Reconfiguring a history of art and design curriculum in a South African university of technology: Becoming-with critical arts-based pedagogical encounters

Abstract

The South African #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall student struggles prised open spaces for critical arts-based pedagogies to disrupt art history, a discipline embodying Eurocentric cultural hegemony. While a growing body of literature explores the relationship between arts-based learning and socially just pedagogies in the global north, not enough scholarship has attended to how critical art-based pedagogical practices contribute to the doing of academia differently within South African higher education (SA HE) settings. Located in an Extended Curriculum Programme (ECP), my thesis explores how critical-arts based pedagogies can be used to reconfigure an art history curriculum. Using a diffractive methodological approach that generates differences within, that are perceived as affirmative rather than oppositional. The inquiry further explores how critical arts-based pedagogies might disrupt the canon of Western art history and build relationships of solidarity and trust in classroom encounters. Drawing on feminist new materialist, critical posthumanist perspectives, care ethics studies and postphilosophies scholarship, this thesis constitutes 5 peer reviewed scholarly articles that explore the novel contributions of critical-arts based pedagogies to socially just academic practices in SA HE in order to challenge coloniality. Premised on how distrust is endemic to SA HE, Chapter 1 provides the overarching ethical framework that guides my pedagogical approach to teaching art history. Bringing together Tronto’s feminist ethics of care, Ettinger’s carriance and Boler’s pedagogies of discomfort, the role that care practices play in building ethical relations across difference in the classroom is explored. Chapter 2 attends to how my artistic-research practice, that operates in the interstices of making and thinking, activates modes of inquiry in “the between’’ of words and images. Following an immanent speculative inquiry that unsettles the hegemony of language, these practices inform pedagogies that trouble logocentric, linear approaches associated with Cartesian thought. Chapter 3 further explores how critical arts-based pedagogies trouble issues of inclusion, exclusion and assimilation within the academy with the conviction that “decolonising the mind” hinges on disruptive knowledges that decentre Eurocentric cultural dominance. Structured around an ancient Greek vase painting lesson, the chapter positions students’ knowledges as central, by foregrounding how their embodied encounters with ancient artefacts manifest visual and written narratives that disrupt Eurocentrism. Chapter 4 is concerned with how educators and students might work affirmatively with difference(s), by diffracting the intra-actions between students, myself, artist Sethembile Msezane’s performance Chapungu, the day Rhodes Fell (2015) and the Winged Nike of Samothrace (190 BCE). This process prompted new imaginaries whilst working with ambivalent and painful pasts in ways that matter for art history teaching by troubling the canon without reinscribing it as normative. Chapter 5 examines how critical arts-based pedagogies might address haunted pasts by activating a speaking-with and drawing-with the ghosts of Sarah Baartman and the “Hottentot Venus” in the classroom. In so doing, a literal and figurative re-membering of the past is activated within the context of the present that has bearing on the future. In keeping with decolonial imperatives, the study concludes with the following overall findings: Critical arts-based pedagogies play an important role in critiquing issues of inclusion, exclusion and assimilation within contemporary academic contexts. These pedagogies also activate embodied modalities, materials and non-discursive modes of expression that simultaneously question what counts as knowledge and explore how knowledge is produced. Being processual and relational practices, critical arts-based pedagogies enable a disruption of student/educator and researcher/practitioner boundaries. Together with ghosts, we are able to reimagine different futures through our non-innocent entanglements with the haunted and haunting discipline of art history. In summary, the thesis argues that in foregrounding students’ “non-dominant” subjectivities, their artworkings disrupt hegemonic discourses and challenge the dominance of science-based approaches to educational research practice.