Tag Archives: Art

Decolonizing Reflexive Practice Through Photo Essay (M4P5)

The coming school year will be the first time I teach Photography 11/12, and I am hoping this resource will help me prepare for that. The paper, Decolonizing Reflexive Practice Through Photo Essay Aisinai’pi Storying Place (Walsh et al., 2018) outlines a photo essay project that situates the students’ identities with place. A photo essay is “a series of images evoking stories of original peoples and settlers on this land and fuels important questions about identity and belongingness” (p. 103).

An example of a photo essay, representing the importance of (controlled) burns for healthy ecosystems.

In the paper, the authors describe using a photo essay of the City of Calgary to orient students with Indigenous worldviews and a sense of place. Each photo has a theme, and many interconnect. For each photo, they asked students key questions, such as:

Who originally occupied this land?
How do Eurocentric societies and Indigenous societies understand Mother Earth?
What are your beliefs about live-giving forces?
What promotes health and wellness?
How do you understand the notion of all entities to be interconnected and interdependent?
etc.

I think this could be a valuable way to introduce students to both photo essays and to local history. You could extend the learning by having students create their own place-based photo essays.

Reference:

Walsh, C. A., St-Denis, N., & Eagle Bear, A. (2018). Decolonizing Reflexive Practice Through Photo Essay Aisinai’pi Storying Place. Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.18733/cpi29376

Using Visual Arts to Explore Local Community (M4P4)

Teachers for Social Justice published a lesson that facilitates students connecting with their local community. This is important for students to explore their own identities, their relations to others, and a sense of place. The lesson uses Bryan Collier’s book Uptown as a visual example of the art project (video of the book below).

https://youtu.be/7eJFJjQsTy4

This lesson is geared towards younger elementary students (grades 2 and 3), but I see the potential for this to be adapted for older students in digital media and photography classes. To begin, you could start by learning about media literacy through an anti-bias, anti-racist lens. The Association for Media Literacy has a useful framework for this. This would set the foundation for a “Reading the Street” activity during the community exploration, where students would experientially learn that media includes the environments around them, conveying ideologies and implications. The project can culminate with a digital collage project using computer programs such as Photoshop or Krita (free). To go even further, students could animate their collages using a program like After Effects, or make it interactive (such as clicking certain parts triggering an audio clip) using Adobe Animate (click here for an example, from ETEC 540’s “What’s in Your Bag?” assignment)

Other lessons on Teachers for Social Justice website that look promising:

Little Stones: Art for Positive Change (M4P2)

Little Stones is an award-winning documentary following four women making positive changes in their communities through art. The documentary’s team also joined up with the University of Michigan School of Education to create a Take Action! toolkit to help educators bring social justice to their own classrooms. This includes lessons surrounding the documentary itself (focused on Gender-based violence), as well as two workshops on Graphic Design (p. 119) and Spoken-Word Poetry (p. 126). The toolkit has many valuable media literacy activities, such as an analysis of infographics (Lesson 3, p. 45-48) and lyrics (Lesson 7, 95-108). Overall, this is a solid resource on its own, but also has the potential of being used as a reference for developing Anti-Racist and Indigenous art and media lessons.

Project of Heart (M4P1)

Project of Heart is an artistic inquiry into the history of Indigenous people in Canada and the legacies of the Indian Residential Schools (IRS). Though open to all Canadians, it is geared towards schools and students. The website is organized by Province to help provide local context and resources.

The project’s framework includes 6 steps:

Investigate the History and Legacy of Residential Schools in Canada
Look closer at a specific IRS in your local area, including whose territory it is located on and the children taken to the school
Create a gesture of Reconciliation
Survivor Visit
Social Justice Action
Finishing Up Project of the Heart

For Step 3, the website gives several suggestions for projects, from their traditional commemorative wooden tiles to crafting feather wreaths or writing a song. The provincial pages also provide blog-rolls with examples from schools. An approach that I think would be interesting is a collaborative mosaic. Ideally, this would be done in collaboration with a local Indigenous artist who would create the overall design and perhaps teach the students some art lessons. For examples of Collaborative Mosaics, check out Jen Jolliff‘s school ones, and the Global Roots Project.

M4P1: The Bill Reid Centre

The Bill Reid Centre is located at Simon Fraser University, a forty-minute hike from my school, but I did not realize its website was so rich in resources. It uses digital technologies such as photographs, drawings, videos, and other visual media to highlight the depth and vibrancy of Northwest Coast culture. Each section is so plentiful in resources that an entire year of curriculum could be developed with the website as a starting point. Its stated mandated is to (1) encourage community and academic conversations regarding the visual culture of Northwest Coast First Nations, and (2) promote public understanding and respect for the First Nations of the Northwest Coast past and present. The digital village project, in particular, could be of particular value in my class when using Minecraft to showcase knowledge.

Considering Cultural Appropriation in the Art Classroom (M3P5)

In my investigation into using digital art as a means of decolonization, I came across this article (Taylor, 2021) on The Art of Education University’s website. I feel that it helps solidify the distinction of when appropriation is acceptable (such as with remixing) and when it is not. It is both easily digestible and practical for a classroom teacher. One sentence in particular stood out to me, for its simple flip-the-idea-on-its-head approach:

“Instead of using kente cloth to teach weaving, teach weaving to introduce kente cloth.”

This phrase echoes what Kawagley and Barnhardt said about learning about the greater ecology before focusing in on one particular niche. In the case of the kente clothe (a Ghanaian textile), Taylor outlines how to guide students through intentional decision making, towards creating their own personal textiles, rather than mimicking an aesthetically pleasing one from another culture.

References:

Kawagley, A. O., & Barnhardt, R. (1998). Education indigenous to place: Western science meets native reality. Fairbanks: Alaska Native Knowledge Network.

Taylor, J. (2020, October). Considering Cultural Appropriation in the Art Classroom. The Art of Education University. https://theartofeducation.edu/2020/10/23/considering-cultural-appropriation-in-the-art-classroom/

Digital Storytelling as Inquiry (M3P4)

In their paper, “Digital Storytelling as Arts-Inspired Inquiry for Engaging, Understanding, and Supporting Indigenous Youth”, Englinton et al. investigated how youth explore their personal and cultural idnetities trough multimedia narratives. The creation, reflection on, and sharing of these stories provided “opportunities for these youth to represent, perform, and thus construct their identities using the cultural artifacts available to them” (p. 14). The authors argue that this medium, in this case short (under 5 minutes) multimedia narratives, is a powerful amplifier of marginalized voices. They base their workshop on the Freirean model which uses images to spark dialogue and illuminate collective themes or issues.

This process can be taken a step further into the digital-art niche by creating such narratives with animation. There is an abundance of support for stop-motion (sometimes called slowmation) animation for supporting learning. Pavlou (2019) details its strengths for facilitating digital storytelling, such as its power to encourage creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration. For an example of an Indigenous stop-motion, see the video below:

From the Video’s Description: This animated documentary follows the journey of an Indigenous photographer as she travels through time. She witnesses moments in her family’s history and strengthens her connection to her Metis, Cree and Anishnaabe ancestors. This is a personal story told through the eyes of director and writer Amanda Strong. The oral and written history of her family reveals the story — we witness the impact and legacy of the railways, the slaughter of the buffalo and colonial land policies. Four Faces of the Moon contains no English language, relying on sound, image and Indigenous voice to tell the story. This multi-layered approach to storytelling may leave you with more questions than answers: it is an invitation to look into your own understanding of history, legacy and the importance in knowing who you are and where you’re from.

References:

CBC (2017, March 21). “Four Faces of the Moon” – Canada’s dark colonial past | Animated Short Doc [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/rWe–sysNkk

Englinton, K. A., Gubrium, A., & Wexler, L. (2017). Digital Storytelling as Arts-Inspired Inquiry for Engaging, Understanding, and Supporting Indigenous Youth. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 18(5). https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1136731.

Pavlou, V. (2019). Art Technology Integration: Digital Storytellying as a Transformative Pedagogy in Primary Education. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 39(1), 195–210. https://doi.org/10.1111/jade.12254

Contemporary Indigenous Artists (M3P3)

In this post, I am weaving together three different resources. When teaching visual art education, sometimes it is useful to direct learners towards other artists as sources of inspiration or research. Sending students exclusively to sites like Behance, Instagram, or Pinterest runs the risks of overwhelmingly Western content. The following resources can help lead students to contemporary Indigenous Artists:

Digital Mural is a collection by Indigenous youth. The gallery includes visual images, audio, video, and digitally rendered work. A central theme to the collection is the creative responses to change, community, and resilience. You can focus the collection by selecting certain categories (ex: Figure, Indigenous Futurism, Land, etc.) or tags (ex: Digital, Illustration, Photography, etc.). Clicking on the individual works will provide information about the piece and/or artist.

The Indigenous Arts Collective of Canada seeks to empower Indigenous women and to create a safe and inclusive space to conserve and share cultural knowledge. In their purpose statement they say: “For Indigenous people, art is the very soul of our spirituality. It’s our every movement, dance and song – it is in every stroke of paint, every bead sewn, every feather placed.” The website has an Artist Directory, where you can browse by artist or by artform, and a Marketplace to support Indigenous artists.

The Secwepemc Artisan Catalogue (2013) showcases Indigenous artists in and near Kamloops, BC. Each artist has a bibliography and samples of their work, from beading to painted headphones.

References:

Community Futures Development Corporation of Central Interior First Nations. (2013, October 28). Secwepemc artisan catalogue. SlideShare. https://www.slideshare.net/npankewich/secwepemc-artisan-catalogue.

Digital Mural. (n.d.). https://digitalmural.ca/gallery.

Welcome. Indigenous Arts Collective of Canada. (2021, June 28). https://passthefeather.org/.