La Lotería and Creative Resistance in Arts Education

• In Event: Critical Professional Development and the Racial Justice Possibilities of Teachers of Color in K–12 Schools

Abstract

Art-education research has failed to recognize how traditional approaches are culturally disconnected from the lives and needs of students of Color. Although more museum-sponsored programs hire established artists to teach in marginalized communities, many artists come from privileged backgrounds and do not often understand the realities and strengths of marginalized communities. Developing artistic skills of marginalized students alone will not help them understand or address oppressive conditions. Therefore, educators that work with marginalized populations need to consider alternative approaches that will help students challenge dominant academic, social and cultural perspectives by drawing from their home knowledge. This paper is a self-study of a high school art teacher who draws on the popular Latin American game of La Lotería to build upon students’ funds of knowledge and develop their own creative resistance to oppressive ideologies in their lives (Author, 2017).

Funds of knowledge are identified as the historically developed and accumulated forms of household knowledge used by students to navigate their social environments (Moll, 1992; Gonzales, 2005), and can be used in classroom curriculums to develop a more relevant and accessible learning experience for students. The concept of creative resistance, developed from Funds of Knowledge along with Critical Race Theory (Delgado-Bernal, 2002; Yosso, 2005) and Critical Pedagogy (Freire, 1970), uses the arts to validate student knowledge and draws on that knowledge to transform their socio-political realities (Author, 2017). Using those theories, I built upon students’ histories, community engagement, cultural practices, and student-teacher relationships in their arts education setting. Specifically, I connected the game of La Lotería—a popular Latin-American game that is similar to Bingo yet reflects iconic images of Latin-American popular culture—to the modern and personal experiences of students by analyzing and recreating images reflecting issues of race, class, gender stereotypes, and misconceptions that are portrayed in the game and their lives.

Working collaboratively, students and educators built upon the knowledge of students and their families to counter negative imagery in the game of La Lotería. Centering knowledge from their homes and parents’ occupations as assets in the classroom, students created Lotería cards that countered dominant messages. By critically analyzing their experiences, this lesson deepened students and educators’ understanding of race, class, and gender in their environments and offered space to resist their socio-political circumstances. Finally, a number of students shared how the critical art education approach through the game of La Lotería played a role in their academic development and deepening educational aspirations.

I presented the Lotería lesson in a workshop at the CPD to expose other K-12 educators to the use of funds of knowledge and creative resistance as a way to challenge conventional approaches to engaging race, class and gender in arts-education. Working with other educators across grade levels and interdisciplinary subjects, the Lotería approach is now being applied in different regions of the U.S.

Author

• Luis Genaro Garcia, California State University - Sacramento