Pedagogies of unsettling: Black feminist aesthetics and art education’s hidden curricula

• In Event: Composing otherwise: Black Studies and the future of arts-based education research

Abstract

This paper explores how Black women enrolled in or recently graduated from graduate-level art education programs at historically white institutions navigate, refuse, and reimagine their pedagogical formation. Drawing from Black feminist thought in art education (Acuff, 2018) and relational and spatial geographies in Black Studies (Glissant, 2004; McKittrick, 2020), the study engages the oscillation between the concepts of opacity and ambivalence as a methodological and pedagogical stance. Here, opacity here functions as a mode of inquiry that foregrounds partiality (McKittrick, 2021), withholding, and aesthetic knowledge (author, 2025). Through this lens, the paper asks: What do Black women’s lived experiences reveal about the hidden curricula of art education, and how do their aesthetic and pedagogical practices challenge dominant models of teacher preparation?

Drawing from a larger study, this qualitative arts-based project uses theoretical framings of Glissant (2004), Hartman (2019), and McKittrick (2020; 2022), particularly the latter’s articulation of Black methodology as “a destabilizing force against colonial knowledge systems” (p. 4). Black feminist epistemologies (Acuff, 2018) position practices of refusal and relationality as forms of pedagogical truth-telling rather than simply obstacles to knowledge. These insights shape the methodological approach, which centers life story interviewing and arts-based prompts as aesthetics of Black miscellanea (McKittrick, 2022, p. 4) and is structured around four thematic “drawers”: ambivalence, opacity, refusal, and aesthetic articulation. Participants—Black women who identify as emerging or practicing art educators—respond to open-ended prompts through conversation, artifact-sharing, visual expression, or metaphor.

Data sources include transcribed interviews, field notes, and participant-generated aesthetic materials, including photos, audio fragments, and other symbolic objects. Thematic and poetic coding techniques are used to identify patterns of affect, metaphor, and resistance across interviews. Particular attention is paid to silences, contradictions, and nonlinear timelines—elements often overlooked in studies of teacher preparation but central to participants’ narratives.
Preliminary discoveries suggest that participants rarely describe their learning in terms of becoming educators through ambivalence, tension, aesthetic refusal, ancestral relationality, and embodied knowing. These moments are described as “pedagogies of unsettling”—forms of becoming that challenge dominant discourses of professionalism, clarity, and excellence. Participants engage in what might be called an alternate curriculum: one rooted in survival, care, and radical creativity. This curriculum circulates beneath and around the formal structure of teacher education, revealing the racialized assumptions embedded in what art education often presumes to be neutral or universal.

This paper contributes to the growing body of research that critiques whiteness in art education and calls for a consideration of Black feminist frameworks into curriculum building and teacher development. It builds on prior scholarship that has identified the need for more expansive, relational, and justice-rooted pedagogical models (Acuff, 2018). By treating opacity not as a failure of articulation but as a generative methodology, this work affirms Black women’s fugitive and aesthetic ways of knowing as central to the study of art education. Ultimately, the project proposes that a curriculum attentive to refusal, interiority, and relational rigor opens up more capacious possibilities for what teaching is and can be.

Author

• gloria j. wilson, The Ohio State University