Entry #6:
How Art Contributes to Society
March 6th, 2022
#bepartofamovement
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Thinking back to when I was in high school, social justice issues often weren’t addressed by most of my teachers. My writing classes were less focused on reflection and contemplation, and more on getting through state-required readings. Most of the well-meaning teachers took a stance that was like, “We are all the same here at school, and you should really focus on the common goals that we have here.” Viewing students as equal is a well-intentioned belief, but it also creates a narrowed view of students’ lives, and also invites a ‘color-blind,’ stance that was really popularized in the past. I grew up in a predominantly white, conservative, Christian area of the Midwest, and most of my educators fit that description as well. I know that plenty of students did not thrive in the environment of one-size-fits-all-education, and avoidance of conversations about diversity. Luckily, with better diversity education, educators have developed better ways to invite often overlooked perspectives in the classroom.
I think that looking forward, an emphasis has been placed on embracing and inviting conversation on differences in experiences, rather than shared similarities. Looking at the way you are the same as someone else can be useful when developing empathy and understanding, but our differences are what make us unique, and differences offer new ways of looking at something like identities. I think past educational methods really neglected to serve students that were LGBTQ+, students that had non-traditional family structures, and culturally diverse students.
Arts education, (and visual art in general) has the perfect opportunity to address students’ needs of figuring out their own identities. Especially in middle and high school, some students are figuring out what their identities are, and sometimes they do not feel safe exploring these identities at home. Some students don’t start to explore aspects of their identities until they get to high school. I think that music, drama, and especially art offers a place for students to explore identities, and observe different perspectives in their peers’ artwork. I can only speak on my own personal experience as a white woman— but I can also make a conscious effort to supply students with endless resources to explore artists with identities that more students can relate to and be inspired by. The reading that really embodies this concept is from the “Defining Identities Through Multiliteracies,” by Danzak. When addressing the pedagogy of multiliteracies, she states that it’s “a shift in conception of literacy from a standard, to a critical and dynamic understanding of literacy as a multiplicity of discourses. There is a growing importance of cultural and linguistic diversity as our communities become more globally connected.” I think that having art-centered conversations about social justice issues that students care about, will help them become more confident, and then they will make more personally meaningful art.
For this art journal entry, I wanted to continue the theme of landscape as metaphor, and adding another ink drawing on watercolor paper to the series. I tried to think of how to represent the ideas from our social justice projects, and the project my group is working on: Identity. Specifically, we wanted to have students gather and talk about our own identities, the identities of others, and to think about how society treats people when identities are misunderstood or ignored. So I wanted to create a landscape that was made up of two parts: The part people see on the outside, and the part that might be hidden, but is still an integral part of the landscape. I thought of ways to draw the landscape, then obscure a large portion of it. I figured that I could have the drawing fold out, or lay another piece of paper or transparency sheet with another drawing on top. I think it represents the concept of intersectionality, and how sometimes we might only see one aspect of a person, but their other identity might be ignored by others, but nonetheless is just as important.
