Mapping Racism: Images, Art, and Race Pedagogy

• In Event: 43.041 - Dis/Orientations: Mapping Whiteness in Educational Spaces

Abstract

In the discussion-based course on race, the hope is that students feel free to express their views in order to have those views challenged, but this approach ignores all of the ways that we learn that do not include discussion or words, for that matter. It also ignores how many students come away from courses focused on race without much more of an understanding of the complexity of race and racism. This is not to say that discussion should not happen, instead I am interested in thinking through what becomes possible when discussion is not taken-for-granted. Further, asking/requiring white students to narrate their journeys through whiteness is often, a reproduction of whiteness (Leonardo, 2013), rather than a disruption. This tendency prompts a re-imagining of how teaching and learning about racism might differently happen and to what effect.

While it is an important part of race education to critique and engage whiteness in ways that are ethical and consequential, it is sometimes difficult to anticipate what might make some difference—what kind of knowledge, sense, feeling, beliefs might reduce harm and suffering (Dumas, 2014). Instructors carefully create syllabi, anticipate conflicts, and imagine the kind of learning experiences that might allow for students to become less deadly (Franklin & Rath, forthcoming) and to become teachers in more ethical ways. This need has become so uncontroversial that many Teacher Education programs require courses that deal with issues of equity, racial and educational justice. What remains left to discuss is how students learn about these issues in ways that affect who they can become. In these courses white students becoming teachers learn alongside students becoming teachers but also experiencing racism. This can produce frustration, impatience, conflict, and crisis in the space. This can also produce additional harm to students of color. In this paper, I wonder how re-imagining the work of teaching racism by allowing for self-directed and collective mapping of race across cultural texts through collage and other mediums can make for differently consequential learning. This approach can minimize the unnecessary harm of such learning experiences, particularly for students experiencing racism. It also reduces the kind of harm felt by those students not experiencing racism--harm that can result in denial, dismissal, or a “suffering through” that leaves whiteness unchallenged and unexamined.

This paper is an exploration of the pedagogical use and potential of collage, playlists, film, and video drawing on student produced work from a course on racism in the fall of 2016 to consider how their mapping of race across collages, playlists, blog posts, art, and film allowed space for them to become teachers in ways different than they had previously imagined. Art and arts practices make new space for students to newly and consequently engage the topic of through affective encounters with texts. This is not a fix or a solution because race pedagogy is complex, rather a provocation to expanding what we count as education and how learning can happen differently.

Author

• Asilia K Franklin-Phipps, The City University of New York