Illuminating Alternative Imaginaries for Educational Futures: The Power of Crowd-sourced Art

• In Event: Pedagogies and the Art(s) of Protest: Mobilizing for Ecological Justice

Proposal

How might we resist systemic power structures by reconfiguring common pedagogical tools to illuminate alternative imaginaries that center the perspectives of youth?

Despite growing activist participation and political organizing by youth, which is animated by creativity and imagination, their diverse voices and perspectives are often marginalized according to their social positions, and underestimated in the face of the profoundly complex realities. Within education, we understand this failure to attend to youth imagination as a characteristic of education’s ongoing colonizing effect as part and parcel of the “house of modernity” (Stein et al., 2017), which naturalizes a modern/colonial global imaginary that places threats to (white) stability from outside the “house” and thus calls for their forcible containment rather than either turning a critical lens back on the house or creating space for other possibilities. Similarly, while the arts offer space for exploring alternative imaginaries, arts education is often marginalized as superficial or merely serving a consumerist function (Bell & Desai, 2011; Hickey-Moody et al., 2021). Particularly in contexts entrenched in normative neoliberal colonial modernity, education has been shown time and again to reinforce the status quo (Komatsu, Rappleye, & Silova, 2020; Orr, 2004), rather than bringing the needed changes to address the current climate crisis and intensifying ecological degradation.

Where education is thus fixed within a modern-colonial paradigm, we inquire how taking the perspectives of youth seriously through the arts might help to collectively imagine equity and ethical responsibility on a planet unevenly damaged through the very modernity and coloniality that continue to infuse mainstream education. We take up this challenge by working with youth art collected in the Turn It Around! Flashcards for Climate Futures (TiA) project, which gathered 1000 pieces of artwork from 60 countries, collected via an online platform that utilized networks and social media to reach diverse students globally.

This presentation explores how crowd-sourced art offers “opportunities and openings for responsible, context-specific collective experiments that dismantle the house of modernity by enacting different kinds of relationships, and different possibilities for (co)existence, without guarantees” (Stein et al., 2020, p. 45). Using arts-based research methods and closely analyzing artwork submitted through the TiA project, we investigate how taking the perspectives of youth seriously through the arts might help to collectively imagine equity and ethical responsibility through pedagogical and decolonial turns. The project becomes a technique for activating common educational tools differently, as one step in dismantling the “house of modernity” and resisting its constitutive violences, such as its emphasis on capitalist growth, competitiveness, individualism, and human exceptionalism, to rethink education’s role in creating a different global imaginary.

Authors

• Marina Basu, Arizona State University

• Ann Nielsen, National Institute for Excellence in Teaching

• Carrie Karsgaard, Cape Breton University

• Iveta Silova, Arizona State University