Pre-Service Teachers and Middle School Students: A Collaboration for Social Justice Art Education

Our lives are mediated through the visual which informs, in multiple and conflicting ways, our views, our beliefs, attitudes and mores, our choices, and thereby our resulting actions. This barrage of the visual impacts the postmodern student encountered in K-12 education. Students readily gain access to information that was once the sole domain of adults yet the prevailing system of education has not adapted. Visual culture is seldom used as an engagement strategy in school despite its ubiquitous role as hidden curriculum and ever-present place in the world beyond the school. Social justice education underscores humanizing pedagogy as it examines and challenges power relationships in the classroom (Anderson, 2010), fostering a space for students to gain a clearer understanding of the world in which they live (Garber, 2005) and be active participants in their education (Dewhurst, 2011; Hackman, 2005). It is both goal and process (Bell, 1997) through which youth can explore issues of power and critically examine the role of media and socio-cultural forces in relationship to power (Chung, 2008). As students use semiotic pedagogy to connect to each other, question their world and translate their beliefs into action (Dewhurst, 2011) they are empowered; they become active participants in the creation of the curriculum through their voices, lives, and interests. Youth empowerment is an inclusive, participatory, ongoing, and a critical educational process (Williams-Boyd, 2004) through which those who have been marginalized or disempowered are put back in the driver’s seat. This presentation will share the findings of a qualitative action research study, grounded in social justice art education, in which pre-service art educators worked collaboratively to integrate visual culture into the curriculum to bring Dayton middle school student’s voices to the forefront. They planned, delivered and assessed art education lessons that fostered meaning making, critical engagement, and development of artistic and activist voice