Spatiality, Learning, and Liberation in Physics Education
by Hillary Moore
We’re excited to showcase the stunning artwork of Hillary Moore at the AAPT Summer Meeting! Hillary’s vibrant pieces will be on display in the Exhibit Hall throughout the event. Be sure to stop by during coffee breaks to explore her work and learn more about her creative process.
These four pieces of artwork show a progression toward more liberated spaces in physics education. As part of a recent collaborative project exploring spatial justice in physics teaching and learning, researchers engaged an illustrator to create artistic renderings of reimagined learning spaces. The artist chose keywords from the interviews, case study analyses, and other dialogue generated by the project. She sorted those words into four categories representing, 1) injustice in traditional physics education spaces, 2) disrupting and reimagining those spaces, 3) a more embodied, collaborative approach to learning, and 4) dreams for the future of physics education. Each of these categories is the basis for a piece of artwork that invites the viewer to examine their own experiences in physics classrooms and their vision for learning spaces where every student belongs.
SEPARATE, REMOVED, HIERARCHICAL, CONTAINED, INDIVIDUAL, EXHAUSTED This piece was created with watercolor, ink, and graphite. It depicts current or traditional spaces in physics education. The composition is a grid of uniform boxes containing individual learners who, with closer inspection are each different, but the repetitive boxes evoke mass production or a factory assembly line that produces students who are proficient in the field. Students contained in identical boxes also implies a separation between learners and that each person is on their own.
ACTION, DISRUPT, DISPEL, REIMAGINE, REORGANIZE, REORIENT The second piece was created with color pencil, graphite, watercolor, and cut paper. The central form is a hand in silhouette that is popping a bubble. This piece is about initiating change. It evokes a quiet disruption. What happens when we dispel and then rethink traditional forms of knowledge? If we reimagine the way we exist in educational systems, how are we oriented to one another as learners? How are we organized around a teacher/professor? Where does the motivation to learn come from?
EXPERIMENTATION, CURIOSITY, PLAY, COLLABORATION, INTERACTION,INQUIRY, CONNECTION The third piece is made from cut paper, white ink, and color pencil. It shows many learners overlapping in silhouette, interacting, working, and learning together. The silhouetted forms are filled in with a pattern of stars that suggest there are galaxies and infinite possibilities within them. The people are tangled together, the learning process may be messy, but there is evidence of more energy and joy compared to the first two pieces.
BELONGING, LIBERATION, PEACEFUL, JOYFUL, FREE, FUTURE, IMAGINE, SOAR, CELEBRATE The fourth piece was painted in watercolor with details drawn in color pencil. As the piece that represents dreams for the future, it was created to evoke feelings of freedom and belonging. It depicts a person sleeping peacefully surrounded by soft whimsical feathers. Above, people are moving joyfully as they watch a flock of birds flying up into the sky. These images were chosen to reflect layers of consciousness: repose, lucid dreaming, collective awareness, and a liberated state of taking flight and soaring above.
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