Dr. Darlene Clover
Darlene grew up in Kincardine, Ontario (with Valerie) and her journey to becoming essentially a citizen of the world began when she went on a short visit to Colombia and ended up becoming fluent in Spanish and living there for a number of years. She decided at the age of 30 to go to university and ended the decade with a PhD. She is very active in the field of adult education (consults & researches) and is supportive of women's community-based initiatives.
Darlene is also a member of The Positive Energy Quilt Project, a group of people working together making quilts, to protest a gas-burning power plant planned in 2002 for Duke Point, near Nanaimo, in British Columbia, Canada.
Valerie says she admires Darlene's sense of humour, her inner beauty (and outer), and her ability to bridge the world of the intellects with well - the rest of us! Suzanne loved the fact that Darlene is interested in women's community arts & crafts as this is something dear to her heart.
In Her Own Words
The title of my current research is Women's Community Arts as Catalysts of Arts Literacy, Adult Education and Civic Participation: An International Comparative Study in Canada and New Zealand. The purpose is to examine and compare the educative and learning potential of women's community arts/crafts projects. These projects are created for, by and with the community and foster arts literacy (a re-valuing of women's traditional arts/craft), cultural leadership (cross-cultural dialogue and learning), critical learning and community building. The primary purposes of the research are to:
- identify and interview grassroots women in Canada and New Zealand/Aotearoa who engage in advocacy arts/crafts practices and seek to foster social justice through their art/craft work;
- facilitate connections among advocacy artist/craft-educators both within and between Canada and New Zealand/Aotearoa;
- advocate and legitimate the work of women artist/craft workers as community educators by sharing their stories widely;
- broaden the theory and practice of feminist adult education by including women's aesthetics, community arts and cultural framings;
- work collaborative to showcase advocacy art/craft educational work at conference, through articles, academic presentations and other types of popular materials.
For further details on the projects associated with this study please visit our website at www.educ.uvic.ca/epls/faculty/clover/clover.htm or www.educ.uvic.ca/communityarts
or contact:
Dr. Darlene E. Clover
University of Victoria
Faculty of Education, Leadership Studies
MacLaurin Building, P.O. Box 3010
Victoria, British Columbia, V8W 3N4
Tel: 250-721-7785
Fax: 250-721-6190
The Positive Energy Quilt Project www.kristinmillerquilts.com/Protest_Quilts/Positive_Energy_Quilts/Positive_Energy_Quilts.htm
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