Going There: Arts-Based Service-Learning in Humboldt and Comics Arts-Based Look at "Docent Days"

• In Event: 51.081 - Sheraton Roundtable Session Nine - Grand Centre
  In Roundtable Session: 51.081-10 - Diverse Arts-Based Research Methodologies Addressing Socially Engaged Art Practices/Community Learning Projects

Abstract

This presentation outlines collaborative production of a comic book, serving as the material culmination of visual arts-based inquiry, analysis, and data reporting addressing a cross-institutional “Docent Day” service learning project, through which multiple stakeholders (including representatives of a Federally funded elementary arts integration grant project; undergraduate students and faculty from a local public University; local artists; and students and teachers from participating elementary schools) each had the opportunity to engage with work exhibited in University-based art galleries. The objective of the presentation will be to examine the methodological logistics and material output of this collaboratively generated arts-based examination of complex phenomena, viewed from myriad viewpoints through multiple means.

This study is theoretically framed at the intersection of service learning initiatives and socially engaged art practices (Bourriaud, 2002; Helguera, 2011; Kester, 2011) in community and school settings, particularly attending to how engaging preservice teachers in projects that are of service to a given community, and simultaneously educative to those preservice teachers(Jeffers, 2005), bears similarities in process and intent to socially-engaged art, the relational practice of developing works that derive their effect from those who engage in the work.

Methodologically speaking, the author synthesizes collected data into comics-art-based ethnographica (Jones & Woglom, 2016), practice-based visual inquiry informed by the tradition of visual ethnography, as well as arts-based social research proffered by a/r/tographic theorists (Irwin), and autobiographical comics artists (Kochalka, Bechdel, and Sacco) .

Data collection for this study was affected through disparate but interrelated processes. Investigators interviewed elementary teachers to gather insight into their perception of Docent Days and the effect of those events on their students, while their students filled out worksheets describing their experiences in the galleries and their reactions to works there. Student videographers captured imagery from the trips, while undergraduate art educators chronicled the events (and their design) through photography of the work that lead up to the elementary students’ visits to the school, and arts-based visual-verbal research journaling reflecting on their praxis. Institutional Review Board approval was procured for all data collection processes.

The study has generated suggestions for potential future explorations of community-centered service learning partnerships, while pointing to possible future mixed-methodological arts-based research reporting, suggesting new avenues for arts practice-based researchers and community-engaged arts education practitioners.

The potential scholarly impacts of this project include: the proliferation of arts-based service learning practices in higher education, affecting reciprocal exchange of pedagogical experiences (for undergraduate artist/educators) and cultural experiences (for elementary students and their teachers), and suggestions for how multiple modes of arts-based inquiry might be coupled to more holistically inform practice.

Author

• James F. Woglom, Humboldt State University