The Arts to Encourage Multiple Perspectives and Promote Social Justice.

Abstract

This paper presents the use of the arts and aesthetic education in a graduate literacy course for inservice and pre-service teachers followed by a description of how one graduate student implemented her learned theory in the high school classroom in which she taught. The core theory of the paper follows the assumption that aesthetic education elicits the imagination, and thus encourages multiple ways of interpreting and learning text. As such, the article invites the readers to view imagination and aesthetic education as active steps in creating awareness toward empathy and promoting socially just classrooms and practices. In addition, this article describes the implementation of one graduate in-service teacher’s learned knowledge of aesthetic education into her own high school English classroom in an attempt to raise awareness for social justice. Please cite this article as: Pinhasi-Vittorio, L. (2013). The arts to encourage multiple perspectives and promote social justice. Journal of Language and Literacy Education [Online], 9(1), 54-72. Available at http://jolle.coe.uga.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/The-Arts-to-Encourage-Multiple-Perspectives.pdf. L. Pinhasi-Vittorio & S. Vernola / The Arts to Encourage Multiple Perspectives (2013) 55 The graduate literacy class was quiet, except for the usual excited whispers of new students. This was their first class of the semester, and most of the students had seen me only once or twice during advisement hours. The students sat around three large round tables, waiting for me to start the usual formal introduction of the course and of myself. I told them that I was going to sing the blues. My statement came as a shock, as the students’ eyes widened; they appeared to be perplexed, and a few students asked quietly, “Is this a literacy class?” Assuring the apparently confused students, I asked them to be patient with the process. I sang, with my untrained voice, 61 Highway by Mississippi Fred McDowell (1964), revisited by Guy Davis. As I was singing, I noticed smiling faces. Some students even moved their bodies to the sound of the words. Soon after, I played the actual song, this time with the words of the song distributed. “61 Highway” Well, that 61 Highway is the loneliest road that I know Yeah well that 61 Highway is the loneliest road that I know She run from New York City, run right by my baby’s door. (McDowell, 1964) [Three more stanzas were shared] I guided the students to describe the images that came to their minds; “What do you see?” I asked and then added, “What did you imagined as you heard the song?” I was curious to see how different or similar the images based on the song would be. Although all the graduate students heard the same lyrics and melody, many of them held different images in their mind. One student said that she pictured a woman stranded on a secluded highway; another shared that she saw an old black man sitting and playing the guitar; a different student envisioned a man waiting in a bus line on his way to visit his wife and children, while another student created an almost complete story about a heartbroken woman, who was traveling to find her love. Each listener had different associations with the melody depending on their own life experiences and knowledge, and thus each one imagined or created a different story in their minds. Some reacted in disbelief when they heard completely contradicting images than what they envisaged. Those reactions, in a sense, opened the conversation about the importance of accepting multiple perspectives, and we started to talk about the role of imagination and empathy in opening the awareness toward social justice. Experiencing the blues was a good beginning to demonstrate that each person brought different vantage points to one story and, as result in one class, one story might become multiple stories. Using music as segue to the literary text was deliberate; I postulated that there would be more acceptances of the multiple interpretations and views with music, rather than with the standard text, particularly in a literacy classroom. The idea behind this activity was to gain awareness of different ways of understanding a text, while at the same time, to create new meaning as the graduate students listened to and read the lyrics. Throughout years of experience and systematic data collection, I have discovered that the optimal way to achieve a meaningful interaction with a text is through the use of art, the physical experience, and the making of art/poetry/music. After the students’ discussion of the blues, they appeared to be more relaxed; they were smiling and leaned back in their seats. I noticed they were ready for part two of the assignment: creating art. They were asked to write about themselves, in any form they felt comfortable (poem, prose, or paragraphs). After five minutes of writing, I asked the students to share their work with the L. Pinhasi-Vittorio & S. Vernola / The Arts to Encourage Multiple Perspectives (2013) 56 students sitting at their tables. The groups’ task then became to write a blues piece using what they had just written and read. This piece served as a tool to introduce all members of the group to the rest of the class. I was aware that this assignment could be challenging, as the students needed to rewrite their personal introductions and turn them into a collective introduction that would include, to some extent, parts of the stories of all members of the group. As they worked, some of the students were smiling and leaned their bodies forward while conversing and sharing their writings. Others sat back in their chairs and were looking at their writings, and others were looking at the ceiling. After fifteen minutes of group work, all the students were interacting with one another. Taking additional risk, I added the last piece of instruction: they were to turn their collaborative writing into a blues composition (which they were then asked to perform). Sounds of disbeliefs once again echoed in the room: “I don’t know how to sing?” and “I’m not artistic.” Regardless of their protest, within five minutes, all of the groups were engrossed in the creative process of re-writing their own pieces and intertwining them with those of their colleagues. While they were working on this added assignment, I observed them closely, and I noticed the change in their facial expressions; the students were smiling, giggling, and laughing at times. Their performances in and of themselves were fantastic, and as I looked at them, I reflected back on Maxine Greene’s vision (2001): “Imagine...teachers...immersing themselves in music, theater, visual art, and dance” (p. 3), and I could not help but to smile. This was the first assignment of the graduate course Literacy Based Literature, and my students were already able to “immerse themselves in music” as they were able to imagine and recreate jointly the introductory pieces about themselves. This was our first interaction with the idea of moving beyond the personal experience, beginning to see the perspectives of other individuals, and developing awareness of the importance of imagination as a key element in developing empathy in an equitable and just classroom.

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