Finding Possibility in the Liminality of Socially Engaged Arts: Fostering Learning and Well-Being With Refugee Youth

• In Event: A Transversal Understanding of the International Perspectives on Community Arts Education

Abstract

This paper introduces a socially engaged arts project uniquely designed to support reciprocal learning for refugee high school students and educators in a collaborative partnership. A project overview and literature review precede the detailed framing of a pedagogical model developed over three years. This model illustrates how the liminality afforded by socially engaged arts, a form based on social interaction, valuing the process of fabrication over the product itself (Helguera, 2011), allows such a project to cultivate exceptionally generative spaces of both learning and wellbeing in support of refugee youth challenged by the liminality of displacement.

“Liminality has been theorized as the transitional moment between spheres of belonging when social actors no longer belong to the group they are leaving behind and do not yet fully belong in their new social sphere” (Suarez-Orozco, et al., 2011, p. 444). For socially engaged art, this project embraces Grant Kester’s (2004) dialogical aesthetic which draws upon the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin in asserting that “starkly different from artists focused on individual self-expression, dialogic artists begin their work, not with the desire to express or articulate an already formed creative vision but rather, to listen” (p. 118). Furthermore, and central to this project, “dialogical works can challenge dominant representations of a given community and create a more complex understanding of and empathy for that community among a broader public” (p. 115).

This paper aims to offer a pedagogical framework for use in communities, museums, and schools. These pedagogical assertions are the result of a prior action research study for which the author collected qualitative data through participant observations, interviews with youth and adult participants, and analysis of student creative/written work. Participants for each iteration of the project included a diverse group of PK-12 educators enrolled in an interdisciplinary arts master’s program and refugee high school students (ages 16-19) resettled in the mid-Atlantic region.

Results are presented in the detailing of an arts-based pedagogical model that is linguistically responsive, humanizing, and highly scaffolded with great intentionality placed on play, creative risk-taking, communication, vulnerability, and care. High value is additionally placed on disrupting typical student-teacher hierarchies. This chapter posits that the very in-between-ness of socially engaged arts and their highly relational nature, richly enhance the generative potential of this unique collaboration. Furthermore, intentionality embracing culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012), trauma-informed practice (Jennings, 2019) and social emotional learning (Markowitz & Bouffard, 2020) ensure that these efforts are mutually beneficial for the learning and wellness of refugee youth and the partnering educators invested in better supporting them. Significance becomes clear in recognizing the rapidly rising number of humanitarian immigrants enrolling in US schools. Innovative efforts to effectively support young people facing high rates of trauma and linguistic isolation simply cannot be limited to schools. This paper contends that, unencumbered by the limitations and expectations placed on schools, community artists and arts centers around the world should embrace the liminality of socially engaged arts to meaningfully support multi-generational, multicultural, and multilingual engagement.

Author

• Kate Collins, Towson University