I collaborated with artist Katherine Diemert to develop a workshop titled Critique as Gift, which we first presented to our peers in education at the Canadian Society for Education through Art (CSEA) conference in Halifax in 2024. We also produced a publication to accompany the workshop, as seen in the photos. We plan to offer this workshop again and to develop other events for sharing and practicing this work. If you are interested in future events in regards to this project, please visit https://critiqueasgift.wordpress.com/ or send us an email at critiqueasgift@gmail.com, we’re happy to start an email list.
Following the workshop at the CSEA conference, Katherine and I co-authored an essay for Canadian Art Teacher Journal for issue 21.1 (2025) titled Emerging Scholars. Access the essay here.
Here is the workshop description that was offered for the conference:
Through this workshop we invite you to join us in developing and experimenting with alternative structures of critique. By considering how permission to play can expand on traditional methods, this session will offer strategies to bring back to the classroom. Traditionally, to offer our work up for critique asks us to be vulnerable, and as the critic, to operate from a space of extremes. We contend that by developing strategies through the use of everyday objects, prepositions as tools, and embodied techniques we begin to turn to new and unexpected ways of doing critique.
Working from Terry Barrett’s concepts of description, interpretation and (in our words) evaluation as a structure, we embrace “soft talk” (Leslie Dick, 2018) and begin to engage in reciprocity with each other.
We invite you to think-through with us what we really need from critique and how critique could be offered as a gift.
