Between Memory and Ethical Subtraction: Openings for Reconfiguring Education

Respondent talk with Christina Delgado Vintimilla

Pavillion

Dr. Delgado Vintimilla will speak about her research establishing pedagogy as a creative, ethical, and generative practice rather than a set of instructional methods. Her research is presented in conjunction with our current exhibition 83% Perfect by Amy Ching-Yan Lam, which questions the ideals of exceptionalism perpetuated by educational systems. Lam’s exhibition starts with the re-imagining of her “first test” into a formal minimalist installation that uses repetition and shifts in scale and colour to materialize this fearful memory.

Delgado Vintimilla’s reading of this work is organized into three movements: the first is centered around personal childhood memories, with the second proposing an ethical position that subtracts child development from normative educational discourse. She will make this proposition through a close reading of Lam’s First Test while highlighting some of the legacies of child development and questioning the very concept of developmentalism. In the final movement, Delgado Vintimilla will speak to the commons as an open space for ethical and creative dwelling for collective life.

Dr. Cristina Delgado Vintimilla is associate professor of early childhood in the Faculty of Education at York University. Her research is deeply informed by her background as a pedagogista within the Italian tradition. Her area of research is pedagogy as living knowledge and as that which thinks and troubles education as a normative project. Currently, her research focus on creating pedagogical inquiries and pedagogies that address the complexities of educational contexts (formal and informal) in the Global North and South. As a pedagogista, Cristina is particularly interested in the intersection between pedagogy and the arts as a generative intersection for imagining alternative onto-epistemologies.

83% Perfect by Amy Ching-Yan Lam uses humour and satire to reveal how educational and art institutions counter their imagined functions to give voice, share space, and be open to all by inversely propelling individualism and exceptionalism. 83% Perfect is curated by Jenifer Papararo.