Arts-Based Research With Students With Special Needs: Contesting the Hegemonic Gaze, Co-Constructing Empowering Representations

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

Abstract

My arts-based research with Latina(o) and African-American adolescents with special needs seeks to pierce, through arts-based dialogical methods, the hegemonic deficit lens through which my students often see themselves and are seen by others. Simultaneously, it seeks to contribute to the building of an empowering counter-vision, that they also embody, which challenges the hegemonic (white) gaze (hooks, 2015).

My research draws visually and conceptually on the art of Kerry James Marshall, who subversively applies the European painting tradition to upend its dominant representation of African-Americans. In Marshall’s work, Black people demand the right to be seen on their own terms, to represent themselves. Marshall’s paintings create critical disruption through collage-like, meticulously painted surfaces that are polysemic and complex in both form and narrative content

Philosophically, my research is informed by the ideas of critical theorists including Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Herbert Marcuse who all understood that transformative possibilities in the service of social justice demanded a disruption of the experience of daily life. Freire’s dialogical way of disrupting experience, central to my process, was to give back what was given to him “not as a lecture, but as a problem.”  

My process involves the construction of digital collages that overlay the stories of African-American and Latina/o special needs adolescents in Newark, NJ. The data infusing the collages are drawn from hours of video recordings of these students preparing for and then co-teaching a master’s special education class with me, and then debriefing afterwards. It is through these activities together that trusting and caring relationships are formed that allow both art and discussion to generate critical thinking. I join established qualitative methods of selecting video images with more intuitive artistic experimentation; often beginning with certain themes in mind, the artistic process has its own dynamic, and relationships emerge unexpectedly from the joy and play of the artistic process. When the resulting collages seem compelling to me, I return them to the students for intersubjective critical analysis. As my students reflect on the multimodal and manipulated collages of themselves, they discuss and then reject, accept or modify the representations, all understood to be fluid, contextual, temporal and evolving.

Though the research cannot claim to catalyze enduring ontological transformation, the arts-based artifacts clearly engage the students in critical dialog on how they are represented. Furthermore, students take pleasure in and are proud of the creation of artifacts that represented them as complex and thoughtful individuals while contesting the official representation of them as failures.

Arts-based research can engage underserved students to think critically about how they see themselves and are seen by others. Furthermore, resulting products are accessible to the co-researcher-subjects of the research unlike most texts about underserved students in underserved communities. As such, they include students in the scholarly conversations about them.

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

hooks,  bell. (2015). Black looks: Race and representation. New York: Routledge.

Author

• Gene L. Fellner, College of Staten Island - CUNY