Social Justice Art: A Framework for Activist Art Pedagogy

• In Event: Collaborative Arts, Creative Research, and Youth Engagement in Social Justice Practices

Abstract

Objectives and framework: A relatively new subfield in art education, social justice art education merges critical pedagogy with art education to describe an iterative process by which people create works of art in an effort to impact conditions of inequality or injustice (Author, 2010). As a pedagogical approach, social justice education seeks to engage learners in a critical analysis of the factors of injustice through creating works of art that imagine new realities and shift ways of social interaction (Quinn, Hotchtritt & Ploof, 2012). Drawing on perspectives of young artists engaged in social justice art education, this paper highlights findings from an empirical study that identified the key learning processes involved in making art intended to impact society.

Research overview: Qualitative research methods provided the ideal tools to investigate the following question: What teaching and/or learning activities do youth identify in making activist art? To answer this question, I conducted a study of a free, museum-based class on activist art for New York City teens. Participants included fourteen youth aged fourteen to eighteen from public and private schools. Over multiple sessions, participants observed, discussed, and created their own works of activist art. Youth identified issues of injustice or inequality that were important to them, explored those issues through several studio activities, and created a final work of art that was shown in a public exhibit.

Data collection and analysis: To address how young people described, understood, and experienced making activist art, interviews, participant observations, and analysis of artwork produced in the program allowed me to focus on participants’ definitions, explanations, and interpretations. The inclusion of these multiple forms of data collection allowed for important data triangulation. In analyzing the data, I used etic- and emic-coding to examine specific moments of learning and teaching to help us understand what happens when young people make activist art. This emphasis on the specific allowed me to describe the various kinds of connections students made, the patterns within the questions they asked, and how they struggled to think about aesthetic and activist decisions in their art.

Findings: In my analysis three key learning and teaching processes emerged throughout the class, rising and receding at different points to play key parts in the practice of making activist art: connecting, questioning, and translating. Connecting describes the ways in which learners identified relationships, links, or patterns relevant to their activist art projects. Questioning in activist art draws heavily from critical pedagogy to describe the unfolding inquiry around a given concept whereby learners move beyond simple identification to critically engage in a structural analysis of issue they are making work about. Finally, the act of translating refers to the process of repackaging an idea in order to communicate it through a medium different than its original form.

Significance: This analysis offers a research-based framework that provides researchers and educators with ways to discuss, plan, and evaluate how young people create works of art in an effort to impact inequality or injustice.

Author

• Marit Dewhurst, City College of New York - CUNY