About Beyond the Bamboo Canvas
About the Project
The regional conference, Beyond the Bamboo Canvas: Instructional Innovation for a Globalized Classroom, is the culmination of a 2017-18 Instructional Technology Grant, funded by the State University of New York. (SUNY-IITG). Awarded to Professor Kyunghee Pyun, Department of History of Art and Professor Elaine Maldonado, Director of Faculty Development and Center for Excellence in Teaching, the project seeks to globalize the classroom with emerging technologies and the integration of Asian art and craft into the general curriculum.
In 2016, Professor Pyun developed the website, Bamboo Canvas. With her researchers, she created a customized and interactive web presence that allows users to learn about the ecosystem of craft centers in East Asia. With information on climate, agriculture, flora, and fauna, as well as information on the economic surroundings of craft locations, students are able to benefit from an accurate and in-depth presentation of Asian art and craft. This aspect of Pyun’s research has been central to helping people understand the ecosystem of unique craft-producing centers.
The 2017-18 funding cycle, culminating with the November conference at FIT, has allowed Professor Pyun’s team to explore Asia art and craft multi-dimensionally—-maximizing virtual-reality technology. The grant has also allowed her to test the project’s efficacy in engaging users with innovative, replicable models.
The 2018 conference is the conclusion of ongoing research and development. In collaboration with Professor Maldonado and the FIT Center for Excellence in Teaching (CET), Professor Pyun and her team will showcase their research findings. Experts in IT-assisted museum programs, instructional design, global education and heritage preservation will address the conference and provide first-hand experiences. To honor as well as highlight the cultural heritage inherent to this research, an honorary master artisan has been invited to demonstrate his work.
About the Directors
Kyunghee Pyun is an Assistant Professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York. Her scholarship focuses on history of collecting, reception of Asian art, diaspora of Asian artists, and Asian American visual culture. She was a Leon Levy fellow in the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Collection and works on a book project entitled Discerning Languages for Exotic: Collecting Asian Art. Her forthcoming book, Fashion, Identity, Power in Modern Asia focuses on modernized dress in the early 20th-century Asia and will be published by the Palgrave Macmillan in 2018.
As an independent curator, she has collaborated with Asian American artists in New York since 2013. Her trilogy featuring Korean American artists are Coloring Time: An Exhibition from the Archive of Korean-American Artists, Part One 1950–1990 (2013): Shades of Time: An Exhibition from the Archive of Korean-American Artists, Part Two 1989–2001 (2014); and Weaving Time: An Exhibition from the Archive of Korean Artists in America, Part Three: 2001–2013 (2015), held at the Korean Cultural Center New York and Queens Museum. Her upcoming curatorial project is the Violated Bodies: New Languages for Justice and Humanity to be held at The Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York in the spring 2018.
Elaine Maldonado is the Director of Faculty Development and Center for Excellence in Teaching at the Fashion Institute of Technology, part of the State University of New York. Prior to holding this this position, she was the Director of the College Learning Centers at City Tech, City University of New York. She has held teaching appointments at CUNY, Parsons/New School and at the Bank Street College of Education Graduate School. As a teacher and teacher trainer, primarily in arts education, she has over 30 years of classroom experience.
Professor Maldonado has presented papers at multiple professional conferences that include Assessment Network of New York, Campus Technology, SUNYCIT, SUNYSTEM, University of the Arts London, National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education/Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. She is a member of the editorial board for the SUNY educational journal, Common Good. Most recently, she presented her work on the topic of faculty development at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Her essays on teaching and educational research have been published in journals such as the Journal of Educational Technology Systems (Baywood/SAGE), Sarascope, American Society of Engineering Education, E-source for College Transitions and the American Society of Engineering Education.
Between 2002 and 2018, Professor Maldonado has written and directed well over $1,000,000 in educational research grants. Funders include the National Science Foundation, New York State Department of Education, National Education Association, SUNY, FIT and the United States Department of EducationFund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, where she has also served as a grants reviewer.