The University of Manitoba campuses are located on original lands of Anishinaabeg, Cree, Ojibwe-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and on the National Homeland of the Red River Métis. More
COVID-19 Anxiety: Location, Refuge and Loss is a collaborative creation research project with Pam Patterson, Assistant Professor, TIS, Faculty of Art, OCAD University; Daniel Payne, Head of Reference & Instructional Services, Dorothy H. Hoover Library, OCAD University; and Joanna Black, Professor, Art Education, University of Manitoba (cross-appointed to School of Art). The project has been funded by an OCAD U Seed Grant, a Canada Council Strategic Initiatives Digital Futures COVID-19 Grant, a University of Manitoba Creative Works Grant, Ontario Arts Council Exhibition Assistance Grants, and a Manitoba Arts Council Travel Professional Development Grant.
Artists/researchers have been exploring the generative potentials found by working in joyful, vulnerable, and committed communities of practice. During this pandemic, accepting anxiety as a given and as inherent in creative making, artist/researchers from OCADU and University of Manitoba have been exploring mutually supportive pedagogies among themselves, with artists at Gallery 1313, Toronto, and with students. Creating a rich environment for learning, they have been developing resources articulated as individually expressive research results.
Hosting this portal on the OCAD University Library’s LibGuide platform embeds the creative output of our artist, student, staff, and faculty in an information rich ecology of knowledge. The utility allows libraries to take an active, independent role in the production of web resources that are connected relationally to the broader Library collection at OCAD University and beyond.
Guided by the Canadian Federation of Library Associations’ Statement on Intellectual Freedom, the OCAD U Library celebrates innovative expressions of creativity and ensures that these voices are supported, nurtured, and promoted. The diversity of resources presented in this dynamic portal tangibly demonstrates the new information objects libraries need to collect and how they can be used to foster learning opportunities. This shows, in a nuanced way, how creative research is a rhizomic process of inquiry that is rooted in scholarship empowered through conversation; two of the foremost principles in the information literacy frameworks that guide librarians’ pedagogy.
This equal collaboration between Art and Design Education Lab (ADEL) and the Library provides a means of exploring wholistic, dialogic strategies for integrating information, research, and pedagogic resources with the goal of evolving course curriculum in an active, responsive, respectful, transparent, and prescient way.
This multifaceted COVID Pedagogies: Tools, Content & Strategies LibGuide site also includes significant contributions by other OCAD U faculty, staff, students, and guests that present, query, and assess emerging pandemic knowledges using a range of creative and academic submissions from video to visual essay to exhibition. Here are tracked pandemic experiences, conversations, experimentation, and explorations. The resources presented include innovative teacher/librarian/researcher-driven tools that are being developed in/for teaching, many with content that addresses the pressing issues and conversations of this pandemic time.
Linked on this COVID Pedagogies: Tools, Content & Strategies LibGuide site is the website COVID-19 Anxiety in the Age of the Anthropocene originating from, and developed by, Joanna Black and Sarah Paradis, University of Manitoba. The University of Manitoba site presents work by general arts and science students and those in education. Video work is also included by Joanna Black and by Sarah Paradis. Also linked here is the Unpacking Pandemic Pondering Exhibition site online at Gallery 1313, Toronto.
Much thanks to Marta Chudolinska and Janine Arellano for their joyful commitment to this learning community and for designing and implementing this libguide site.