By Any Medium Necessary: Cultivating the Public ARTivist

• In Event: The Arts as a Public Pedagogy by, for, and About Bilingual, Bicultural Youth

Abstract

This praxis-oriented practitioner research illuminates the theoretical, pedagogical and cultural conditions utilized in both a youth development program, Youth Roots, and a schooling context, ARISE High School, to cultivate the “Street Scholar ARTivist” (Asante, 2008), who uses his or her art to fight oppression by any medium necessary. As a critical participant researcher, I will examine texts in two forms, as cultural products and lived culture (Livinson & Holland, 1996). The researcher collaborated with Latino and African American high school youth in East Oakland, California, comparing the nature of aesthetic texts aimed towards social change, yet in elective and mandatory learning spaces.

In both the Youth Roots community-based program and a 9th grade Humanities high school class, the yout cultivated their ARTivist identities (Asante, 2008), becoming their own organizing force not reliant on an intellectual vanguard for transformation, but themselves organic intellectuals (Gramsci, 1971). Collaboratively youth and researcher engaged five frameworks: multimodal literacy, knowledge of self, critical social theory, pop culture and new media, and grounded theory production. These elements enact what Sandoval (2000) calls a differential coalitional consciousness, a dynamic agency that acts as an oppositional strategy against dominant ideologies. This critical youth cultivation encourages students to nurture themselves and each other, cultivating critical tools to focus “inside-out,” starting inside oneself toward social change.

Through arts-based research, the participants illuminated structures and practices affecting them, employing a broadened view of “text.” This study examined the cultural products and practices, and insights of students and teachers over the course of 3 years (Mathison, 1988). Data sources used include student digital products, field notes, interviews, and video documentation from the program director, teachers, and youth interns within the YR program, and the teacher and students of the Humanities class as participant critical researchers. Youth action research was the methodology utilized by the youth themselves, engaging in arts-based autoethnography, textual analysis and new media production.

The researchers/participants found the following themes important to being ARTivists: living the questions, critical sense making, nurturing the process, progressing through struggle, cultivating real relationships, leaving your mark, co-creating, healing, getting fitted (agency), and becoming young elders.

Given the reduction of youth development funding and arts education curriculum in community and schools, it is imperative we further our understanding of the transformative possibilities for youth when immersed in an environment of making art for the people. Illuminating these phenomena could give teachers, schools, youth workers, artists, and teacher educators, added insight into how an emancipatory education that utilizes the arts could be provided to urban youth.

Author

• Gerald T. Reyes, University of California - Berkeley