My action research project, Practising Freedoms (PF), builds on my IP intervention which is to embed embodied and creative enquiry into teaching justice in Year 1 Fine Art: Drawing at Camberwell, where I teach as Senior Lecturer.
PF stems from my experience of co-leading two Unit 3 half-day workshops on justice to meet an assessment requirement asking students to consider racial, social and/or climate justice in their practices1 and in a 1000-word exhibition review. With limited time and minimal teaching guidance, our Year 1 team has relied on a case-study presentation to introduce these themes.
Through assessments I have observed that many students treat the justice requirement as a passive, tick-box exercise rather than sincere, reflexive engagement. In retrospect, our reliance on the ‘banking model’ of teaching by presentation (hooks, 1994; Freire, 1996) contributed to this passivity because it framed justice as information to absorb rather than enabling personal and critical interrogation.
Students have previously shared with me some reasons for their limited engagement. Some view the requirement as an institutional imposition or a tokenised addition to the curriculum, considering what they perceive as UAL’s own justice passivity or complicity in unethical practices. Their critiques echo Sara Ahmed’s argument of ‘nonperformativity’ where institutional declarations of commitment to diversity and justice become the action rather than taking tangible action (Ahmed, 2012).
Other reasons include their need to prioritise ‘art’ making, a lack of time for self-directed research, and uncertainty about how to integrate justice meaningfully into their work, often relying on stereotypical viewpoints they believe will satisfy tutors and secure good grades.
Responding to these tendencies of scepticism, passivity and compliance, PF aims to orient students toward a dialogic, embodied and creative engagement with justice. I will draw on bell hooks’ philosophy of Engaged Pedagogy (EP) which recognises students as epistemic agents whose lived experiences, embodied knowledges and identities are foundational for cultivating critical consciousness of systems of power, oppression, resistance and freedom (hooks, 1994).
Like action research, hooks calls for a practice of reflexivity, enabling me to critically examine how my positionalities – as a Black woman, a multilingual speaker with cross-cultural lived experience, a curator of social practice, and a tutor – shape how and what I teach, and the ways I conduct research.
Leading social justice education scholars, Adams et al. emphasise creating learning communities where students share their lived experiences with each other ‘to make sense of larger structural systems of advantage and disadvantage, and create new meanings for themselves.’ (2016, p.60). Similarly, Salinas et al. (2018) argue that cultivating an intersectional understanding of oppression and privilege is crucial to prepare students to navigate an increasingly complex sociopolitical landscape.
Following Jokela et al., I will approach PF as ‘art based-action research’, combining the cyclical nature of action research with the use of ‘art as a catalyst’ (2019, p. 9) for enquiry, data collection and knowledge generation. In seeking to transform teaching and learning, my ARP asks:
How can dialogic, embodied, and artistic processes foster students’ personal exploration of justice?
Bibliography
Adams, M., Lee Anne Bell and Griffin, P. (2016). Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice. Routledge.
Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.
Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by M.B Ramos. London: Penguin.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
Jokela, T., & Huhmarniemi, M. (2019). Art-based action research in the development work of arts and art education.
Salinas, C. and Guerrero, V.A. (2018). Tokenizing Social Justice in Higher Education. Counterpoints, [online] 517, pp.161–179. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/45178164.
Footnote
- This requirement forms part of UAL’s 2022 – 2032 strategy and Educational Ethics Code to develop ethical and socially responsible creative practitioners. ↩︎