MANAGING THE ART ROOM
Can Art Address Difficult Topics?
A visitor listens to a digital story in a museum setting.
Flávia Bastos and James Rees
These issues impacted all of us in some way, but in many instances, we experienced strife and divisiveness instead of unity. We believe that art educators are uniquely positioned to engage in exploration of the complexities of today’s reality with their students, and this article is an invitation to confidently tackle difficult topics.
Personal Perspectives
Our experiences as art educators collaborating on the Who Is American Today? project (see the February 2019 issue of SchoolArts), with its focus on developing student voice, exploring controversial issues, and promoting dialogue, provide the basis for this article.
Alexa, a participant in our project from Miami Valley School, was asked to create a digital story about “Who Is American Today?” Reflecting on her experience, she said: “I have never done something like this before. I have done class projects before, but have never been able to express my opinion.”
Art educators are uniquely positioned to engage in exploration of the complexities of today’s reality with their students.
Because we believe Alexa’s experience is not unique, and that there are many teachers who feel uneasy about eliciting personal perspectives about current topics with their students, we’d like to share some takeaways from our project as they relate to how and why to promote student voice in art classrooms.
Why Is Student Voice Important?
Too often in classroom settings, individual perspectives can be overshadowed by what might be perceived as the dominant thought about any given social, political, or economic issues. Visual art is particularly well-suited to help cultivate individual student voices through the creation of original artworks. This celebrates each student’s individuality, distinctive culture, language, experiences, and views.
To cultivate divergent perspectives, modeling is key. Teachers need to offer examples of how artists address controversial issues from a variety of perspectives. Dialogue about diverse topics requires ground rules that will help students feel safe about expressing their own views on contraversial topics. As a teacher, it is crucial to be the facilitator, which means making sure that your own personal views on issues don’t shape the conversation, as you help students more fully articulate their own views.
Unless students are exposed to a variety of viewpoints, it will be difficult for them to have informed opinions. That’s why it’s important to make discussion a central feature of contemporary art teaching and learning and to seek ways to connect students’ individual experiences with timely issues.
What We Have Learned
Our experiences in the Who Is American Today? project have demonstrated that students across the country are eager to share their perspectives. We can learn from them about how the macropolitics of society affect their everyday lives and grow more informed and compassionate about how to better educate today’s students. While we recognize that engaging with current and sometimes heated contemporary topics is relevant, it also provides real challenges and risks for educators. A final piece of advice, which we discussed in greater detail in a recent K12ArtChat podcast episode, is to find support in a group of like-minded educators and tackle that transformative work together.
Welcoming Difficult Conversations
Flávia Bastos is professor of creativity and education at the School of Art, University of Cincinnati, Ohio. flavia.bastos@uc.edu; James Rees is an art teacher at Provo High School in Provo, Utah. james@jamesreesart.com