art as a middle place

In Reflections from the Heart of Educational Inquiry (1991), Grumet proposes the need for a public language with which we can speak of meanings made in home, taking the private and personal into the public. Immediately I respond with art; art is that language so often, for so many. But I find it interesting that the artists who most often create images of these domestic/everyday stories, memories, and knowledge are the ones who most often go unrecognized themselves. Just as she discusses how in scholarship, the knowledge we possess from home is not welcomed as worthy in the spheres of academe, so too is art created by outsiders (folk artists, students, untrained, etc.) not often welcomed with regard in the art world.  (The Smithsonian has an amazing collection of American Art that includes many of these kinds of artists.  Explore the collections here.)

It too is thought of lesser, of simple, of craft – not art. For the past 100 years or so in art, there has definitely been a dialogue about this and perceptions have been changed. Outsider artists have gotten attention. Still there is a strong connection between the discussion, and I can see myself following this interest more and more.

One of the most powerful statements in Grumet’s chapter is her purpose in sharing memories of her childhood. She says she wants us to recognize how home “was also a place of conflict, of improvisation, or shifting loyalties and cultures, and the unity that it presented was often the aesthetic achievement of men and women working to draw form out of the chaos of their own lives” (81). How is that any different than school? Yet we tend so much to separate the two – one is personal, one is private. So when I ask students to project their own home movies on the wall of the classroom, in the form of the art they create with me, am I providing the language/space they need to make meaning out of their personal and their current public? Or am I forcing them into a place I don’t have the right to demand? While I feel committed that I am approaching my curriculum in the right way, balancing the traditional objectives with ones closer to those concerned with social justice and contemporary art, I wonder whether I am actually providing what the students need – a space to become more fully themselves.

One of my main concerns with the community where I work is the prominent presence of violence in the school and their lives. With that concern in mind, I read Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), seeking for ideas that address images’ role in violence and inspiring tolerance and a greater respect for life. She addresses mostly the imagery of war photography, along with a discussion of the prints of Goya’s series The Disasters of War and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas. Sontag focuses on the viewer, the distance both created and diminished between the viewer and the victim(s) portrayed in the work. One idea that stood out was that as a viewer we must not be distracted from asking, “Whose suffering is not being shown?” I often find myself wanting to address that question with my community of work, mainly because I feel that the suffering is shown in such a biased, dismissive way in the media (Another Teen Dies in Gang Violence or something to that effect). That tone becomes the tone those involved regard the experience as well (students, teachers, administrators, parents). Many of the questions and reflections Sontag poses in the book guide my questions and reflections in similar ways.

Art simply makes sense to me to become this middle place of Grumet’s discussion. While I move ahead, I seek more discussion of the role of those involved in this place – those creating the art, being portrayed, consuming the images, and guiding the creation, reflection, and analysis. I find myself and my students in each of those roles, which in itself holds multiple meanings, just as we create and understand the multiple meanings within them.

regarding suffering

Susan Sontag’s (Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador 2004) exploration of the depiction of suffering in visual arts, concentrating on photography, focuses some of my questions on the role arts play in creating empathy and promoting tolerance.  I often wonder what role art can play, and the stories within art, in teaching for social justice.  In a time when we are inundated with images – grotesque, sexual, violent, airbrushed, real, fabricated, moving and still – what kinds of effects do they actually have?  And are those effects useful?  Appropriate?  Do they teach?

While her writing focuses on war, the role of journalism and media within violence around the world, I cannot help but connect it back to urban settings where violence effects the daily lives of communities.   Sontag discusses how the photograph doesn’t really make us understand violence, while narratives reach that goal more closely.  On the other hand, photographs haunt us.  Many of the images she recalled, such as the Capa image above, the children running, screaming from the napalm in Vietnam, the liberation of extermination camps at the end of World War II.  Most of us know these images all too well.

They do indeed haunt us.  But she raises the question about how we do not know the images of the suffering that we, in the United States, have caused.  We are not haunted by many of these images, the few that exist.  The suffering is always somewhere else.

Why are the images of parents grasping framed school portraits of their teen who was killed in gang violence not as haunting or remembered?  Why do we not recognize this suffering?  Because it is our own?  We, as a nation, caused it?

But what could it do?  Many of us watch the news, read the paper, and we know about this.  Is it a question of style in the imagery?  Or is it that we resign to the suffering?

While all of this was stirred as I read Sontag’s discussion of suffering and its representation in images and media, I am not sure what path or what conclusion I could find, create.  I am not sure even if I yet understand her argument in the book, except that she ended it with one idea I believe is truth.  Sontag brings up the “we” who are not in the war, not normalized with it.  And she states, quite honestly, how we will never understand, can never know what it all truly means to experience.  I feel that everyday, as I drive back my short, few miles to my neighborhood, where I can walk down the street without having to think too much about my surroundings, and how different that is for my students.

essence in portraits

As a photographer, I have always been most interested in portraits. I am sure that interest, as well as my general interest in photography, comes from the multitude of family photographs I grew up seeing. My favorites still have to be the portraits my grandfather took of my grandmother in his small studio in the 1930′s.

Yet I love them all, the posed smiles at birthday parties, the candid in-between moments of my family’s daily life, the celebrations, the births, the deaths, the people — all captured on film. I have addressed this theme a few times in my art, but never to the degree that capture the essential stories of my family. Not sure why.

I just began reading The Art and Science of Portraiture by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffman Davis and feel almost as I imagine I would finding a religion that became me. The focus of portraiture as a inquiry method is the “complexity and aesthetic of human experience” and its goal to inform and inspire – something many approaches to researchers and inquirers ignore, feeling that it isn’t their role to do. With these goals, focuses, and beliefs about humanity and experience, portraiture is intended to not only tell a story but find a story. It is this central aspect that sets portraiture apart from ethnography as a mode of inquiry. With that, the portraitist seeks to show the subject/actors/players essence within the context.

After reading only the first 20 pages, I wanted to look at some images to see what examples I could find that did indeed show an essence. I likened it so much to artwork and photography in particular since it is my primary medium as an artist. I think about how I have embraced the role of a documentarian, yet fully realizing that an artist is never truly documenting, that there is always editing involved, with the frame, the timing, the lighting, the angle, etc. I went online and started searching for images that captured the essence of those whom are captured. I wanted to see stories told through images created. I wanted to reflect on images that have stuck in my mind and shaped the photographs I have created myself. I thought to images of Miles Davis in a recording studio and sought out that photograph and photographer.

(To see more, click here.) I had seen many of these images before, and all did indeed to hold that essence within their borders. Why? Here are incredibly well-known individuals, all with stories we could easily know – through biographies of all kinds. Yet not knowing them, there is – I believe – something we do begin to know through images like this. Or possibly things that we want to know, we want to believe. Or maybe it is that we can feel some commonality. Lawrence-Lightfoot discusses how in capturing the particulars within portraits, generalities emerge that are the means through which we connect. It is these subtle details that create a pathway to more universal patterns of human experience. Maybe that is what we see when we look at Miles from the perspective of a fellow musician, over the sheets of music from Porgy and Bess. Or in a quiet moment of Dylan facing an empty Carnegie Hall during a rehearsal. Or Mingus looking off , across the room, who knows where or at what. These moments can tell us more about the essence, the stories, the common pattern of our lives than possibly anything else.

The Curriculum of Amelie

It is  not a rare occurrence for me to watch a film for the umpteenth time.  It’s what I do.  I usually feel guilty as I am putting the DVD into the player and realizing that I will not be doing anything for the next two hours or so that I should be doing, i.e. reading, grading, cleaning, and the like.  But the guilt quickly dissipates as I do one of my favorite things in life.

So earlier this week, after my repeated announcement of “I need more DVD’s,” I watched Amelie. And as I was watching it, I realized how much this movie has impacted the curriculum of peoples’ lives – mine included.  People love the movie and for so many reasons.  I think of the range of people I know who consider it a favorite – men and women both.

The film is beautiful.  Jeunet painstakingly controlled every shot and item in the frame, working with it digitally to give the film the brilliance it has.  The story is more than fun, the characters creating a wonderful little community, and the concepts simple and human – love, understanding, and peace.

I would guess that Amelie has changed Paris for every person born in and around the 1980′s just as I am sure Breathless did for generations before and La Dolce Vita did in Italy.  During my last visit to Paris, my sister and I discovered settings from the film as we explored Montmartre, we had creme brule at the restaurant – relishing in cracking the crust with our spoon, and imagining ourselves entrenched and intrigued with life just as Amelie Poulain.

So many people in my generation want to live life like Amelie, yet how many of us do?  We imagine ourselves guided this way.  We hold simple actions to great meaning, the skipping of stones of our days.  We seek to take pleasures in our work, in our homes, in our relationships that surround us – from intimate to casual.  We all think of ourselves as little Amelie’s but do we succeed?  Some might say, as they often do, Kathleen, you are being too idealistic again. Kathleen, movies are not real life.  But isn’t Amelie realistic?  Doesn’t it show a version of reality?  She has pain, she has obstacles, she cries, she laughs, she works, she eats.  She is a character, sure, but isn’t she possible?  Yet all of us who watch the movie and smile and cry, and want to enter back into the real world a little closer towards her way of life, do we?  Is it so hard to help others with a clear heart?  Is it too idealistic to think we can have our own strategems to make life more fun, more real, more fulfilling?

The film made me think a lot about my different roles.  I have been trying to capture some kind of essence in my past, my story, that describes the curriculum of my life.  And something I am realizing is that so much of what has created me is film.  While my memory is disappointing and scarce, I don’t remember grammar school beyond three or four experiences, I don’t remember many lessons taught me by my parents as a child or adolescent, yet I remember entire dialogues in films from all eras and genres.   I remember how certain films made me feel, think, desire, and pursue.

We learn by creating meaning from experiences we have, and I try and teach by having those experiences involve art.  Yet I have not realized all of the meanings that I have created for myself over the last 28 years (or however many of those have been aesthetically conscious) from the experiences of viewing films in my life.  If Amelie has these effects on who I strive to be and what I pursue to learn, what have been the results from Arsenic and Old Lace, The Thin Man, Casablanca, The Blues Brothers, Pulp Fiction, The Misfits, Harvey, The Big Lebowski, and the countless other films I have seen more times than I can count?  While it may be simply my love for story, or a way to spend my time, it is quite possibly something grander.  I used to fight myself about the ideologies I took from movies (saying such things to myself as “You cannot expect your relationship to be like Nick and Nora’s!”).  But maybe instead of fighting what I have learned, maybe, just maybe, I should embrace it.

just starting to wonder why a little more

This blog, my teaching, my studies, and my art all have something in common that is emerging.  I am not quite sure what my goals are.  Why do I do it?  Let’s take the blog for instance.  I know the primary goal is so that I can explore ideas further, to better understand them.  I know that when I write about something, I am able to chew on it a little and then put it into words again, and in that process, I understand it more.  Or realize what I don’t know or get.

But then, why put it on the internet and ask people to check it out?  Am I looking for some kind of validation?  Do I get ideas from others to further my own learning and understanding?  Do I know why I do it?  This whole conversation translates directly into the other important aspects of my life: art, teaching, studying.  I think it is easy to get into the routines of life – of going to work, of creating the next lesson, and then the next.  Into the routine of not making art, feeling I have nothing original to contribute.  Into the routine of going to school, because it just feels right.

In all those rhythms that arise, I keep losing the sense of a goal.  While I am learning that the goal can indeed be the journey, and that is one of the most comforting lessons I have probably ever learned….I still find myself asking why?

Maybe this is all coming out as I realize people are looking at this page.  Maybe it is manifesting stronger as I try to reenter creating my own art.  Or maybe it’s as I realize that I keep making decisions in my life and hope it isn’t to just keep making decisions…..if that makes sense.

We all have truths, don’t we?  Things we ultimately believe are true and that guide our lives.  What creates them?  What are mine?  I feel like where I am going – with art, studies, and teaching – I have to kind of know what mine are, and I am not sure I do.  I try to think about where I have been, what has gotten me here, and I don’t really know.  I don’t really remember, maybe.

I hate the idea of doing things for selfish reasons.  I don’t want to post these entries on a blog to make myself feel more important or more intelligent than I even would ever want to be.  So there it is – a little fear of self-indulgence.  If I prayed, I would ask for this feeling, that is so close to the surface of knowing, to just emerge.  I feel so near to understanding where it is my truth lies, and I know it is somewhere near everyday people’s stories that emerge through the arts….but what does that really mean?  What does that mean for me?  For my students?  For my art?  For strangers I pass on 32nd Street?

Where now?

celebrating the story

This first year returning to my studies, I have found myself more reflective about my own goals, passions, and story than I originally thought I would be. An important focus for me has been centered on the concepts of meaning and truth/honesty. Why am I teaching? And why do I feel the need to continue studying education myself? A lot of the answers that have emerged have to do with the question: what makes a life meaningful and good? While I am beginning to understand that the answers to these questions are actually the journey of asking and pursuing them, I am reaffirmed in the importance of our stories in helping guide that path. When I began, I knew I wanted to see what kind of sources for learning might lie in narratives within visual art. Now I am finding evidence of these meanings and knowledge that exist in experiences captured and explored in story forms of all kinds.

The first text I approached was Sandburg’s The People, Yes (1936). I am constantly inspired by the narrative within art – visual and literary. Like Terkel, Sandburg’s focus on working class people as well as Chicago has always connected with me. Within my artwork and my visual arts curriculum, I strive to somehow connect our stories to questions and ideas that guide people’s lives. Sandburg approaches this idea by the way has us reflect on the knowledge that exists in the lived experience of the characters he creates in his vignettes. Sandburg mentions the “reaching out” that happens as we go through the actions of our lives. He calls this reaching out alive. That livelihood is what I want to pursue and question in my work. When I turn this idea towards work, I wonder how this reaching is addressed in urban schools and how it then translates into our expectations of people outside of the school community.

Madeleine Grumet’s article The Politics of Personal Knowledge (1987) has taken my attention a number of times already, as I keep returning, reviewing the ideas and inspirations I find there. Her ideas regarding the connections between narrative and knowledge follow with the goal of better understanding our and others’ experiences. As she discusses the otherness/alienation that occurs within storytelling – whether the story originates with us or another, she poses that the experience then becomes more open to understanding and reflection. When Grumet discusses her work with teachers and theatre, I find connections possible to approach visual arts in similar ways – exploring visual arts “as a way of knowing, a way of investigating and performing our understanding of texts.” I would like to pursue more ways to approach my own studies and students in this way, most intrigued with the fact that this allows multiple narratives to surface – broadening and deepening our understanding based upon the interpretations we and others bring to it. This Grumet article holds more paths for me to follow, namely the ideas of combinatory possibilities, the space that exists between narratives, and her process of scoring.

As I continue, I am feeling more confident in my questioning. I am finding that I am right not wanting to answer things outright and that I should be regretful when I take such a stance on ideas I do not completely understand. While I am continually humbled, I look forward to enjoying the path of the questioning, and in that act, I believe my truth will exist.

a return to my words

With words on the page, you can rework rethink reorganzie and edit and edit and edit, but without words, you are left with good intentions, grand plans, big hopes – in other words, not much.

– Ayers, W.

( Narrative Push, Narrative Pull)

Whether I read Bill Ayers’ writings, listen to him talk (formally or not), or simply walk past his office door, I am endlessly inspired. In the most recent article I’ve read (noted above), I find myself with an idea for a project with my students, energy and focus for my writing here, better understanding of the role of narrative and narratives in education and our society, further clarity in issues concerning Israel and Palestine and the never-ending reference to the racial achievement gap in education, and more confidence in my work with students, art, and study. All that from a seven page article.

One of the connections is with writing. As I have finally discovered – in order for me to really understand things, I need to write. If I try and reflect mentally, I become too distracted far too quickly – usually by emotions (or sometimes the piles of DVDs begging my attention). Prof. Ayers
says that writing sets up a relationship, a dialog. The harmony and disharmony within myself is able to play and struggle. When I enter conversations in class or at work, I almost always regret it afterwards. I think to myself – why do I always end up talking? Do I really think I know what I am saying? Can I go one day without making myself seem obsessed, incoherent, or egotistical?

I believe I started this blog months before I actually told more than two individuals. I have obvious issue with my own concept of self. Fine. It’s there. But a new focus:

In the article, Prof. Ayers shares comments George Orwell (1946) made about reasons individuals write.

• Sheer egoism
• Aesthetic enthusiasm
• Historical impulse
• Political purpose

Reading the explanations of each, I thought back to my days as an undergraduate student in studio art. I felt so conflicted about how someone could ever call herself an artist. I bounced through each and every reason for making art, and never really found my reason. I tried it all, and finally I decided – who am I kidding? And with that, I graduated and left Bloomington for Chicago. Looking back at it, it was when I decided I wasn’t going to play the art school game anymore that I did my best work. I was interested and excited, and I carried that into life in Chicago.

Orwell’s reasons for writing easily relate to reasons for creating art. When I introduce my Art I students to different purposes artists have with their work, they could almost all fall into one of the four above categories. After all, literature and visual art are not from separate realms of human creation.

But I also feel that the reason individuals teach could fall into these categories as well. “Sheer egoism” could easily explain why some people teach. The fact that in teaching one becomes an authority, and that is entertaining and good for one’s ego. Many of us are completely intrigued with our content areas and age levels, so it makes sense that many would follow the concept of “aesthetic enthusiasm.” Many teachers are clearly concerned with the transfer of culture and traditional knowledge in ways intended to help the truth continue. Lastly, we all know at least a few (ahem) who hope beyond hopes that what they are doing inspires people to grow and push our world into something else.

I am becoming more and more interested in why people teach. I look around my school and wonder, “Why is that person here?” “What made her start to teach?” “How is it that he is still authentically enjoying this after so many years without selling out?” And I realize that even in these three short years, my reasons have evolved. I am sure every teacher falls into each category sometimes at some degree. I know I do.

As I grow and with that growth better understand why I write, why I create art, why I teach and why I continue to study, I realize there is one answer that emerges every time: because I have to. Professor Ayers reminds me again about my role and purpose when he explains,

You don’t have to think you’re better than others, or to compare yourself to John Dewey or Toni Morrison, but you do have to believe that the message you want to send is of vital importance and that you must, therefor, muster the confidence to the work. You must nourish your own awareness, your engagement, your curiosity, and you must harness all of it with dedication and discipline.

too many words

There were just a few too many words staring at me as I reviewed my blog.  So I thought I would add an image.  Then as I searched, I found this.

Maybe it would be more interesting to see Greene and Eisner each play chess against Duchamp rather than a traditional debate.  But we would have to call upon some voodoo, unless Dr. Schubert could invite Marcel as a guest.

reflection on this form

The purpose of this blog, inspired by my friend’s work on Grown Ass People, has been two-fold.  One being an attempt at receiving an ‘A’ for my first class at UIC as a doctoral student.  The second reason was more personal.  I wanted to make sure I was learning and growing.  I am not the best student in the world.  I have known that a long, long time.  I am not as disciplined as I want to be.  I am easily distracted and like to take on more than I probably should.  (Friends tease me that they are going to make me a sign to wear around my head that says “NO” since I never seem to say it to people.)  But I have learned that from reflective writing, I am able to really kind of figure out where I am.  While I first learned this in regards to my personal life, I have been able to find a means to have it transcend into my professional life (although the two lives are quickly and rightly becoming one).  Writing this blog has given me the discipline, reflection, and collaboration that I sought.  I have been able to make connections between media and sources, inserting links to artists and writers, photos taken by my students, myself, and others, and referencing experiences little and huge. The interdisciplinary nature of the Internet and the blogosphere has been essential to my growth in these ideas.  And I have a feeling this whole process hasn’t hurt my writing skills either – something I was extremely self-conscious about entering a doctoral program.

The comments I bullied my friends and coworkers into making have been an added incentive and opportunity for growth.  I think that we often feel insulated, even among those who we know feel similar to.  Maybe we are all getting too comfortable writing to a computer than talking to each other.  Or maybe we just spend our days together in too much of the thick of it to step outside of the situations and think, feel and want what we know is there.  Either way, I hope that the collaboration of comments continues and grows and furthers this wonderful journey even more.

the maxine plan

Next semester I will begin an independent study on Maxine Greene.  If you have ever read any other part of this blog, you might have noticed that I am a little obsessed with her.  Her Text and Margins started my doctoral pursuit, and she has continued as a major and ever-present thread in my interest and work already.  In the last essay that I read, The Avant Garde in the Classroom, I feel like I have found a focusing theme for my exploraiton of her work.  The essay is full of ideas, some of which I addressed in my previous post Eisner and Greene, but central to her paper is the idea that teaching the humanities is a means of bringing students into a situation that allows them to create themselves.  This concept of meaning-making is exactly that which I hold truest to my goal of teaching and learning, and she puts it most eloquently in this writing.  This pursuit of form and sense making is central to what can be learned through the arts.

Greene has melded my interests in what we can learn from the past and present in terms of what who we are and want to become.  She ends the paper with these statments.  I want to further explore her work – and in turn my own – in regards to this idea.

The polarization we have spoken of will continue to advance; divisions will deepen; rebellion and repression will increase.  In the humanities classroom we can serve the human cause if we are willing to work with students as human beings, diverse and restless exemplars of the avant-garde.  Confronting past and present in their changing relationships, we can still free individuals to go in search of form.

While I take this as my guide as I delve deeper into Greene’s work, I also think that this could be very well the central idea of my dissertation work.  In the statement lies the leading ideas I want to further explore: the humanity and diversity of working with students, the connection that contemporary and non-traditional (outsider, intuit, and folk) art offers towards better understanding human experiences, and the role of the teacher as a collaborator in meaning-making that assists students in better becoming themselves.