Search

This paper shares preliminary findings from a reflective inquiry into the nature of collaboration and mentorship through digital spaces within a national SSHRC-funded research team the authors form a part of. Our research collaboration has been marked by particularly close friendships, co-creation and mutual learning that have helped to deepen our research and provide a meaningful and enriching experience for everyone involved. Proposing that mentorship and collaboration can be viewed as a performance, which can be enacted in diverse ways depending on the context and intention, we share the digital and arts-based methods our team uses to both foster mentorship relationships and routinely reflect on how we are performing and experiencing mentorship within our team in order to identify and respond to our emerging needs, challenges and opportunities to enrich our collaboration. [Articles in this journal were presented at the University of Calgary Conference on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching.]

Our research project explores mentorship in four studies located in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and online. We questioned how and if performing mentorship in communal spaces created online could nurture and facilitate the levels of trust, vulnerability, security, and support we had experienced through in-person mentorship. We share the challenges we encountered as in-person research activities pivoted to online. We used online conferences, emails, a password-protected website, and notably, the creative practice of making and posting e-postcards, to foster an online mentoring community. Reflecting on our online practices and interactions, we come to theorize mentorship as performance -- emergent, embodied, creative, and relational interactions in motion, creating and holding open spaces of possibility for one another in mentorship relationships.

Combining disability and dance may not be new, yet enacting inclusive dance/drama education in a university remains rare. This article reflects on the integration of people with developmental disabilities in dance theatre, particularly in institutions of higher education, and shares insights that emerged in the context of an inclusive dance-theatre project. Over two years, the project progressed from a community-based art for social change partnership, to a post-secondary drama course, to a large-scale, university-produced theatrical production. Drawing on qualitative, embodied, and quantitative data the authors critically reflect on the potential for integrated dance theatre work to contribute to training future professional artists with disabilities, to enrich curriculum for students without disabilities, to inform theory and practice in the field of art for social change, and to positively affect the perceptions and experiences of people living with disabilities. Allier le handicap et la danse n'est peut-etre pas nouveau, mais instituer des cours inclusifs de danse-theatre dans un milieu universitaire demeure un evenement rare. Cet article traite de l'inclusion de personnes ayant une deficience developpementale dans une initiative de danse-theatre en milieu universitaire et des reflexions qui en ont surgi. En deux ans, un projet de partenariat communautaire dans le domaine des arts pour le changement social a mene a la creation d'un cours de theatre postsecondaire et a une production theatrale de grande envergure a l'universite. A partir de donnees qualitatives, quantitatives, et incorporees, les auteurs livrent une reflexion critique sur l'apport de la danse-theatre integree a la formation de futurs artistes professionnels ayant un handicap, a l'enrichissement du curriculum des etudiants sans handicap, au developpement de la theorie et de la pratique dans le domaine des arts pour le changement social ainsi qu'a une meilleure perception et experience des personnes vivant avec un handicap., This article and the project it describes came about because the authors accepted an invitation to dance with disability. In 2013, the Lethbridge Association for Community Living (LACL)--a non-governmental organization [...]