At the Intersection of Liking, Love, and the Materiality of Schooling

Presenters: Join two seasoned and highly respected respected art education scholars, Dr. Cala Coats and Dr. Jorge Lucero, as they share a new collaborative talk about love and school in everything from amateurism to perseverance.

Presentation structure:

Dr. Cala Coats: 15 mins
Dr. Jorge Lucero: 15 mins
Panel discussion: 20 mins

Presenter bios:

Dr. Cala Coats Associate Professor and Director of the Art Education Program at Arizona State University. Her research and teaching explore intersections of ethics and aesthetics through embodied and place-based inquiry, public pedagogy, and creative experimentation. She is interested in the power of learning through everyday encounters and curriculum design as research creation, emphasizing the potential for collective change through the awareness of ecological and transdisciplinary interconnections. Dr. Coats recently published New Materialisms and Embodied Encounters in Education: Curiosity's Vital Potential (Bloomsbury), and she has contributed to a range of other publications on artistic social collaboration and interdisciplinary inquiry, affective attunement as connective force, histories of creative activism in intentional communities, and radical indeterminacy through choice-based learning.

Jorge Lucero is an artist from Chicago who currently serves as Professor of Art Education in the School of Art & Design and also as Associate Dean for Research in the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. From 2015 to 2023 he served as Chair of the UIUC Art Education Program. As part of his decades-long work to test the creative and conceptual pliability of "school as material" Lucero participates in and around the academy in every manner possible. He has exhibited, performed, published, and taught through his work all over the U.S. and abroad. Lucero is an alum of Penn State University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Prior to working in higher education, he worked as a high school art teacher at the Chicago Public School’s Northside College Prep. In 2023, Lucero received the National Art Education Association’s Higher Ed Educator of the Year Award at their annual conference in San Antonio, TX.

An informative flyer highlighting a speaker event on February 12, 2025 at 7PM

Click here for access to the slide deck [forthcoming]