Art and Conflict: Theater of the Oppressed With Educators

• In Event: 29.025 - Visual Pedagogies and Methodologies: Forwarding Critical Thinking and Action

Abstract

Equal educational opportunity involves learning to respond to the challenges of life with creativity and integrity. Conflict, at internal, interpersonal, and political levels, is a key challenge that formal learning processes have done little to help people navigate. This reduces students’ efficacy in their personal lives and limits their capacity to stand up to injustice in the world around them.

This paper highlights the role of museums as public spaces that can nurture powerful educational work addressing conflict. I describe a cross-disciplinary community arts experience collectively created by school, museum, and community educators in a professional development seminar. The educators forged new models of place-based education to deepen students’ relationship to their histories and nurture their cultural identity.

Author

• Shanti Elliott, Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy Learning Sciences