Assessing the Perceived Impact of a Local, Community-Engaged Mural Project on Preservice Art Educators

• In Event: Cultivating Art Teachers’ Identity Awareness Through Critical Reflection: Perceptions, Context, and Positionality in Art Education

Abstract

Purposes: The purpose of this study was to understand how undergraduate preservice art educators perceived the impact of using a local, community-engaged mural project (Mending Walls) in the development of pedagogy and curriculum in their foundational coursework and how they perceived its’ impact on their beliefs surrounding teaching and learning. The Mending Walls project seeks to advance social and racial justice through collaborative, community-engaged art, connecting community members and artists from different cultural backgrounds in conversations to foster empathy, connection, understanding, and healing.

Perspectives: The study was grounded in existing research in three areas: community-engaged murals, community-engaged pedagogy, and community-engaged teacher preparation. These concepts were used to frame the study and provide further rationale for the inquiry.

Methods: This study merged the methodological frameworks of qualitative case study and narrative inquiry (Sonday et. al, 2020). In this case, the system was bounded by the parameters of a specific place and time (Creswell, 2013); the place being enrollment in specific foundational coursework in the Department of Art Education at a mid-Atlantic university and the time being bound by one academic year Fall 2021-Spring 2022. The single case study focused on preservice art educators that successfully completed at least one of two specific courses that utilized the Mending Walls project within the course curriculum. The intent was to better understand the participants' unique experiences, using a narrative framework to focus on a variety of individual narratives – i.e., stories of lived experiences across several participants (Medeiros & Etter-Lewis, 2019). This framework allowed for the investigation of individuals’ complex and rich experiences while also providing space for critical reflection (Webster & Mertova, 2007).

Data sources: Data for this study was collected through four main sources: semi-structured interviews, document analysis, field notes, and a visual narrative analysis of participant submitted artwork (which also involved a REDcap survey).

Results: This case study followed Braun & Clarke’s (2006) six phase process for reflexive thematic analysis data engagement. Through the in-depth analysis of the aforementioned data sources five major themes were generated: community, local artists, public art, social justice, and documentation.

Significance: This study indicates engaging with the Mending Walls project served as an entry point for preservice arts educators in cultivating culturally responsive, community-centered, and differentiated approaches to the development of pedagogy and curriculum; and in promoting collaboration, critical dialogue, and creative expression as a means to build and strengthen more inclusive and socially just communities.

This study implies, it is critical for instructors of preservice educators to consider ways we might center community engagement as a component of our pedagogical practices. The findings from this study beg to ask further, How might teachers encourage the visual exploration of the space around us? What stories are in our surroundings? What stories can we tell? What are the histories of the spaces we inhabit? Examining public art (and especially community-engaged murals) can provide accessible and engaging entry points for preservice art educators to build recognition of asset based, community centered, and culturally sustaining (Paris & Alim, 2017) approaches to art and education.

Author

• Caitlin Black, Rhode Island School of Design