August 27 -28 | Celebrating Creative Wellness 
​Saturday, August 27, 9 a.m. – Sunday, August 28, 3 p.m. $200 members/ $250 non

Self-expression through the creative arts offers a healthy method of processing experience and renewing one’s emotional coffers. In August 2016, MacRostie Art Center will host an Art & Wellness Weekend in order to continue the conversation about ways to enrich our quality of life with creative practices. Sessions include: Therapeutic Yoga with Nicole Hoops, Art & Healing activity with Janet Miller, Expressive Painting workshop with Lea Friesen, Nature Art with Aaron Squadroni, En Plein Air Painting with Liz White, Somaesthetics yoga and creativity workshop with Pauline Sameshima, and Project Lulu exhibition with Arts Express healing activities through creative expression. Participants have the option to stay over-night for creative time and relaxation at the MAC, or arrange their own lodging and return Sunday morning for more creativity, wellness, and self-expression.

Link to story 

PhD student Holly Tsun Haggarty has won a Graduate Student Award from the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (an association of Canadian Society for the Study of Education) for her Master’s thesis, entitled “Resisting Positivism: Unfolding The Epistemological Basis of Two Arts-Integrating Research Methodologies, Arts Based Research and A/r/tography.”
Holly’s thesis explores how an arts practice may be considered a research methodology and a way of knowing. Her research was supervised by Dr. Pauline Sameshima with committee member Dr. Don Kerr. Holly is continuing her research into the philosophical basis of arts-integrating methodologies in her current PhD studies.
One of the judges commented that Holly’s thesis inquiry "is excellently conceived and constructed - the level of scholarship and writing outstanding…[with] witty, reflexive poetry integrated throughout." Another noted that Holly “brings a balanced and powerful methodological synthesis to bear on this inquiry, which appropriately combines critical, creative and heuristic approaches.”
Congratulations, Holly, on this award!

Northern Ontario Medical Journal: “Project overcomes barriers to cancer screening” by Chisholm Pothier.
http://www.nomj.ca/2015/12/15/project-overcomes-barriers-to-cancer-screening.html

We invite you to consider contributing an abstract in an edited book project tentatively entitled:

 MA: Materiality in Teaching and Learning

Edited by:
Pauline Sameshima, Anita Sinner & Boyd White

The Japanese concept of ‘ma’ refers to the interval between two markers. Ma is somatically constructed by a deliberate, attentive consciousness to what simultaneously is expressed, repressed, or suppressed between two structures. In this dialectic exploration, we seek to probe the spaces between—private/public, teacher/student, old/new, young/old, self/other, and so forth.  Questions we seek to address through multi-modal perspectives include but are not limited to:

·      What inquiry methods, practices, objects, designs, structures and/or environments unveil features of, and        influences upon, teaching and learning identities that lead to teacher or learner self-efficacy? 

·      How do we as educators work with objects/artefacts of teaching and learning and create new       
       relationships for learning in the process?

·      How is educational materiality enacted in education and to what ends?

·      How is materiality changing/challenging our educational discourses?

Significant research in teaching and learning has been undertaken in the last decades, but the role of materiality and material culture, as formative in the development of teaching and learning identities, offers a new site for epistemological understandings. The purpose of this book is to explore how materiality and material culture provides: (1) concrete artefacts available for empirical examination; (2) a reference point for symbolic interpretation; and (3) a lens, through which to de/reconstruct the sometimes problematic, frequently unarticulated and even inchoate nature of teaching and learning. We expect that these articulations can redefine and improve the conditions, practices, products, and pedagogies of being a teacher/learner in the 21st Century.

We invite unpublished accounts or investigations that specifically address issues of materiality and material culture in teaching and learning in a variety of performative, literary, or visual response forms, including innovative arts integrated renderings, poetry, stories, creative forms of research, case studies, and traditional chapters. Submissions should be no longer than 3000 words including references (Word documents only, APA 6th ed.) and will be due January 11, 2016. Please double-space your entry, references, and endnotes. Images must be 300 dpi, TIFF files only, colour (CMYK format) or B/W, and should be included at the end of your submission. Please include permission letters if applicable, credit and source lines, and captions for images, audio, and performance videos.

All submissions will be peer-reviewed before acceptance. If accepted, please be prepared to edit your submission as required. Please email your proposed submission title and masked abstract (100-150 words) separately from your contact information to [email protected] by September 1, 2015.

By Jan Oakley
Dr. Pauline Sameshima, Canada Research Chair in Arts Integrated Research, was a panelist on the Education Panel of the Ontario and Canada Research Chairs Symposium, held in Toronto at the beginning of April. She was one of six research panelists discussing the question, "How does Ontario ensure the best education system from kindergarten to PhD?"

Varainja Stock, PhD student (pictured below) also attended the Symposium. She co-presented a poster presentation that outlined the arts-informed research of her doctoral program of study, along with the arts-integrated research of Patricia Maarhuis (a graduate student from Washington State University), and Dr. Sameshima.

The Symposium was hosted by the Council of Ontario Universities. It showcased the contributions that Ontario researchers are making to issues affecting the prosperity and well-being of Ontarians, in diverse areas including education, health, the economy, ethics, borders and sustainable economies.

Reposted from: http://education.lakeheadu.ca/news/?display=news&nid=131

Sutra 3: That [Consciousness becomes] diverse because of the division of reciprocally 
adapted objects and subjects (From the Pratyabhijñā-jrdayam). 


"The world we perceive is inextricably woven into the fabric of our existence. We have the opportunity to create and re-create—and create again—our experiences of that world, and thus, we hold the power to
 find a direction in our lives that will, ultimately bring us growth and fulfillment.”
 (Swāmī Shāntānanda, 2003, p. 85, on Sutra 3)

Please scroll to 8:02 for interview and coverage.