UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Charles Garoian has continued his cultural journey through the art of art education by authoring a new book "The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art: Embodied Research and Practice," published by the State University of New York (SUNY) Press this year.
By beginning each chapter of "The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art: Embodied Research and Practice" with an autobiographical recalling of personal memory and cultural history, Garoian, professor of art education at Penn State, creates a differential, prosthetic space. Within these spaces are the particularities of his own lived experiences as an artist and educator, as well as those of the artists, educators, critics, historian and theorists whose research and creative scholarship he invokes. Garoian uses these autobiographical and cultural narratives related to art research and practice to explore, experiment and improvise multiple correspondences between and among learners’ own lived experiences and understandings, and those of others. In addition to this book and his scholarly articles, which are featured in leading journals on art and education, Garoian has also authored "Performing Pedagogy: Toward an Art of Politics" (1999) and co-authored "Spectacle Pedagogy: Art, Politics, and Visual Culture" (2008), both volumes published by SUNY Press.
Garoian received bachelor of art and master of art degrees from California State University, Fresno, and his doctorate in education from Stanford University. He has performed, lectured and conducted workshops in festivals, galleries, museums and university campuses in the United States and internationally. Based on the critical strategies of performance art, his teaching focuses on exploratory, experimental and improvisational art-making processes in visual art studio and art education courses. He was the principal organizer of the Performance Art, Culture, Pedagogy Symposium, held at Penn State in November 1996. The first of its kind, the symposium program included 42 renown performance artists, critics, historians, arts presenters and educators who examined the historical, theoretical and experiential significance of performance art in order to distinguish its pedagogy as an emerging form of arts education. In October 2000, he co-organized Performative Sites: Intersecting Art, Technology, and the Body, an international symposium at Penn State that examined the theoretical, experiential and pedagogical implications of performance artists’ works that use mechanical and electronic technologies to critique the body and its identity.
The several granting agencies and programs that have supported his cultural work include the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Getty Education Institute for the Arts.