Teaching an Online Arts-Integration Course Guided by Rancière's Aesthetic Equality

• In Event: Reimagining Arts Integration Course Content and Instruction: A/r/tography in Search of Equity and Belonging

Abstract

Education, including arts-integrated education, is limited by the ways in which we know (e.g. Dewey, 2013; Eisner, 2002; Phùng and Fendler, 2015; Robinson, 2010). Despite seemingly perpetual efforts towards education reform, students remain mired in the status quo. To enact meaningful change towards educational equity, we must have the courage to imagine new education paradigms. I leverage Rancièreian aesthetic experience to guide my teaching practice and work towards new, socially-just education paradigms. In Rancière’s framework, aesthetic experience is a function of equality.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Rancièreian aesthetic experience guided my efforts to teach an online arts integration course from a perspective of equality. I hoped my students and I could reimagine arts-integrated education paradigms and thereby work towards reimagining education. In this paper, I write as an a/r/tographer to create an epistolary narrative that explores the Rancièreian aesthetics of my course instruction and how the course might contribute to new understandings of arts education. Rancièreian aesthetic equality allows me to view every student as already an artist and the very act of teaching as an art form. Each student brings preexisting arts knowledge and experience to the course, as do I.

What follows is the welcome letter from this course:

Dear students,
Welcome to TE430. Thank you for choosing to be here and co-creating this learning space with me. I am so glad that you all have chosen to be in this class with me this semester.

Some of you might be taking this course because it is required. Some of you might be taking this course because you are drawn to its title. Some of you might be taking this course just to give it a try. No matter what reason brought you to this course, there is room for us all and the work we would love to do.

The concept of art is very complex. Whether you identify yourself as an artist or not, I hope you will notice the artist within you after this course. To find our artist selves is not about simply learning skills or following guidelines. It takes time and patience. Sometimes this can take years. That’s okay, it took me a very long time, and in many regards, I’m still figuring it out.

This class is just the beginning of what will hopefully be a long journey to becoming an artist in your teaching and life. Art is more than skills. Education is more than instilling ideas into empty vessels. What is art? What is education? What is art education? What can art education offer? What is the importance of art education? Who benefits from art education? How can we reimagine the ways in which art is employed/deployed in the classroom to suggest a radical shift in education? What is the relationship between art, teaching, teacher and students? We will discuss these questions in this class.

Thank you, and I am truly looking forward to a wonderful semester with you all.

Your instructor,
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Author

• Reyila Hadeer, Michigan State University