Research

Chapter Eight-Localising Asia in Aotearoa, Dunmore Publishing, NZ 2011 Personal narrative: roots – encountering new boundaries from a visual artist’s perception The two most significant aspects of encountering new boundaries are dislocation and association, both geographically and socially. A displacement in location not only transposes our physical entities but also transforms our consciousness about all that has been accumulated and absorbed in the course of time, from people we have met and places in which we have lived. Being a visual artist and an educator, this displacement proposes an artistic response, both in my art practice and my teaching of art. I was born to a working-class second-generation Christian convert family in southern India, and faced the challenges of being a Christian and accepting religious beliefs introduced by the British missionaries during colonisation, while negotiating with the national and regional religions and cultures of India. My exposure ...

Integrated Arts Curriculum at School Level – A Cultural Perspective This paper attempts to examine New Zealand arts education programmes, beginning with the primary through the secondary school curriculum, to search for the possibility of integrating the independent arts disciplines currently existing in the schools. A learner-centred interactive interdisciplinary pedagogy is intended to draw a paradigm for arts education that has two similar, yet different, integrating points of inception. One is rooted in the indigenous concept of the art form embedded in cultures like those of Africa and Asia, while the other is identified in the modern educational psychoanalytical theory of multiple intelligences proposed by Howard Gardener. Parallel kinds of integration are found in these two approaches – either between the disciplines or within an individual’s intellectual development. Interestingly, it is clear that these two approaches, integrated into a curriculum, would enable a disci...