The Art Room as a Third Space: What Art Education Scholarship Offers DSE (Disability Studies in Education) Praxis

• In Event: Constructing Educational Possibilities: What Disability Art and Art Education Offer in Teaching Disabled Youth

Abstract

Drawing on Third Space theorists Homi Bhaba (1994), Henri Lefebvre (1991), and Edward Soja (1996), as well as the ways their thinking is furthered in conversation with Gloria Anzaldua and bell hooks, this paper posits a (re)orientation of the art room as a third space in education for disabled youth. It offers a scoping review of Disability Studies and Art Education (DSAE), with a particular focus on what DSAE scholarship can offer to Disability Studies in Education (DSE)’s scholar-activist agenda, suggesting art education as what Lefebvre describes as a “possibilities machine” (Soja, 1996, p.81).

The DSAE field draws on cultural theories of disability studies to suggest normative conceptions of the body sustain an oppressive ideology of engagement in the arts (see, for example: Eisenhauer, 2007). Situating their normative critique within schools, DSAE scholars draw attention to the competing ontologies of art education, operating within the dominant special education paradigm, and disability studies (see, for example: Penketh, 2017; Wexler, 2022). The anti-ableist values of DSAE align with the tenets of intersectional disability justice (Berne, 2015; Kefai, 2021; Sins Invalid, 2019), with which DSAE shares a foundation in the political history of Disability Art (Kuppers, 2014; Siebers, 2010). However, with notable exceptions (e.g. Gross, 2021), DSAE literature remains primarily theoretical in its scope and does not endeavor toward practical implications beyond the disciplinary boundaries of art education. The influence of DSE scholarship on the DSAE field is undeniable, yet this paper contends that, due in large part to its dominant positioning as a subset of art education in the lineage of cultural theory, the transformative potential of DSAE scholarship for the broader education field remains largely unrealized.

This paper suggests that (re)orienting DSAE within DSE scholarship enlivens DSE’s robust critiques and deconstructions of special education (see, for example: Baglieri, et. al., 2011; Brantlinger, 2004; Erevelles, 2000; Slee, 2001) with the re-constructive, creative potential of the arts. It is in this space of possibility where we highlight the utility of third space theorizing (Bhaba, 1994) to conceive of the art room as a fluid, open-ended, liminal space (Wang, 2007) of in-between. Thirding (Soja, 1996) the art room suggests a space in-between the dominant first space of special education and the second space of art-activist ontologies, ripe with the potentiality of imagining the else-where and else-when that animate disability studies scholar-activists (e.g. Kafer, 2013; Tyler, 2022). The third-space art room rejects single-issue, medicalized framings of disability that uphold the ideology of ableist white supremacy, rejects art education practices that endeavor to remediate disabled youth in service of therapy or vocational efficiency (Kraft, 2006), and moves instead “to detonate [and] deconstruct, not to be comfortably poured back into [the] old container” (Soja, 1996, p. 163) of traditionalist special education. Thirding the art room thus develops a transgressive space that supports “developing a radical imagination that formal education too often fails to provide” (Anderson, et. al., 2023, p. 18).

Authors

• Jenna Gabriel, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Christopher Hall, Boston Public Schools