Not Artists: Collage-Making and Race Education

• In Event: Visual Inquiries Into Borders and Perimeters of Learning

Abstract

In a course on racism, we make collages in order to cautiously approach the entanglement of race and racism, social constructions and embodied experience, and knowing and doing. We resist the hard lines that surround each of these things. We also make collages to engage what we cannot articulate or yet know. We do not know what we are doing. We do not know, even as we are looking at the thing and trying to decide if we are finished. The classroom is not made for bodies moving around and doing things. We are making a mess. None of it looks like we imagined. The collage becomes a fluid representation of what we want to say and what we cannot yet say. We worry that we have forgotten something, and wonder if someone else will understand what we are trying to do, even as we do not understand it ourselves. We are not artists, and our hesitance to do art as non-artists, parallels our attempts to do and be differently in relation to race. In doing art as non-artists we think with our hands and resist the doings of school that we recognize and/or are already good at doing. We do this, even as we have not figured out how to articulate what it is we are attempting to do.

Meaningful interaction with race under the constraints of a course is particularly difficult, requiring multiple moves away from the borders of schooling. Many students enter the classroom with an unarticulated, but present, allegiance to the borders of schooling, knowledge, experience, and subjectivity. These are borders that have been established and enforced. These sturdy borders anchor us, quieting the anxieties and fears of becoming a teacher, while also, quieting my fears and anxieties teaching students about race and racism. Yet, multiply resisting the borders of schooling and education is imperative in a cultural context that is about life and death for many. There is tension between our capacity to consequently deal with such difficult topics in education, and the urgency that is currently required. We are stuck, but this stuck space is heavy with potential.

It is no longer controversial to say that teacher education should engage issues of race and racism. But much of what is recognized as “good enough” race education often does not resist racial hierarchies, but instead, reproduces them. This kind of education about race and racism imagines there are clear competencies to be achieved, and likely does not meaningfully (or intentionally) engage that which is in excess of knowledge. I suggest a kind of education on race and racism that accounts for and considers the simultaneous flexibility and fragility of race and racism (Leonardo, 2013). This resists norms of race education that focus almost exclusively on language, individual intention, and feelings (Mattias, 2016). This paper is an exploration of attempts to use collage-making toward engaging race and racism in ways that makes space for the fluidity and complexity that race education for pre-service teachers often avoids.

Author

• Asilia K Franklin-Phipps, University of Oregon