“The Scream”: Using the Visual Critical Pedagogy of Subversive Indigenous Art in the Elementary Classroom to Discomfort the Comforted and Activate the Empathic, Ethical, and Relational Dimensions of Reconciliation

Authors

  • Victor Brar university of British Columbia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.20355/jcie29581

Abstract

This paper uncovers my journey as K-12 practitioner in British Columbia towards exploring the use of “subversive art” as a “visual critical pedagogy” (Gil-Glazier,2015; Naidus,2005; Peters, 2016; Zorilla & Tisdell, 2016) to advance my students and myself towards reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples in Canada.  I use the powerfully unsettling painting done by Cree artist, Kent Monkman, titled “The Scream”, as a springboard for this inquiry.  “The Scream” provides an Indigenous counternarrative to the colonial versions of residential school histories and has the potential to progress practitioners and students towards actionable reconciliation by activating their empathic and ethical consciousness.  I attempt in this essay to weave together a cluster of concepts, as I explore: (a) the nature and evolution of truth in BC’s elementary school curriculum (Andersen, 2017); (b) the historical establishment of the curriculum in a positivist modality (Gadamer, 2013; Greene, 1975; Marker 2004); (c) Greene’s (1995) argument that aesthetic education can help students and practitioners to engage meaningfully with difficult knowledge; (d) Greene’s (1977, 1995) philosophy of wide-awakeness, through which students and practitioners can activate the power of difficult knowledge; (e) Gadamer’s (2013) “fusion of horizons” as a means by which wide-awakeness can function in this context; (f) “subversive art” as a form of “visual critical pedagogy” (Gil-Glazer, 2015); (g) and the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire. I braid these concepts together using the scholarship of Indigenous scholar, Michael Marker (1951-2021) to provide the pedagogical rationale for my determination to establish the visual critical pedagogy of “subversive art” in my classroom.

 

Key Words

Subversive art, Visual critical pedagogy, Reconciliation, K-12 education, Practitioner inquiry

Downloads

Published

2023-12-24

Issue

Vol. 18 No. 2 (2023): Indigenous Historiographies, Place, and Memory in Decolonizing Educational Research, Policy, and Pedagogic Praxis: Special Issue in Honour and Memory of Professor Michael Marker (1951-2021)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright for this journal is vested with the author under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms: a. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. b. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process.