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Kevin Tavin has been awarded the International Ziegfeld Award for his work on international art education. Each year, USSEA honors one national and one international art educator with the Ziegfeld Art Education award, each of whom has demonstrated exemplary teaching, service, or research.

Professor Tavin states, "while I have spent most of my professional life as an art educator in the U.S., my recent experience in Finland, and professional work throughout the world, has helped me to understand the concepts of internationalization and being international, differently. When I look at my own business cards, for example, I think about the meaning of international and internationalization, and how the geographical and political borders drawn throughout the twentieth century have shifted, and continue to shift. Notwithstanding the resurgent nationalism, I am confronted by the underlying presupposition of the demise of the nation state as we have known it, and contrariwise escalating forms of globalization. And, without forgetting the corrosive neo-liberal and late-capitalist propensities, I still try to imagine how the productive qualities of this dispersal challenge the very concept of a university (including Aalto University). Perhaps in addition to traditional universities, we are moving toward “multiversities,” (Lars Bang Larsen, personal communication, December 18, 2014)– hybrid entities, where connections, entanglements, and post-disciplinary practices are pervasive through the collapse of physical space in networked culture." 

Kevin Tavin has a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, MEd from Towson University, and PhD from Penn State University. He has taught K-12 and post-secondary courses since 1990, including six years of teaching primary school art, and being a professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and The Ohio State University. His research focuses on critical multiculturalism, visual culture, critical pedagogy, cultural studies, Nordic art education, and psychoanalytic theory. His work has been published in international art and education journals and books, and presented as keynote and research papers across the globe. Recent books include, Angels, ghosts, and cannibals: Essays on art education and visual culture and Stand(ing) up, for a Change: Voices of arts educators. 

Further information:

kevin.tavin@aalto.fi

More information on the award can be found on the USSEA website: