Mapping Other Possibilities: Exploring Unlearning in the Teacher Education Classroom Through the Arts

• In Event: Places of Possibility, Cultures of Connection: Exploring Art, Design, Making, and Imagination in Enacting Educational Alternatives

Abstract

Within discourses of policy and practice, the term learning is being used nearly interchangeably with the term education. The current measures of standardized testing, outcomes based teaching, and teacher review add to the notion of education as an accumulation of skills, practices, and dispositions. Biesta (2010) calls this learnification and Fendler (2016) argues that learnification ignores other possible values and purposes for education. The overt emphasis on skills and practices has also led to the arts being reframed in the same light. However, Greene (2000), Eisner (2002), Sousanis (2015), and other scholars of art education have repeatedly argued that the role of the arts in education is to create possible experiences and scenarios that challenge given understandings, to explore the unknown, to commune with those who have come before us, and the possibility of that which is not yet.
In this paper, I share experiences and artistic products from a teacher education classroom in which I encouraged students to consider the values of unlearning. Drawing on a/r/t/ography (Springgay et al., 2005) as method and practice, I designed a 2-week module that invited Prospective Teachers (PSTs) to consider their own assumptions, practices, and beliefs about mapmaking by drawing on the work of artists and youth who challenge dominant modes of mapmaking.
I invited PSTs to share their beliefs and understandings of cartography by making maps of their neighborhood. Nearly all of the prospective teachers created maps that depict a top-down view of their neighborhood and are devoid of animals, humans, plants, and other more-than-human assemblages that are integral to our everyday lives. I then shared the work of artists (from diverse age, ethnic, gender, and geographical backgrounds) who push the practices and purposes of mapmaking through their artistic and community-based work (see Harmon, 2003). For example, Samina Mishra and Sherna Dastur’s (2017) My Sweet Home showcases maps created by young people living in Delhi, India that are indicative of the imaginative ways in which youth engage with space. Often, these maps stand in contrast to dominant practices of mapmaking through their creative interpretation of space, orientation, scale, and perspective. Subsequently, prospective teachers recreated maps of their neighborhoods by bringing together photographs, text, and other materials. The resultant maps offered a wide array of aesthetic, geographic, and cultural interpretations of mapmaking. Ultimately, the module sought to introduce prospective teachers to the value of unlearning and challenging “variously entrenched and often unquestioned ways of thinking, doing and living” (Chokr, 2009) by engaging with artistic practice and through the process of making, play, and imagination.
This paper considers the challenges and possibilities afforded by engaging the arts in the teacher education classroom. Using the maps created by the prospective teachers and their written responses to the activity, I examine the possibilities for unlearning within teacher education and consider it as a value and purpose of education. This paper offers another vantage point for examining the role of the arts within the teacher education classroom by shifting the focus away from an accumulation of skills towards a mapping of other possibilities.

Author

• Vivek Vellanki, Indiana University