Artistic Articulation

• In Event: Curriculum and Aesthetics

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore scholarly alternatives to academic writing. Evidence from this study consists of student work extracted from several undergraduate teacher education courses in diversity/social justice that includes, but is not limited to, samples such as poetry, songs, sculpture, collage, painting, and digital narrative. Students investigated social institutions as well as systems of oppression that are often embedded in these institutions and focused on how policy, media, and social control intersect.

How one comes to an understanding of something describes the elaboration of that understanding. The overarching theoretical framework emphasized alternatives to more orthodox notions of academic composition and provided an opportunity for student work to be authentically considered as both an artistic and scholarly expression. “As an educator, I am convinced that to ignore experiences like these, to limit learners to single modes of seeing and interpreting, may be to frustrate their individual pursuits of meaning and, in consequence, their desires to come to know and learn” (Green, 2001, p. 75).

In other words, the ideological history that we have existed in is as much a reaction to our contemplation of the world as it is the residue of countless such contemplations by others so similarly situated. This study provided “intellectually-safe space” that consisted of a concerted design to facilitate multiple perspectives expressed in multiple ways.

It is the function of art to reorganize experience so it is perceived freshly. At the very least, the painting, the poem, or the play cleanses a familiar scene, washing away the film of habit and dust collected over time so that it is seen anew. When it is most radical, the work of art draws the viewer to it, engaging expectations, memories, recognitions, and simultaneously interrupts the viewer’s customary response, contradicting expectations with new possibilities, violating memories, displacing recognition with estrangement. (Grumet, 1988, p. 81)

Author

• Christopher Strople, University of Maine, Farmington