Public Pedagogy of Upstander Art

In the first part of the Upstander investigation I learned what it looked like and felt like to empathize with individuals of a different culture and era. Linda Stein's "H2F2" chose to focus on the people left out of the history books because of their religion, their gender or sometimes even their ideals. The women that she wove into her tapestries, molded into her sculptures, and spoke about in her workshops inspired questions about teaching, biases and accommodations.

When I explored the amazing life of Ruth Gruber I had to really reflect on why individuals like her were left out of history books. Modern day curriculum is written and guided by a variety of individuals with differing philosophies. However, one has to wonder how all of these curriculum guides still seem to follow the same trend. I would like to think that as an art teacher and as a woman that I would be vigilant in teaching my students about both male and female artists. However, no matter how hard we try to be aware, the simple fact is that we still exist within a patriarchal society that devalues women. What do my students think when I teach them that women rule but then they step outside of the brick walls of our safe space into a world that pays women less, marries them off and persuades them that they are meant to be the vulnerable and merciful figures. One of the biggest things that I took away from this exploration is the knowledge that to change this trend I can't just simply teach in my standard "Introduce-connect-demonstrate-apply-produce" routine. I dance around what artists have done in their lives because I am worried about being "politically correct" or presenting information to my students that might shake their belief systems or make them reconsider their identity. For the first time in a long time, I had to ask myself why I teach this way even though I don't want to. I believe to truly be able to teach free of the patriarchal trend, we must begin to confront the injustice and the things that make ourselves and our students uncomfortable. If we don't allow our students a chance to reconsider reality then we are just producing another generation that is just like us. 

The theme of being welcomed was very confusing to me at first. It made sense in the macro sense of looking just solely at refugees and immigrants but in the grand scheme of things I didn't understand how it applied to art education. Then, I participated in the Judy Chicago Dialogue portal in the second part of the exploration. The thread asked, "Do institutions of education address the needs of those who reject the binaries of male/female? If not, why not?" to which I responded: 

"I do not think that our institutions address the needs of those that do not identify with their biologically defined gender. I think that this is explained in part by Michael Kimmel with Linda Stein when he describes how racism works. Kimmel talks about societies tendency to aggregate or disaggregate. This means we either identify a problem by aggregating and saying that it is “their” fault, putting one persons actions on the group as a whole. Or, we disaggregate and view the problem as being isolated to an individual part. As a society, because we have not accepted those that do not identify as male or female as a part of the larger whole, we will continue to see the needs of those people as individual issues that should be dealt with on a lower, flexible, and less noticeable level..."

I bring these ideas together because they both are speaking to an injustice to a part of our society. We refuse to accept or welcome certain people as a part of the whole. As a teacher I always worry about how we are treating African American student or student with special needs, but what about the students whose difference is not physical? What about the student who is keeps their true identity hidden because they don't feel safe?

Which brings me to my last point. Nan Goldin is my hero because she confronted domestic, spousal abuse by photographing and sharing it with the public. She did this in spite of knowing that some people may become upset, that some people may disapprove and some people might even call it selfish.  She chose not to hide her partner's actions and confronted her bully. In one simple snap of the shutter she created an image that asked the public if they were going to just stand in the museum and be bystanders or if they were going to be brave upstanders. I think that these exercises mostly taught me that education needs to learn how to confront the uncomfortable. We need to search for the similarities instead of the differences. We must teach each other how to stand up for ourselves and each other. We need to acknowledge the "us" instead of "them" and the "we" instead of the "I".