Social Spaces for Embodied Critical Pedagogy in Art/Educator Practice

• In Event: Pleasure Is Political: Implications of Embodied Making and Teaching for Arts-Based Research

Abstract

What does critical pedagogy look like in practice? This is a question I field regularly as an educator working with pre-service art teachers committed to social justice and artists invested in socially engaged art and artistic activism. In response, I often re-direct the question to ask, what could art and education for social justice feel like, sound like, or even taste like, in order to focus on the embodied nature of enacting educational philosophy and building a related set of artistic dispositions rather than attempting to mimic existing practices or examples. How can we describe or support more complex understandings of teacher and artist practice that allow us to move from a personal understanding of capacity and agency to social and political action in the classroom and in the community? How can we create spaces that allow teachers and artists to share their diverse social practices using the tenets of critical pedagogy described by Paolo Freire (1970, 1973) and building contemporary practices inspired by his notion of education as a ‘practice of freedom’?

In order to construct complex webs of understanding around the nature of teaching and learning as a space for personal, social, and political transformation, I will describe a series of forums designed to support teachers and artists to engage with each other and reflect on the work that they do. Building on work started at the non profit, Art21, my research focuses on generating (and then documenting) discursive spaces that acknowledge Foucault’s analysis of the relationship between language and power (Foucault, 1969) and attempt to shift traditional hierarchies and dynamics to create leveling spaces where teachers, artists, and students share and perform practices that are grounded in collaboration, community building, and cross disciplinary/cross context exchange. More recently, this work has continued in the form of a participatory action research forum for sharing educator and artist practices related to questions about creative work, difference, radical love, personal and student agency, and social transformation.

Drawing from the work of contemporary artists who use discursive, collaborative, and socially engaged strategies as modes for engaging with diverse publics and addressing localized concerns and social issues, I have been inspired by Suzanne Lacy’s Oakland Projects from the 1980s and more recent work like the School for Revolutionary Girls and Between the Door and the Street, as well as the School of Echoes by UltraRed a collective who uses the notion of Militant Sound Investigation as a means of ‘activat[ing] pedagogical spaces for development and dissemination of theory and practice’. I am interested in how these creative practices can support new ideas for sharing, representing, and embodying critical pedagogy in practice.

Freire, P. (1970, 1973). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Freire, P. (1973, 2000). Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company
Foucault, M. (1969). The Archaeology of Knowledge. London and New York: Routledge.

Kincheloe, J. (2005). Critical Pedagogy Primer. New York: Peter Lang Publishing

Ultra-Red, (n.d.). ps/o6 Public Education, School of Echoes. Retrieved on July 8, 2017 from: http://www.ultrared.org/pso6.html

Author

• Jessica Hamlin, New York University