Walking the Talk: Three Language Educators Engage in a Walking-Based Art Inquiry for Anti-Racist Education
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25071/1916-4467.40642Keywords:
arts-based research, anti-racism, language education, walking curriculumAbstract
As language and art educators committed to anti-oppression, we sought to explore how walking and art-making help us reflect, inquire, create, and act, upon new understandings of anti-racist education. Living in three different cities (Edmonton, Vancouver, and Palermo), we collaborated on a walking-based art inquiry for ten weeks in the summer of 2020, combining walking, art-making (photography, painting, mixed-media collage, screenprinting, and poetry), reflecting, and discussing. We were curious to investigate, both individually and collaboratively, what an anti-racist curriculum looks and feels like to us, and what walking and art-making might do in the process of learning and teaching. We situated our project in an arts-based research paradigm (Conrad & Beck, 2015), and we were inspired by Feinberg’s (2016) walking-based pedagogy and Judson’s (2018) walking curriculum. This article presents artistic experiments we created, as well as curricular insights that emerged from our process, for example, that walking and art may serve as dehabituating forces to help us openly feel, question, protest, and reimagine education, from intersecting perspectives of race and language.References
Beier, J. L. (2014). Schizophrenizing the art encounter: Towards a politics of dehabituation. [Master’s thesis]. University of Alberta. https://era.library.ualberta.ca/items/24a514f8-b85e-4d18-93b9-0cd9d83e03d2/view/dde5cfec-cca7-46e8-95ac-f89fd03d7661/beier_jessie_l_201409_masters.pdf
Conrad, D., & Beck, J. (2015). Towards articulating an arts-based research paradigm: Growing deeper. UNESCO Observatory Multidisciplinary Journal in the Arts, 5(1), 1-26. https://www.unescoejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/5-1-5-CONRAD.pdf
Cummins, J. (2009). Pedagogies of choice: Challenging coercive relations of power in classrooms and communities. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 12(3), 261-271. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050903003751
Dei, G. J. S. (1995). Examining the case for “African-centred” schools in Ontario. McGill Journal of Education, 30(2), 179-198. https://mje.mcgill.ca/article/view/8239/6167
Feinberg, P. P. (2016). Towards a walking-based pedagogy. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 14(1), 147-165. https://jcacs.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jcacs/article/download/40312/36186
Figliuzzi, A. (2020, August 23). Relational pedagogy: A different approach for our new reality. Studio Art Sessions. https://www.studioartsessions.ca/post/relational-pedagogy-a-different-approach-for-our-new-reality
Gullà, M. (2020, June 5). A Ballarò un murale con il volto di George Floyd: Il razzismo e il virus più pericoloso [In Ballarò, a mural with the face of George Floyd: Racism is the most dangerous virus]. Palermo Giornale di Sicilia. https://palermo.gds.it/video/cultura/2020/06/05/a-ballaro-un-murale-con-il-volto-di-george-floyd-il-razzismo-e-il-virus-piu-pericoloso-5a89fd17-f684-4bc8-8c54-06341354f939/
Judson, G. (2018). A walking curriculum: Evoking wonder and developing sense of place. imaginED.
Knowles, J. G., & Cole, A. L. (Eds.). (2008). Handbook of the arts in qualitative research: Perspectives, methodologies, examples, and issues. Sage. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452226545
Kunkle, F. (2015, Oct 26). ‘Walking while black’ can be dangerous too, study finds. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2015/10/26/walking-while-black-can-be-deadly-too-study-finds/
Machado, A. (1989). XXIX. In O. Macrí & G. Chiappini (Eds.), Obras Completas, t. I, Poesías Completas, t. II, Prosas Completas [Complete Works, Vol. 1, Complete Poems, Vol. 2, Complete Prose, Vol. 3]. Espasa-Calpe.
Nieto, S. (2013). Finding joy in teaching students of diverse backgrounds: Culturally responsive and socially just practices in U.S. classrooms. Heinemann.
Prendergast, M. (2020). Dwelling in the human/posthuman entanglement of poetic inquiry: Poetic missives to and from Carl Leggo. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 17(2), 13-33. https://jcacs.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jcacs/article/view/40442/36455
Rev Transcript Library. (2020). Justin Trudeau Canada COVID-19 Press Conference Transcript May 22. https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/justin-trudeau-canada-covid-19-press-conference-transcript-may-22
Streeter, K. (2020, May 18). Running while black: Our readers respond. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/18/sports/running-while-black-ahmaud-arbery.html
Verissimo, J. (2019, August 28). On the politics of italics. Literary Hub. https://lithub.com/on-the-politics-of-italics/
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Adriana Oniță, Lébassé Guéladé-Yaï, Lucie Wallace
Copyright for work published in JCACS belongs to the authors. All work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.