Methods of research. This was the topic for discussion today, and it’s one that I initially found intimidating. When the word research is used, I often think about someone with expert investigative skills and knowledge delving into books and journals to unearth untold gems of information. I also think of someone who like Sponge Bob, in the picture above, is extremely academic and lives with their nose in a book. In the context of the SIP project however, this isn’t exactly the case, but there is an element of unearthing and digging involved. A digging and unearthing of the self…..
In the earlier post I mentioned the different forms of research I wanted to use, and the two that are most significant to me are the ethnographic and reflexive. I believe that teaching students to be critical and reflective of their work, but also of their positionality, is crucial in order to create an engaged, dynamic and fluid relationship to their practice and those of their peers. However, many students are somewhat reserved when it comes to centring their life experience and knowledge as a means to learn and develop their artistic endeavours.
A chapter called Heart to Heart in bell hooks’ book ‘Teaching Community – A Pedagogy of Hope’ covers the role of love within a teaching context and how from a position of love, it is important to encourage students to engage with education via the process of dismantling hierarchies of what is “valuable”, ergo from the teacher, and what is of “little value”, what comes from the student. The below excerpt details the importance of dismantling hierarchies between student and teacher, that prohibit both from being part of a fluid and evolving learning process.
‘In our nation most colleges and universities are organized around the principles of dominant culture. This organisational model reinforces hierarchies of power and control. It encourages students to be fear-based, that is to fear teachers and seek to please them. Concurrently, students are encouraged to doubt themselves, their capacity to know, to think, and to act. Learned helplessness is necessary for the maintenance of dominator culture. Progressive teachers see this helplessness in students who become upset when confronting alternative modes of teaching that require them to be active rather than passive. Student resistance to forms of learning that are not based on rote memory or predictable assignments has almost become the norm because of the fixation on degrees rather than education. These students want to know exactly what they must do to acquire the best grade. They are not interested in learning. But the student who longs to know, who has awakened a passion for knowledge is eager to experience the mutual communion with teacher and subject that makes for profound engagement.’
Whilst studying on this course, I’ve had first hand experience of teaching students who have admitted to prioritising receiving a good grade over fully engaging with things that might seem alternative but are relevant and interesting to them. This fear of exploring the personal (ie ethnographic) is an example that students believe that leaning too much into what is ethnographic, sits outside of ‘normative’ learning structures, and leads to a potential point of failure. As Paulo Friere states in ‘Pedagogy of the Opressed’,
‘The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.’
I am interested in opposing this, and my practice is built on incorporating critical, reflexive and ethnographic methodologies into the foundation of my work in an attempt to engage students in critical self-led learning . This type of critically engaged pedagogy is reflected in the teachings of both hooks and Paulo Friere and I will therefore be using a critical paradigm to develop the content for my quiz (graphic diagram) and interview questions.
Friere’s work on using social justice as a basis for critical educational pedagogies has aided me in my attempt to create relationships with my students that centre their knowledge and positionality as part of how they might understand how to develop their practice. As detailed in the diagram below, I am interested in how my SIP can start to begin engaging students in discussions about their practice in the context of how the individual relates to the collective, and how this then impacts the intersectional and the expansion of knowledge, which can then be manifested in the self actualised, engaged and conscious individual.
I will use a critical paradigm as a basis for my enquiry as it reflects the interests in my practice as an artist, social justice activist and lecturer and enables me to develop my project in a way that is in keeping with the pedagogies that I am most interested in. With a positive paradigm there is an attempt to find a truth, with the belief that everything you need to know/discover is somewhere out there, it just needs to be found, and with an interpretivist paradigm, meanings change depending on context. As my approach to teaching is based on the premise of critically engaged, inclusive and self-led learning I will be using a critical paradigm to form the basis of my interview questions and research.I will couple this with the ideas explored in the feminist Ethics of Care movement, where engagement with another is based on being emphatic and meeting them where they are at that moment in time, creating space for them to lead the teaching experience alongside you.
I have described how critical engagement with ideas around positionality and intersectionality foreground my exchanges with students I teach, and it is with this in mind that I thought about the fruitful role this could play in an interview. Or as I’d like to put it, a conversation with intent. Speaking to students with a combined approach of interviewing and discussing the role of citation within their practice will help me create a dynamic and critical space with those I speak to.
What does this have to do with ethnography and reflection? Well, after reading hooks I considered how speaking to students allows me to share a space with them where we cultivate a conversation about citation, but how does my experience as Rachel alter or impact that interaction?
One of the things that’s been said to me repeatedly throughout this PGCert, is that I should consider how my practice and interests can be shared with my students. I never really understood the relevance of this, until students themselves started to ask me in tutorials what my work is about, what I make/the type of things I’m currently making, if I had work in shows…. I think this interest in my working life as an artist was a result of the positive relationships I built with the students, and the open manner with which I would communicate with them about their interests, their practice and their general well being. I finally absorbed what fellow PGCert students had mentioned to me and realised that there was space for me to use my work/interests as an artist, within my teaching practice more explicitly. As Dr Clarrisa Pinkola Estés states in Women Who Run With the Wolves, ‘We must strive to allow our souls to grow in their natural ways and to their natural depths.’ and instead of compartmentalising my interest in social justice/anti-racist pedagogies and my artistic practice, I realised how they are inextricably linked, and it was important to bring this forth with intention during this project.
So, that’s why this post features a picture of me singing karaoke, living my best life 🙂 The aforementioned image is from a show I did this July, called ‘Blessings Pon Blessings’. I organised a pro black karaoke, in a project space where I performed/invited people to perform songs by artists that are black/identify as black, and only black people or those who identify as black were allowed to sing. The show also featured an installation, where I decorated the space with balloons, lights, foil curtains and images of nature, writers, artists, intellectuals, singers, family and friends (of whom all were black, and the majority women) to make the things that influence my work visible. This aspect of the instillation was important, as I saw it as a visual citation. I was thinking about how citation could be used to make parts of my practice more accessible/my interests in inclusivity visible, so I decided to use images to cite things that are important to me historically, culturally, musically, personally and politically, in order to give context to my work, and another layer of meaning, which was simultaneously implicit and explicit.
The action of making visible the things that influence me/linking my practice to things outside of myself that are tied to me, allowed me to demonstrate citation as a visual, artistic and ethnographic device. I was able to share things that are relevant to me and shape my existence, in a way that is both critical and meaningful to the development of my work, but also allows others to engage with a radical demonstration of self love and love for the Black community, a community I belong to. The idea that citing POC (especially women who are POC) is a radical act, is one that is prevalent in the practices of many intellectuals, one of whom is Sara Ahmed.
An Academic who predicates her work on citation practices, Ahmed considers important questions about what impact non inclusive citational practices have on not only a text, but the reader and the histories connected to these things. Below is an excerpt from a blog post where she discusses her decision not to cite white men in her most recent book as a way of redressing the gendered and racial biases at play in many people’s citation practice.
Ahmed’s positionality as an Asian feminist academic, affects her relationship to how she cites, and she uses the ethnographic to influence her citational practice in her written work. Similarly to me, Ahmed uses her creative output as a way to critically engage with and discuss conversations about intersectionality, racial politics and feminist ideologies. This is something that is also mirrored in the work of many critical race theory scholars, such as Shirley Anne Tate, Sylvia Wynter and Kimberlé Crenshaw, and it mirrors the attempt I made in my karaoke performance, to make visible those who are often rendered invisible. The karaoke performance coupled with the installation was a demonstration of an anti-racist and radical citational practice that validated the breadth of my knowledge, life experience, and the cultural, historical legacies I belong to as a Black woman.
There are examples of feminist and anti-racist citational in many places, and Ahmed’s practice has been a source of inspiration for many women. For example: below is an excerpt form a conversation between Helena Rickett and Gabrielle Moser who discuss the importance of Ahmed’s approach to citation in the context of feminism.
The discussion between Rickett and Moser shines a magnificent light on contemporary feminist thinking around the radical and regenerative nature citation can afford individuals, and this is inclusive of those who are cited, and those who do the citing. The admittance by Céline Condorelli of belonging to a legacy of many individuals who have built what we stand upon, is the consideration I myself think about in my citation practice within my work as an artist, and it is part of the foundation that my SIP is built upon. It is what I hope to evidence with the artists I share with the students in the quiz, and especially in the work of Rosie Hastings and Hannah Quinlan, who similarly to Condorelli, name a work after their friend ‘Gaby’. Reflecting upon the work of feminist academics and artists like Ahmed, Condorelli, hooks and Hastings & Quinlan, has enabled me to see the broad and inclusive scope within which I can exist as an individual, educator and an artist.
This work is ongoing and important, because it moves us further forward in decolonising the curriculum and critiquing pedagogies and practices that are exclusionary. With UAL’s recent commitment to creating an anti-racist curriculum, it is evident that considering the role of citation is a way to utilise the strength of the positional, the alternative and the personal. It is within this broad scope that I wish to investigate the relationship students have to citation in my quiz and interview.