A Portrait of Production: Understanding Efforts to Educate a New Generation of Citizen-Artists

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: Probing the Paradox: Illuminating the Ecology of Education Through Portraiture

Abstract

In the United States and beyond, patterns of forced migration have been accompanied by the rise of nationalist sentiments, renewed emphasis on national security, and hate-filled rhetoric. These forces have brought questions about who belongs to the fore of public debates, as material and symbolic borders now represent a hypervisible aspect of everyday life. Against this backdrop, recent scholarship suggests that through community arts education, economically and ethnically diverse youth learn to apply their artistic skills to foster more inclusive cultural narratives and advance a variety of civic purposes (Dewhurst, 2014; Kuttner, 2015; Kuttner, 2016). Nevertheless, because existing scholarship in the arts has tended to focus on what the arts have the power to “do for” diverse youth (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013), very little is known about how diverse youth perceive of the significance of their own art making experiences.

In response to this issue, the author will discuss early findings from an ongoing qualitative study of a community arts education that centers the perspectives of young artists involved in an arts and media organization located in the Northeast United States. This study draws on the tradition of portraiture in educational research and is specifically concerned with understanding how young people learn to think about the relationship between art and culture and conceptualize their roles as artists. Data from this study comes from a series of artifact-based interviews (N=16) conducted with young artists ages 14-18 and ongoing participant observation of the processes of artistic production conducted over an 18 month period. To analyze these data, the author draws on the “flexible” coding strategy outlined by Deterding and Waters (2018) and Boyte’s theory of “citizen politics,” a more expansive view of citizenship that recognizes the often informal ways people learn to address shared concerns through intensely local public work.

Analysis of interview and fieldnote data reveal three interrelated themes relevant to supporting creative citizen politics through community arts education: (1) the opportunity to identify, negotiate, and pursue personally meaningful ideas; (2) the opportunity to hold a position of authority and expertise in relation to creative work; and (3) the opportunity to see one’s ideas represented in the public sphere. This proposed presentation will probe rich episodes in community art making experiences for analytic insights and will draw implications for pursuing voice and influence in cultural life. In addition, the author will share reflections on the politics of portraiture, where scholars negotiate both empirics and aesthetics in acts of representation—acts that are almost always contested in the paradigm of qualitative social science. Amidst current understandings that “collective opinion is born at monuments, museums, screens and stages—well before it’s confirmed at the ballet box” (Mendéz Berry & Yang, 2019) this work is both timely and significant: there is now growing awareness that fostering a diverse ecology of cultural production is vital to sustaining a robust democracy and yet little is known about the early educational experiences of diverse youth as they enter the field of cultural production.

Author

• Raquel Jimenez, Harvard University