Art, Pla(y)ce, Culture and Education

Author(s):

Janinka Greenwood(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2016

Network:

29. Research on Arts Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

29 SES 12, Contemporary Stories of Arts Education

Paper Session

Time:

2016-08-26

09:00-10:30

Room:

NM- J114

Chair:

Catarina Silva Martins

Contribution

In a recent European Polylogue, the terms cultural education, art education and arts in and for education were sometimes used as if they more or less synonymous, while at other times various members of the group argued vehemently that very different concepts and processes were involved, and that conflation of these concepts hindered effective dialogue about education. Embedded in some renditions of these dialogues was the notion that there is a common European culture and that it is expressed in some refined forms of art that are not only worthy of study but that also have the means to empower those who learn them to be more civically-minded and cultural citizens of Europe. These discussions prompt a critical examination of what culture is, how it gives rise to and values art, and of what art is and how it draws on and reconstructs culture.

A second cluster of dialogue is one that was re-iterated in various ways in media and over family dinner tables throughout Europe at the time of the last ECER conference when Syrian migrants were making their way en masse through Hungary and Austria to Germany and countries in Europe were deliberating closure of their borders. “It’s the end of European culture,” was one line in the repeatedly enacted script. “Many of our parents and grandparents were themselves refugees,” was another. A third voiced concern about how to meet the coming educational challenges. These discussions prompt inquiry into the relationship of place with culture and into the ways in which education through the arts might allow us to explore, play with, and conceptualise ideas of place and culture and so make personal and sometimes collective meaning of who we are in relation to where we are and the cultures around us.

Drawing on a range of specific practical cross-cultural cases this paper first examines the notion that culture is the context within which art is made and viewed. It then examines the ways in which art may define, re-define and even re-construct culture. Further, it examines ways in which art for education may be purposefully used as a means of teasing out or playing with understandings of culture, in both community and school contexts. The importance of place and its shifting relationship to culture is also explored, as are the ways that art can be used to play with and within that relationship.

Illustrative practical examples are taken from work within New Zealand. The cases examined variously involve Maori, Pakeha, new immigrant, cross-cultural and globalising approaches to art- making and art for education. Examples are taken from both performing and visual arts.

A working model is developed in which culture is theorised as something powerful, pervasive, fluid and often intangible, while art is theorised as a deliberative process of both breaking and making meaning. Within that model, education may enact a range of roles and might constrain or facilitate play with understandings of place and culture and with strategies of making and using art.

While the examples are taken from New Zealand practice, it is expected they will have clear resonances with practice in other parts of the world.

Method

The exploration is an art-based research inquiry. It draws on three scenes as the primary basis for analysis and argument, but also references other visual and performance works. Scene 1: New Zealand. Early 1980s. Education, like the public face of the country, is still predominantly monocultural. Students and teachers have been taken to live on an ancestral marae and make collaborative art works based on local histories. One group shows their mural. In the lower half is an animated traditional carving. A cross is impaled into his skull. In one hand the figure holds a bible, in the other a scroll that represents the Treaty of Waitangi. The mural readily reads as an image of colonisation: forceful imposition of alien values on ancestral culture. But a traditional Maori rafter design is climbing its way up the cross, re-designing it. The hand holding the Treaty is held assertively high. The woven background design is a traditional one, the stairway to knowledge. And the carved figure is emphatically alive, and perhaps angry. Scene 2: Paris. 2013. A dance workshop at the IDEA Conference with drama teachers from around the world. It develops improvisations that use the theatre languages of the street and of the modern dance laboratory to explore identity and difference. The facilitator has brought a theme that grew out of her work with urban students, and hopes the fusion of cultural legacies will allow international participants to find their own level of application. The blackboard recalls words from Martha Graham and a ghetto street artist. Movement on the floor starts with willing but slightly self-conscious participants. It quickly whips up energy as dancers merge their individual interpretations into crews that engage in in street dance battle. Scene 3: New Zealand. 2105. The Cricket World Cup is in progress. A wooden stage has been set up in the fanzone in the city. Local communities have successively taken the stage to dance. The unfamiliar lilt of a Bangladeshi song comes across the speakers and three women in red and gold saris dance. Their husbands and supporters hold high the green flag with its blood-red centre. The dance is exotic to most the audience, and to the dancers the audience is foreign and unaware of the semiotics. But the dancing itself spins together of the threads of homeland, present location, aching nostalgia and proud love. It claims place in a world of shifts.

Expected Outcomes

By referring to the dialogues during the Polylogue, I proposed that an examination of the relationships between art, culture and education is necessary to ensure art educators, do not talk past each other, and to challenge us to think more deeply about the assumptions we make about cultural homogeny and about which kinds of approach to the arts are useful for our students’ learning. Teaching through art is a powerful means of allowing students to examine values and ideas. We as arts educators need to share our experience and learn from each other, and so we have to communicate in terms that are as clear as we can make them. I also placed this exploration against dialogues about the migrant situation in Europe, a situation which may be impacting particularly on Europe at this time but is immediately real and serious for all countries on our planet. Even if we do not see the arrival of large numbers of people who are culturally different as a threat, we need to give attention to how we can create effective learning spaces where various cultural groups can explore and negotiate their identity, their relationship with each other, and their sense of place. Colonisations and oppressions of various kinds are histories that most of our countries have experienced. History tells us that when different cultures meet there is often conflict. As educators many of us believe that intolerance is not inevitable and that kindly third spaces can be developed. As educators who use arts for learning we have tools in our hands that can allow our students and our communities to explore ways to make those third spaces. However, we have to be very conscious not only of the potential of the tools but also of what we want to do with them.

References

Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York: Basic Books. Wright, W. (1908).The Burning of the Boyd, Whangaroa Harbour, 1809. Auckland Art Gallery. http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/explore-art-and-ideas/artwork/234/the-burning-of-the-boyd,-whangaroa-harbour,-1809 Heaphy, C. (1855). Whangaroa Harbour. The Fletcher Trust Collection. http://www.fletchercollection.co.nz/artist/Charles+HEAPHY.html Greenwood, J. (2002). History of a Bicultural Theatre: Mapping the Terrain. Christchurch: Christchurch College of Education. Greenwood, J. & Wilson, A. M. (2006). Te Mauri Pakeaka: A Journey in to the Third Space. Auckland: Auckland University Press. McGee, G. (1981). Foreskin’s Lament. Wellington: Price Milburn. Renée (1981). Setting the Table. Wellington: Playmarket. Renée (1985). Wednesday to Come. Wellington: Victoria University Press Bhabha, H. (1990). The Third Space. In Rutherford, J. (Ed) Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, Lawrence and Wishart, London. 207-221. Greenwood, J. (2001) Within a third space. Research in Drama Education 6(2): 193-205. Polylogue III, Wildbad Kreuth, May 2015. Schonmann, S. (Ed.) (2015). The wisdom of the many: Key issues in arts education, International yearbook for research in arts education (Vol. 3). Münster, Germany: Waxmann.

Author Information

Janinka Greenwood (presenting / submitting)

University of Canterbury, New Zealand

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