Polyvocality and Ethical Truth-Seeking: Arts-Based, Everyday Social Action in the Classroom

• In Event: 45.094 - Sheraton Roundtable Session Seven - Grand Centre
  In Roundtable Session: 45.094-4 - Arts Education in Schools

Abstract

This paper addresses an urgency for pedagogical approaches to ethical truth- seeking. It explores how arts-based literacy and its affordances for polyvocality can be both an approach to knowledge generation and a form of everyday action in the classroom. Illustrative examples are from a participatory inquiry with teachers and youth in a diverse, urban, arts-based high school. The paper theorizes polyvocality from critical perspectives, shares images of this work in practice, and draws upon the voices of teachers and youth. The findings support an argument for a central role for arts in ethical truth-seeking and perception and have implications for pedagogy, policy, and research on the arts and adolescent literacy in in these times.

Author

• Jessica Whitelaw, University of Pennsylvania