Dr Jane Trowell
What is our objective? - Liberation.
How can we disrupt the reproduction of inequality through art education?
(Important as acknowledges existence of inequality and acknowledges our power to disrupt it.)
Through Curriculum
Through Teaching Methods
Through our bodies
The What If experiment:
Creates social justice interventions in the creative and cultural sectors.
Supporting people to question and discover how they might do things differently
Offers: Awareness Journeys: Begin Your anti-racist practice
Strategic Partnerships: Centre equity in your Organisation
Provocations and critical friendships: Question why and how you do things
Voices that Shake:
Bringing together young people, artists & organisers to develop creative responses to social injustice.
Prioritising Black and people of the global majority, Shake! uses a model of personal transformation and structural change to challenge established imbalanced power bases and to re-imagine new infrastructures in opposition to white supremacy, cis-het patriarchy, racial capitalism, colonialism and state violence.
They do this by emboldening young people to realise the tools and inherent power they hold as active members in their communities and to re-imagine and build new infrastructures with resilience and confidence.
PhD:
PhD on Racism, coloniality and whiteness in art education. - Testimony of peers who are artists/art educators of colour practice of conversation about whiteness scholar-activism.
Art and design is political.
In 2016, 94% of secondary art teachers self-identified as white British.
However, this may not so much be an issue of employment as across England and Wales, only 4% with a Black ethnic group, 3% with Mixed or Multiple ethnic groups, and 2% with other ethnic groups.
Student experiences of students being pigeonholed by their teachers. I.e.
Where female students are consistently linked to messages of feminism, involuntarily and possibly inappropriately to an extent that communicates to the students that they are restricted to communicating certain messages because they fit within a specific group.
Equally, students can be restricted from engaging in other discourses because they do not fit neatly within the existing boxes around those dialogues.
Who gets to become an artist in the first place, let alone an art teacher?
(Princess Henrietta of Lorraine, Anthony Van Dyck,(1611–1660)
Contrasted interestingly to an image of a young black girl looking at art in Tate's magazine (2016) which was used to celebrate the effort of Oil company BP to provide access to art for 'less fortunate and marginalised groups.
The Courtauld's overrepresentation of 'white women' as a purposeful push, how and why are different demographics being presented? - Strong example which can be used in discussions of representing women in art institutions. - https://courtauld.ac.uk/
Students as disengaged, because they don't feel seen. Present them through your presentations and inclusion.
Suspect the universal where White experience is at the centre. Educate for and with the pluri-verse.
Embrace plurality and students will engage with you even more.
This forms an anti-oppressional practice.
"Theory as Liberatory practice". - [Reading]: Teaching to Transgress, Bell Hooks (1994).
"I think I am a much better teacher, because I do not believe in compulsory schooling." Jane Trowell.
- Enter the 'side' of the student. - We've got no choice, so how can I be here with you, what can we do within the space of a classroom?
- Teaching as a subversive activity - teaching students to be 'Bulls*** detectives'.
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