"Inter-facing Reflexive Pedagogy"

Abstract

“Inter-facing Reflexive Pedagogy” is a chapter excerpt from my doctoral dissertation: Spectacle, Shock, and Surfacing (2009) that calls attention to visual culture through performative inquiry by making connections between meaning making for everyday life and the practice of installation art by repositioning one’s own body through the installation art form. This becomes meaningful for the spectator/participant by incorporating a reflexive encounter both historically with visual culture and socially where constructed techniques and procedures are closed to contextual circumstances. In a system of relations, through an engagement in counter-constructed spectacle strategies, learning involves the whole person; it implies becoming a full participant. Encounters with an art form are never just an end point, since it may challenge the spectator/participant to new encounters of experience. Merleau-Ponty links these encounters as a route —an experience that proceeds through dialogue and evokes change. By presenting moments of possibilities through physical, emotional, and intellectual spaces for discourse on subjects in and around visual culture, the spectator/participant has the opportunity to re-claim his or her agency and autonomy by first speaking through the installation and then to the
community of which he/she is a significant part.