital visual material in self-isolation.
This session explores how the trainee teachers reconceptualized their role as art teachers and learners and explored the potential of using art to respond to critical social issues. How has the online learning environment, provided them with a framework and a new set of skills to reflect upon the transformation of their own identity, as artists and teachers? How has experiencing art away from cultural spaces affected the way we understand the making and teaching of art?
The art-based digital reflective journals presented in this session are also discussed as a pedagogical tool for recording the students’ evolving designs for using art in the school classroom. Dr Markidou will discuss how artists and educators can use digital reflective diaries as a method for rethinking and redesigning learning in art education, ensuring quality cultural and multimodal experiences for all students.
About the Speaker
Dr Tereza Markidou is Scientific Collaborator at the School of Humanities, Social and Educational Sciences at the European University of Cyprus. She is an art educator and a primary school teacher interested in social and inclusive dimensions of art education. Her research work has focused on social justice and democratic practices in art education and has featured in numerous art education journals. Her rich experience in public art projects reflects her interest in intercultural perspectives in art education. http://thealientrail.com/
https://euc.academia.edu/TerezaMarkidou.
Registration
The session will run on the following Microsoft Teams link, which is accessible after registration: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/team/19%3a7f5206dc61aa48be8f210e8948a39ab7%40thread.tacv2/conversations?groupId=201cf162-a17c-4bd1-97a6-cad4a98fdddc&tenantId=1faf88fe-a998-4c5b-93c9-210a11d9a5c2
If you have a UCL account, please send an invitation to this Microsoft Team well in advance of the session. All non- UCL participants will need to register through the following google form up to a day before the session to enable them access to the link above: https://forms.gle/ubU7hqwwqAThPadt9
Please kindly check that you have access to the group well in advance of the session. For any technical difficulties, please e-mail us at jiawei.ding.17@ucl.ac.uk
About the Forum
The Visual and Multimodal Forum is one of the outreach and teaching activities of the UCL Centre for Multimodal Research. It a hub for researchers across the world who are interested in multimodality. It aims to provide a platform for dialogue and collaboration for advancing visual and multimodal research across disciplines, with a particular emphasis on communication and learning
The Visual and Multimodal Research Forum 