Cathy Smilan

8.29 Shifting Curricular Territories Through Transformative Art Practice (Paper)

Cathy Smilan – University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA

Debrah Sickler-Voigt – Middle Tennessee State University, USA

Brianna Shetzler – University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA

Abstract:

Transformation is a normal part of life and vital to teacher and student growth. Practicing transformative art education, informed by United Nations educational policies (UNESCO, 2023), is timely and necessary due to teachers’ and students’ increased stress and mental health concerns stemming from trauma, restrictive educational policies, teacher shortages, student learning gaps, and public divides generated by social media’s advancements of false, confrontational, and unhealthy narratives. Participants will learn strategies to drive teacher and student agency using this presentation’s original models of transformative art education to shift grounds in teacher education. By using teacher-research to inform curriculum design, we encourage the inclusion of work by global artists that engage us in expanding perspectives for ourselves and our students. Transformations are never easy and cannot be forced. Rather, they are guided by individuals’ and communities’ desires to produce substantive changes to better themselves, improve situations, and support other human experience. Artwork becomes the vehicle to promote healthy discourse and transformations in a comprehensive global design inside the classroom and ultimately extends understandings out of the classroom. For art teachers and learners, transformative practice starts with learning to sit within the generative spaces that motivate the search for resolution. Guided by the principles of Mezirow’s (1991) transformative learning theory, art-based research can guide artist/teachers to identify conceptual problems beyond discipline specific skills and techniques to invite discursive inner dialogue that leads to new perspectives. Through sustained inquiry, artist experience their work as maker/teacher/ human and expand their curricular offerings to their learners. Exemplars of teachers process from a graduate class are shared as exemplars of Incorporating studio-based art teacher research into one’s curriculum and instruction practice.

Mezirow, J. Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning. Jossey-Bass, 1991. UNESCO. (2023). Report on the 2022 Transforming Education Summit convened by the UN Secretary-General. https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/report_on_the_2022_transforming_education_summit.pdf

9.12 Who Am I to Teach You That? (Panel)

Chair:

Cathy Smilan – University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA

Panellists:

Aleisea Guzman – University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA

Julia Schwarz – University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA

Abstract:

In our tenuous physical and political global climate, teachers are increasingly called upon to conceptualize art content learning around difficult conversations and to practice inclusivity in their curricular choices. In some parts of the United States, these conversations are mandated, in others they are discouraged or even forbidden. Teaching in a public university in Massachusetts, affords the luxury of guiding students to confront uncomfortable issues through their art explorations and transform these inquiries into age-appropriate art lessons. Several years before the global pandemic time, art teachers seemed most comfortable with lessons on environmental justice; they voiced reluctance to engage in visual communication that might be seen as controversial to various community stakeholders. Recent guidance from the Massachusetts Elementary and Secondary education led me to expand upon my social justice art education class to more intentionally “support students to thrive by creating affirming environments where students feel seen, engage in deeper learning, and are held to high expectations with targeted support” (see here: https://www.doe.mass.edu/instruction/culturally-sustaining/default.html). 

This guidance facilitated developing a course has evolved into a culturally inclusive survey of issues impacting marginalized people and underrepresented global cultures, and reconsiders art education as inclusive territory. The goal, as DESE stated, is raise critical awareness, develop respect and to increase student learning through incorporating native cultures. Our further goal is to make critical histories visible so that past injustices are not perpetuated through ignorance and neglect. In this presentation, a panel of master k-12 art teachers and their professor share their educational journey to gain understandings about cultures of which they previously had little knowledge. We consider our biases and initial resistance to educating ourselves, followed by the transformative work art processing that illuminated our world views and afforded rich dialogue about how to present difficult material to primary and secondary pupils. Lesson ideas are included.