Collaborative Civic Making and Learning in Public

• In Event: Speculative Civics Learning Through Artistic Creation and Performance

Abstract

This paper examines civic learning in the Upstander Tribute Project (UTP), a maker project facilitated in a 9th grade English Language Arts classroom where students worked in collaborative groups to build a 3D structure along with a digital component to celebrate the life and work of an upstander––a person who stands up against injustice. UTP provides an illuminating example of imagining and practicing civic futures (Mirra & Garcia, 2023) through collaborative arts.
We build on political theorist B. Honig’s (2017) argument that democracy requires “public things” to conceptualize the artistic products created in UTP as public things, serving as a locus for micro-civic negotiation and macro-civic imagination. Honig writes, “Democracy is rooted in common love for, antipathy to, and contestation of public things” (2017, p. 17). For Honig, public things are goods or objects such as roads, libraries, parks and schools, with which individuals in communities construct relational attachments of care and concern. Honig’s vision of democratic civic life is one that presumes contestation, where the use and maintenance of such objects is defined through contestation, entailing both affective and rational investments. Thus contestation itself can serve as both evidence of and substance for the “public” that constitutes the foundation of democratic civic life.
Many civic learning activities remain abstract or two-dimensional. In contrast, UTP required learners to physically and digitally create, build, and then publicly share things––figurative representations of an individual’s lifework for justice. We asked, What can a collaborative multimodal arts-based project make possible for learners as they imagine and practice civic futures?
Data collected included student and teacher planning documents, artifacts of student work both in progress and completed, and fieldnotes and video recording of seven groups’ collaborative work over three class periods. Through interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) focused on one group, we examined points of contestation and affect as evidence of collective investment in the collaboration as a micro-civic space, in the aesthetic and logistics of the made product, and in the civic possibilities the made product represented.
Findings revealed three central possibilities of the work: (1) articulating civic values was an artistic and literary pursuit, (2) collaboration demanded practicing civic futures, and (3) civic making created “public things” around which civic futures were navigated, imagined, and shared. As learners collaboratively crafted their Upstander Tributes, they labored, laughed, and argued. Rather than shying away from the messy and even conflictual nature of the student interactions in UTP, we interpret these very activities as features of practicing civic futures.
Monuments, in all their contemporary public controversy, are the quintessential “public thing.” Their design is intentional and symbolic, not only to pay respect to heroic actions but to foster a public through generating shared care and meaning. For learners, the Tributes functioned as public things, both acting as a site for the messiness of civic life including tension, conflict, resolution, and care and publicly elevating the civic value of standing up for justice.

Authors

• Emma Carene Gargroetzi, University of Texas at Austin

• S. Janelle Quintans Bence, Coppell Independent School District