barbara bickel
Southern Illinois University, School of Art and Design, Faculty Member
- Barbara Bickel, Ph.D. is an artist, writer, editor, researcher, and educator. She is Associate Professor of Art Educa... moreBarbara Bickel, Ph.D. is an artist, writer, editor, researcher, and educator. She is Associate Professor of Art Education Emerita at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Core Faculty at Southwestern College, Santa Fe, USA, and co-founder of Studio M*: Research Creation Lab Intersecting Arts, Culture and Healing based in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada.
She has written more than 80 peer reviewed articles and book chapters and is author of Art, Ritual and Trance Inquiry: Arational Learning in an Irrational World and co-author of Art-Care Practices for Restoring the Communal: Education, Co-Inquiry and Healing. Engaging a practice of editing as compassion she co-edited Arts-Based And Contemplative Practices In Research and Teaching; Honoring Presence And Arts-based Educational Research Trajectories: Career Reflections By Authors of Outstanding Dissertations. She is a co-founder and active editor of Artizein: Arts & Teaching Journal. She creates and teaches art as a sacred inquiry and transdisciplinary meaning making process.
Her current art and research interests include arts-based inquiry, socially engaged art, mixed media art, installation art, video art, connective aesthetics, collaboration, matrixial theory, and restorative and transformative learning. Her art and performance rituals have been exhibited and performed in the US and Canada since 1991. She is a co-founder of the Gestare Art Collective. To view her art and research: http://www.gestareartcollective.com http://www.studiom.space http://www.barbarabickel.comedit
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Historical art educators Kenneth Beittel’s and Henry Schaefer-Simmern’s teaching practices contribute much to our understanding of how one might nurture, develop and then teach from the inner teacher outward, thereby developing wholeness... more
Historical art educators Kenneth Beittel’s and Henry Schaefer-Simmern’s teaching practices contribute much to our understanding of how one might nurture, develop and then teach from the inner teacher outward, thereby developing wholeness as a natural occurrence in students. To better compare holistic teaching in contemporary art education with these exemplars, we began by examining Parker Palmer’s educative work on transformative teaching and wholeness. In The Courage to Teach, he writes, “The power of our mentors is not necessarily in the models of good teaching they gave us… their power is in their capacity to awaken a truth within us…. If we discover the teacher’s heart in ourselves by meeting a great teacher, recalling that meeting may help us take heart in teaching once more” (1998, p. 21). When we examined the teaching practices and theories of Schaefer-Simmern and Beittel, we discovered their passionate, although differing abilities to awaken heart—in the form of what Palmer...
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We are two Canadian arts-based educational researchers who collaborated during a studio residency in Paris, France, during May 2015, for ten days. Our residency curriculum included study of feminist poet-thinker Hélène Cixous, taking... more
We are two Canadian arts-based educational researchers who collaborated during a studio residency in Paris, France, during May 2015, for ten days. Our residency curriculum included study of feminist poet-thinker Hélène Cixous, taking walks in Paris locales, viewing women’s art, and engaging arts-based inquiry methods such as journaling, life writing and creative embodied practices, as a way to pay attention to and document our daily experiences. We practiced what we call companion pedagogy, with a feminist focus on mothering and gifting relations. We find that arts-based, restorative practices strengthen our wellbeing and resiliency as educators, and also support our desire for a more nurturing, mothering humanity to come forward for gifting a healing education. Healing education begs the question of how to address the resiliency of educators over time through what are increasingly challenging and depleting conditions of institutional cultures and economies. We thus offer creative p...
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This is the first article of an in-process, creation-centred research project exploring raw energy through the authors’ distinctive and complementary inquiry practices of creation-centred research (St. Georges, 2020, in press) and... more
This is the first article of an in-process, creation-centred research project exploring raw energy through the authors’ distinctive and complementary inquiry practices of creation-centred research (St. Georges, 2020, in press) and spontaneous creation-making (Bickel, 2020; Bickel & Fisher, 1993). Raw energy, as conceived, is experienced as spirit-in-motion in a process of manifestation—of making the invisible visible—and is rooted in an intra)inter-relational aesthetic. This creation-centred inquiry is a relational and animated approach to creating, inquiry, learning, unlearning, and teaching. It resists the colonial lens by virtue of exploring inner subjective space, relinquishing colloquial aesthetic constraints, and enveloping a sacred space in which to restore, heal, and decolonize the imagination. Led by breath)spirit, touch, intuition, experiential and conversational exchanges, and compassionate relationships, creative lifeforce is activated to forge new ways of knowing—moving...
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The birth story of the Metramorphosis book begins in 2010 at an artist residency on Toronto Island. The book is bound with buttons allowing the cloth pages to be unbound and bound over and over again. In this way it is read anew each... more
The birth story of the Metramorphosis book begins in 2010 at an artist residency on Toronto Island. The book is bound with buttons allowing the cloth pages to be unbound and bound over and over again. In this way it is read anew each time, as it is never re-buttoned in the same order. After a year of stitching into the book I realized it was not my book alone to complete, as the study of matrixial theory (Ettinger, 2005) I was contemplatively engaging in the book making is about relationality, cobecoming and copoiesis. In 2012, I began to carry the book with me while traveling. In the generative state of co-becoming, the book has taken on a life of its own. The 2017 Arts Pre-conference and call to write this article prompted me for the first time to write about this living matrixial book as an on-going socially-engaged art/inquiry/contemplative co-event. This article includes images of the book pages, Ettingerian quotes, my reflections on the lived experience with the book, and a po...
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This article reaches into the depths of a collaborative a/r/tographic ritual inquiry between two women artist-educatorspriestesses. Within this we reflect on the intersections of research, art, spirituality, and education as thresholds of... more
This article reaches into the depths of a collaborative a/r/tographic ritual inquiry between two women artist-educatorspriestesses. Within this we reflect on the intersections of research, art, spirituality, and education as thresholds of collaborative learning. Throughout the ritual-infused research process, we generated source material and imagery from trance, Authentic Movement, the labyrinth, reflective writing and co-interviews. Each of these process practices took us outside of ourselves, and attuned us to Spirit, offering a larger perspective on the inquiry while simultaneously bringing us closer to actualizing the performance ritual. In co-creating what became a performative ritual narrative of the loss and restoration of the Divine feminine in Western culture, we reclaimed a lost part of our Spiritual lineage as women through the performance ritual Re/Turning to Her, a teaching parable performed for the larger community.
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image from Labyrinth video Video Essay Video Credits Videotext Educational Insights | Volume 13, Number 2, 2009 | Barbara Bickel and Nane Ariadne Jordan | Ritual Art: A Pedagogy of Inquiry/Witnessing/Listening to the Sacred
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It is the third week of classes in January and I invite the students in my Philosophy of Art Education class to meet in the student gallery where we will nap as part of a lesson on socially engaged art. The day of class there is no heat... more
It is the third week of classes in January and I invite the students in my Philosophy of Art Education class to meet in the student gallery where we will nap as part of a lesson on socially engaged art. The day of class there is no heat in the 100 year old building where the School of Art and Design classroom and gallery is located. I am glad there are many blankets in the gallery Dream Scroll installation as I enter the building that day. (Bickel, 2013, from journal)
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We are five scholars of education, provoking curriculum on the topic of “care”—as practice, theory, and struggle, through our stories of living, teaching, and learning. Our inquiries surface threads of rupture, where we find that “care”... more
We are five scholars of education, provoking curriculum on the topic of “care”—as practice, theory, and struggle, through our stories of living, teaching, and learning. Our inquiries surface threads of rupture, where we find that “care” indicates our efforts to address suffering. Our care-work consists of restorative, creative, and contemplative practices. We tell our stories through a literary metissage (weaving) of creative non-fiction, poetic writing, artwork, and images. We thus creatively expand the meaning of care by evoking our understandings, lived experiences, and practices of caring. In this way, we hope to create more attuned relationships, and open the way for more stories of “care” to emerge.
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W are delighted to introduce the first part of a two-part special issue of Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal; our special issue attends to arts-based and contemplative practices in inquiry and teaching. We share this first part with you... more
W are delighted to introduce the first part of a two-part special issue of Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal; our special issue attends to arts-based and contemplative practices in inquiry and teaching. We share this first part with you as a larger invitation to all people to experience the radical healing that the combination of arts and contemplative practices can bring to our teaching, research, and personal lives. Also, we offer this two-part special issue of Artizein as a gift within the framework of a healing gift economy. The foundation of a gift economy is a reciprocal circle of care that is other-focused rather than ego-focused and based on a maternal paradigm of unconditional m/othering (Vaughan, 1997, 2007), a paradigm based on love, care and abundance—not fear, mistrust and scarcity. Communities that operate today in a love-based circle of care form a stark contrast to the dominant “imperialist, white supremacist, patriarchal capitalist” exchange economy that sent the ...
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Snowber, C. & Bickel, B. (2015) Companions with mystery: Art, spirit and the ecstatic. In S. Walsh, B. Bickel, & C. Leggo (Eds.). Arts-based and contemplative practices in research and teaching: Honoring presence. New... more
Snowber, C. & Bickel, B. (2015) Companions with mystery: Art, spirit and the ecstatic. In S. Walsh, B. Bickel, & C. Leggo (Eds.). Arts-based and contemplative practices in research and teaching: Honoring presence. New York, NY: Routledge.
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Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, JMI Vol 2, No 1 (2011). ...
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This article reaches into the depths of a collaborative a/r/tographic ritual inquiry between two women artist-educatorspriestesses. Within this we reflect on the intersections of research, art, spirituality, and education as thresholds of... more
This article reaches into the depths of a collaborative a/r/tographic ritual inquiry between two women artist-educatorspriestesses. Within this we reflect on the intersections of research, art, spirituality, and education as thresholds of collaborative learning. Throughout the ritual-infused research process, we generated source material and imagery from trance, Authentic Movement, the labyrinth, reflective writing and co-interviews. Each of these process practices took us outside of ourselves, and attuned us to Spirit, offering a larger perspective on the inquiry while simultaneously bringing us closer to actualizing the performance ritual. In co-creating what became a performative ritual narrative of the loss and restoration of the Divine feminine in Western culture, we reclaimed a lost part of our Spiritual lineage as women through the performance ritual Re/Turning to Her, a teaching parable performed for the larger community.
These storied and aesthetic offerings are presented as an alchemic tapestry of experiences and responses to the conference MAKING shiFt HAPPEN. This innovative (un)conference was fully virtual, and connected us across disciplines,... more
These storied and aesthetic offerings are presented as an alchemic tapestry of experiences and responses to the conference MAKING shiFt HAPPEN. This innovative (un)conference was fully virtual, and connected us across disciplines, countries and time zones. In this review we respond to how MAKING shiFt HAPPEN offered flexible, sustainable and inclusive options for us, women in academia, to engage with meaningful ideas and with other women around the world.
Barbara Bickel (2019): Book review of ‘Unfolding Afterglow: Letters and conversations on teacher renewal,, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2019.1609121
ABSTRACT This article is drawn from a dissertation study with 14 women spiritual leaders who were part of an interfaith planning team for an annual women's spirituality conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Engaging a... more
ABSTRACT This article is drawn from a dissertation study with 14 women spiritual leaders who were part of an interfaith planning team for an annual women's spirituality conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Engaging a praxis of co-a/r/tography as ritual, the women were enabled to manifest and explore their multiple-subjective relationships with the Divine. Through co-encounters within matrixial (Ettinger, 2005) and real religious/political borderspaces via art and ritual, the process of decolonizing the Divine (Fernandes, 2003) for each woman, and the group as a whole, proved possible when supported by a compassionate community.
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ROME BOOKLET WITH ABSTRACTS
Research Interests: Psychology, Art History, Feminist Theory, Art Theory, Contemporary Art, and 14 moreVisual Culture, Feminism, Contemporary Literature, Women Artists, Transnational Feminism, Visual Arts, Art and Cultural Theory, Postcolonialism, Gender and Feminism, Motherhood, Ideologies of Motherhood; Mothering and Public Discourse; Mental Health, Mother and Artist, Psychoanaysis, Histories of Feminisms, Maternal Art, and Maternal Feminism
Barbara Bickel (2019): Book review of ‘Unfolding Afterglow: Letters and
conversations on teacher renewal,, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, DOI:
10.1080/09518398.2019.1609121
conversations on teacher renewal,, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, DOI:
10.1080/09518398.2019.1609121