Art and Multicultural Education: Building Commitment to Social Justice One Brick at a Time

The purpose of this article is to discuss my own attempts to integrate arts-based method into my teaching in pre-service teacher education programs. As I understand it, arts-based method refers to using the arts as a means to explore questions and issues. I will describe the evolution my thinking about arts-based method and how this has been reflected in my teaching. In particular, I will examine the "brick" assignment that I have been giving students in my classes for the last five years. Each student is asked to create a "brick" that represents her or his future contribution to creating a socially just school system. Through this example I will discuss why I believe arts-based method is important to working with teacher candidates to develop a commitment to social justice.

My family emigrated from India to Canada in 1961 when I was about 6 months old. My father, who is a third-generation educator, came to Northern Alberta as part of a small wave of immigrants from India who were brought to Canada to help address a teacher shortage. He and my mother, who had also been a teacher in India, instilled in my siblings and me the importance of working for and with the communities in which we lived and, above all, working for social justice. While I eagerly took up the challenge of working for social justice in the community, my siblings and I all swore we would never become teachers. My first two degrees in university were in literature and as I was completing my masters I began working as a community developer and an adult educator. Eventually my innate love of learning and teaching led me to a doctoral program in education. This academic year (2002-03) marks my 20th year as an adult educator and my tenth year as a teacher educator.

My training in literature and my up bringing in a home where the arts were valued predisposed me to using arts-based method. My insecurity about my "artistic talent" continues to be present me with challenges. Perhaps because I was never taught to be a teacher educator, I often feel as if my approach to teacher education is based more on my experience and intuition than on theory. I find I often use approaches that "feel right" and then later reflect on my actions. Through this process I have realized that there is a strong theoretical basis to what I do and that my "intuition" is built on the foundation of the countless discussions about education and social justice I have had over the years with my family members, friends, and colleagues.

Before the brick

Since my first official teacher education class, a course in multicultural education, which I taught the summer of my second year in my doctoral program, I have tried to incorporate some elements of the arts and creativity into my classes. Initially this consisted primarily of storytelling. I began all of my classes with a story that somehow related to the content we would be exploring and I used personal stories to expand on the information students were learning out of the texts we read. I did this because my previous work in community had taught me that convincing people to be advocates for social justice required reaching their hearts as well as their minds.

When began working full-time in a university I was asked to teach a required course in the teacher education program that introduced students to a variety of social issues in education. The program had over 700 students and, in an effort to ensure consistency across the several sections of the social issues course, previous instructors had developed a common reader and had agreed to three common assignments – one of which was an essay on some aspect of the course. In my first year with this program one of my students asked if he could submit a creative and non-traditional essay. After speaking with him briefly I agreed.

When I reflected on this decision later I realized that his request reminded me of something I had resonated with in the work of James Banks. In his approach to multicultural education, Banks talks of five dimensions, one of which addresses knowledge construction (see, for example, Banks 1997). For Banks, this dimension refers to helping students understand and explore how implicit cultural assumptions influence what counts as knowledge (Banks 1997, p.69). I had always understood it also to refer to how cultural assumptions influence how we present knowledge. In my experience of the university, certain kinds of written papers and oral presentations were the only legitimate forms of knowledge presentation. In my student's request I heard a desire to challenge these conventions.

The student's essay was written as a series of letters between a student and teacher of the same minoritized group. While I was not sure how to grade the piece I was impressed with the depth of his personal exploration and his ability to give a human face to something we had discussed as a social issue.

The following year I told the students that one option for the essay was an artistic piece. I was still unsure how to grade the artistic "essays" but I did notice that the students who chose this option engaged with the issues at a deeper and more personal level than the students who took a more traditional route.

My third year as a full-time university instructor saw me move to another university. Here I was asked to teach a course on multicultural education without the fetters of predetermined readings and assignments. In this course and others I taught that year I asked the students to do an arts-based assignment though which they could express their vision of multiculturalism or social justice. In response to this assignment one of the students, Jill Koyama, decorated a series of boxes with images evocative of different aspects of the struggle for social justice. Her creation was accompanied by an artist statement that spoke to her deep desire for immediate and lasting change. She also said that her practical side realized that total change could not happen overnight. Instead, the system had to be rebuilt in small increments. This reminded her of a child's building blocks. Her boxes represented a set of building blocks each of which contained within it the seeds of social change. I was so taken with her idea that I asked her if I could use it in subsequent classes and so the bricks were born.

The brick as imaginative engagement

The first year I used the bricks I wanted the students to engage imaginatively with the course content. I had heard and later spoken with Maxine Greene at a conference earlier that year and was intrigued with her notion that imagination makes empathy possible. As I explored more of Greene's work I learned that she also saw creativity and imagination as keys to creating a more socially just world. Imagination allows us to break with those things that are seen as "given" and to conceive of new ways of being. As she has noted, "There is no question but that some students face fearful obstacles due to inequities in this country… It may be, however, that a general inability to conceive a better order of things can give rise to a resignation that paralyses and prevents people from acting to bring about change" (Greene 1995, pp.18-19).

I renamed the building blocks bricks and asked my students to reflect on class readings and discussion and to fashion their own metaphoric brick that would represent their contribution to creating a new and culturally inclusive school system. In consultation with my teaching assistants that year I decided that the students should present their bricks in class. We had determined at the beginning of the term that part of our goal was to help the cohorts in the program build community. Again we referred to Maxine Greene who had said, "[c]ommunity cannot be produced simply through rational formulation or edict" (Greene 1995, p.39). One of the teaching assistants, Cynthia Del Rosario, also thought it would be important to have a public display of the bricks so that others in our faculty could engage with our teacher candidates. The in-class presentations and public display have become an on-going part of the assignment.

It is important to note that in the years since, three students (out of a total of some 450 that have been in my classes) have opted out of presenting their bricks in class. They have said that the emotional nature of the presentations and their colleagues' responses have left them feeling too uncomfortable or vulnerable to present their own brick. All three have, however, agreed to have their bricks and artist statements included in the public display.

In the first year, most of the bricks were like Jill's originals – decorated boxes. But a few students did stray from the pattern and presented flowerpots, wood carvings, and mobiles. In subsequent years the form of the bricks has stretched to include songs, videos, plants, stories, poems, and performance pieces.

The brick as questioning the givens

In that first year my teaching assistants and I thought it would be important for us to also create our own bricks. In large part I did this because I knew that many of the teacher candidates, like me, had had the experience in school of being told they were not artistically talented. I knew from past experience with other arts-based assignments that this could be a major stumbling block for the students. I thought that if they saw their teachers taking a risk and producing something that would not be considered "high art" they would be more likely to take their own risks. For the next two years I recycled the brick I had created in the first year. Last year (2001-02) it occurred to me that I needed to create a new brick and that experience convinced me that I should do a new one with each class.

The second brick allowed me to reflect on the changes that had occurred in my own thinking and practice. I have moved from thinking of my approach as based in critical multiculturalism to being a form of education for peace. I have seen my perspective on social injustice enlarge to include everyday manifestations of harm and violence such as those taken-for-granted actions we engage in as teachers that keep our students from achieving their potential. In my case a big part of this has been an underlying belief that my way is the right way and my duty is to convince my students to think like me. Creating my bricks allows me to see the ways in which this attitude continues to inform my practice even though I state at the beginning of each new class that I believe I am working toward just goals but I do not believe that I have all the answers.

Paulo Freire (1998) has said that "[t]ransformation of the world implies a dialectic between … two actions: denouncing the process of dehumanization and announcing the dream of a new society" (p.74). I believe the brick forces me to do this every time I re-examine my commitments and my practice. In addition, in the tradition of arts-based research, it has allowed me to re-examine "assumptions that have fossilized into presumptions" (Barone 2001, p.26).

Most recently the brick has forced me to engage with my thoughts on assessment. In past years, I have side-stepped this issue by giving "A"s to everyone who takes the assignment seriously. That is to say, if students exhibit a depth of thought, engagement with the ideas, and some measure of creativity I have assigned them a grade of A. More recently I have begun to think about how our traditional methods of evaluation are intended to measure a student's mastery of a subject. Arts-based research is meant not to "master" an area but to uncover and express "alternate … interpretations of the phenomena under scrutiny" (Barone 2001, p.24). Given this I think that in the future my assessment process will have to take into account the ways in which the bricks challenge our taken-for-granted assumptions. I am not certain how I will do this but I take solace in the fact that I am now teaching a in program with cohort groups and am part of a teaching team that has taken this assignment as a common assignment across two of the three foundations courses. I expect in the near future to engage with my colleagues in a discussion of a new approach to the assessment of the bricks.

Concluding remarks

Infusing arts-based method goes against the grain of the current dominant trends in education. Encouraging people to question assumptions and work for social justice does not fit well with a system that sees students as human resources to be moulded for the benefit of a market-driven society. I believe this is precisely the reason that those of us with a concern for social justice need to think about this method and other ways to challenge the norms. My intuition tells me that arts-based method is a productive path to follow in education for social justice. It helps us to address the issue of what constitutes knowledge. It engages our emotions and imaginations in teaching and learning. It makes us question taken-for-granted assumptions on which our educational system is built. It helps us to grow as teachers and teacher educators. And I believe it helps us to be free. As J. Krishnamurti (1994) once said, "…mustn't the mind be free to be creative – free? Otherwise it is repetitive; in that repetitiveness there may be new expressions, but it is still repetitive, mechanical" (p.38).

References

Banks, J.A. (1997). Educating Citizens in a Multicultural Society. New York: Teachers College Press.

Barone, T. (2001). "Science, Art, and the Predispositions of Educational Researchers." Educational Researcher, vol30, no 7, pp.24-28.

Freire, P. ( 1998). Pedagogy of Freedom. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the Imagination. Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Krishnamurti, J. (1994). On Learning and Knowledge. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.

About the author

Reva Joshee is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theory and Policy Studies, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. She has also taught in the Department of Educational Studies, Faculty of Education, UBC (1995-97) and the College of Education, University of Washington (1997-99). Her primary teaching areas are multicultural education; social foundations of education; policy studies, and her primary research areas are education for peace; multicultural education policy; citizenship education for adult immigrants; democratic policy processes. She has extensive experience as a diversity trainer going back to 1986 and a long history of involvement in ethnocultural and women's organizations in Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver.

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