Public Murals and Subaltern Histories

• In Event: Communities of Inquiry as Literacy Innovation: The Role of the Imagination and Local Knowledge in a Period of Common Core Standards

Abstract

Objectives: This paper focuses on an ongoing inquiry into literacy, identity, multimodality, and the arts. We examine how the public mural as a co-constructed repository of cultural history and epistemology (Cockroft et al, 1998) provides opportunities for surfacing buried histories and relocating minoritized children, families, and community members as critical knowledge generators. This work is juxtaposed to recent educational policies that have emphasized informational texts and cognitivist approaches to literacy at the expense of culturally-situated ways of knowing.

Frameworks: The Philippine-American War, a little discussed US colonial venture, has been all but erased from American history books and nonfiction texts made available to students. Eliseo Art Silva, a Filipino-American muralist, has endeavored to bring to light stories of Filipino-Americans that have been omitted from the historical record, representing these alternative genealogies in symbolic and coded ways and through close community involvement. Drawing on ethnic studies (Palumbo-Liu, 1995), theories of coloniality (Mignolo, 2011), and epistemology and identity (Alcoff, 2005, Fricker, 2007), we examine the subaltern histories and experiences evident in both the mural and its creation.

Methods and Data Sources: Partnering with a Filipino muralist in an urban community in the northeastern United States, we collected data during one mural’s lengthy completion, an enterprise in which dozens of community members participated. As participant observers (Glesne & Peshkin, 1992), we employed ethnographic data collection methods (Green & Bloome, 1997) and blended visual and sociocultural analysis (Albers, 2010; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006; Siegel & Panofsky, 2009). Our data sources consisted of fieldnotes from the participatory planning and co-construction of the Filipino Mural and the mural’s public unveiling, interviews with Silva and community members involved in the work’s inception, and visual artifacts pertaining to the mural, including the mural itself.

Results: Our analysis points to a false dichotomy between fictional and informational texts as presented in the Common Core State Standards, and suggests that poets and artists are often the first to correct and expand the official historical record. We highlight how the collaborative process of creating the Filipino Mural draws on local legacies and knowledge (Authors, in press; Gadsden, 1992), and also reflects what Benedict Anderson (1999) might call a “cosmopolitanism from below.” Through visual analysis, we document how the mural functions as a rich form of culturally-situated multimodal literacy, both in terms of how it was constructed and how it is taken up or ‘read’ by community members.

Scholarly significance: In the current era of educational reform, students’ transnational identities and multimodal literacies have been increasingly sidelined. We argue that this constitutes a hermeneutical injustice (Fricker, 2007), in that minoritized students encounter a positivistic informational curriculum that precludes them from mobilizing their knowledges in schooling. This study draws implications for how a more multimodal, arts-based, and culturally-situated literacy framework/pedagogy, such as that espoused by the Filipino Mural, could make more visible the cultural and epistemological resources of minoritized students as critical generators of knowledge.

Authors

• Gerald Campano, University of Pennsylvania

• David Eric Low, University of Pennsylvania