A personal perspective on pedagogical structures and strategies that uphold Indigenous ways of knowing

This article gives a brief background of where I come from and how my experiences in Africa and North America have framed the ‘philosophy of teaching’ that defines me as a visual art educator. I reflect on the postcolonial concept of ‘decolonization’ as a means to identifying possible pedagogical alternatives of practice. Acknowledging that my knowledge embraces both ‘western’ and ‘Indigenous’ ways of knowing, poses a question for me as an art educator about ways to design and implement pedagogies that embrace contextualized experiences in order to achieve meaningful learning within formal education. I conclude by stating that nothing will effect change within Uganda’s education sector, particularly in reference to visual art education and practice, without educators having a firmer grasp of their scholarly standpoint on knowledge and learning. Development of concrete ways of bringing together diverse ontological, epistemological and axiological positions of western and Indigenous knowledge systems as well as art pedagogies to facilitate learning, will require educators to develop structures and strategies that progress from the bottom up in order to benefit from the values, beliefs and ways of knowing within diverse local communities.

Undergraduate creative arts students’ perceptions and attitudes toward disability: Advancing a critical disability studies informed curriculum

This study reports on the unanticipated findings of a small-scale, evaluative research project. Further to a pilot iteration, a cohort of undergraduate art students engaged with an immersive, inclusive arts curriculum informed by critical disability studies. Students’ perceptions and attitudes about disability were recorded at the outset and conclusion of the pedagogical project, through a qualitative questionnaire. Thematic analysis was employed to surface patterns in the cohort’s responses at both points in their learning journey. While the findings evidenced the anticipated shift from individualized perspectives about disability to an increasingly social, interactional perspective, the full extent of the medicalized gaze and internalized ableism at the outset of the study was unanticipated. This realization has been influential in developing the pedagogical approach and the framing of the content taught, and has exemplified both the potential and the need to learn about disability, disablement and diversity through art education.

Whose futures need crafting? A collaborative evaluation of the British Council/Crafts Council Crafting Futures 5K grant scheme

Sandra Fruebing and Rachel Kelly were recipients of 2018–19 British Council/Crafts Council Crafting Futures 5k grants. A dialogue between Fruebing and Kelly started when they both returned from their project work in Egypt and the Philippines respectively. Both participants related their experiences through their conversations and this led them to discuss and reflect through regular online exchanges stretching from 2019 to 2020. They both are now considering how their experiences of working with marginalized craft communities have become a position from which to consider the role of development in Art & Design Higher Education research and practice. The spectrum of collaboration and companionship that is emerging from their work, both individually and through online meetings and conversations, become like a radio signal, which is tuning and making audible their similar experiences and understandings.

Fees Must Fall: Student Revolt, Decolonisation, and Governance in South Africa, Susan Booysen (ed.) (2016)

Review of: Fees Must Fall: Student Revolt, Decolonisation, and Governance in South Africa, Susan Booysen (ed.) (2016) Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 350 pp., ISBN 978-1-86814-985-8, p/bk, USD35

Towards an anti-racist Fine Art Ph.D.: ‘Anti-racism productive antagonisms’ (ARPA) for the supervisor, student and examiner

This article outlines three actions for the supervisor, student and examiner to introduce a level of anti-racist consciousness in the journey of the Fine Art Ph.D. The steps are intended as ‘warm-ups’ within and towards more comprehensive, longer term strategies for individuals, departments, faculties and universities, to nurture communities of anti-racist researchers and make UK HE anti-racist. Change takes time, negotiations are unfolding and my brushstrokes are broad. But if the heart of any Ph.D. endeavour is about the development of critical insight, not just by the student into a knowledge area or problem, but about their own position as autonomous researchers, not just within their fields but the wider HE sector and beyond, an actively anti-racist agenda must be integral. I wish to critique my own position as a non-White researcher who has signed up to the neo-liberal, ‘post-race’ university. I welcome feedback, and seek to lay the ground for further work by myself and others. This is my call for researchers in Fine Art and UK HE at large to step up.

Monster aesthetics as an expression of decolonizing the design body

Institutionalized design education aims at training the human body to become a design body, a subject capable of designing according to aesthetic canons. In colonized territories, the modern canon predominates over indigenous, vernacular and other forms of expression. Manichaeism, utilitarianism, universalism, methodologism and various modern values are inculcated in the design body as if it did not have any. The colonization of design bodies makes young designers believe that once they learn what good design is, they need to save others from bad design. This research reports on a series of democratic design experiments held in a Brazilian university that questioned these values while decolonizing the design body. Comparing the works of design produced in the experiment with some works of art from the Neoconcrete movement, we recognize a characteristic form of expression we call monster aesthetics: a positive affirmation of otherness and collectivity that challenges colonialists’ standards of beauty and goodness.

‘Opening the door’: An authentic approach to decolonizing arts education in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Educators in universities in Aotearoa/New Zealand have the responsibility to ‘live and model’ the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. However, tertiary education has often treated the principles in an inauthentic way. There are few courses in art, design and communication in New Zealand that integrate the principles authentically. This article showcases features of a course – Mahitahi | Collaborative Practices – that engages with Te Tiriti principles by teaching collaboration from te ao Māori (the Māori world). Our findings draw from a focus group we conducted with academic staff who taught into a pilot iteration of the course. Three central themes emerged from the focus group relating to the issue of decolonizing arts education. First, that regardless of the educators’ intentions to design a course that privileges te ao Māori, the features of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s colonial reality are still present. Second, the students’ primary learning activity was principled reflection, where they successfully engaged with te ao Māori in an authentic way. Third, students’ connection to te ao Māori was jeopardized by designing part of the assessment that took on a Pākehā (non-Māori) world-view. Consequently, students may have missed the opportunity to engage more fully with educative experiences relating to lifelong learning. We argue that to maintain an authentic connection to te ao Māori, the curriculum should be consistently designed around principles embedded in Te Tiriti o Waitangi.