Critical Articulations of Hope from the Margins of Arts Education

International Perspectives and Practices

Eeva Anttila, Anniina Suominen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815362838
• eBook ISBN: 9781351111171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Critical Articulations of Hope from the Margins of Arts Education presents perspectives on arts education from marginalized contexts and communities around the world. The contributors of this collection are educators, researchers, and artists who have devoted their research and practice to exploring how to utilize arts education to work toward justice, equity, sustainability, and hope when communities or groups of people are faced with most challenging and arduous situations.

This book depicts hardships and struggles, including forced migration; institutionalized discrimination; economic, ecological and cultural oppression; hatred; prejudice and violence. However, it also celebrates the strength of individuals and communities who strive to make a difference and work towards fair and just cultures and communities. The book proposes that participation in the arts is a basic human right and that diverse cultures and the arts are an integral aspect of healthy lives and societies. Building on long traditions of arts education for social justice, critical pedagogy, and the pedagogy of hope, it facilitates international dialogue and explores how the theory and practice for arts education can be furthered by including insights emerging from practices evolving as sensitive to marginal conditions.

Critical Articulations of Hope from the Margins of Arts Education will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students of the arts, arts education, and education. It will also appeal to arts educators, community artists, sociologists, cultural workers and teacher training faculty and in service-learning and other pedagogy-related courses.

Chapter 1

Dialogical musical spaces

Raising youth critical consciousness in equalizing intergroup settings

Shoshana Gottesman

There isn’t and there won’t be And what there was will give up Behind a screen We lived and we died There isn’t and there won’t be What we thought And our secret thoughts As butterflies carried with the wind	אוהבים ליום אחד בוכים ליום אחד מתים ליום אחד אל תשאל מה סופינו	ما في ولا راح يكون كمان والي كان راح يستسلم من ورا الستار عشنا ومتنا
We live for one day Love for one day Cry for one day Die for one day	הגענו וראינו עומד ומחכה	ما في ولا راح يكون كمان شو احنا فكرنا وافكارنا المكبوتة مثل فراشات بالهوا عشنا ليوم واحد
Don’t ask what’s our end We got there and saw Standing there waiting Don’t ask what’s our end Raise your eyes he’s in front of you Standing and waiting	אל תשאלי מה סופינו תרימי את עיניך הוא מולך עומד ומחכה	حبينا ليوم واحد بكينا ليوم واحد متنا ليوم واحد ما تسأل شو نتهايتنا وصلنا وشفنا واقف بستنا ما تسألي شو نهايتنا ارفعي عيونك هو قبالك واقف بستنا

“One Day–Yom Waha–Yom Achad” Lyrics written by Reut Phillips; Musical composition by Heartbeat ensemble 2016–2017 Roni N., Issa Z., Perry S., Alaa J., Adan NH, Momo A., and Reut P. Translation of lyrics by Issa Zaatry. (All Rights Reserved. © 2017 Heartbeat, Inc.)

I start this chapter with the song lyrics above, the co-creation of young Israeli and Palestinian youth musicians authoring and re-authoring their realities, separately and together, musically and socially, metaphorically and literally, beyond the dualities and towards the “in-between” of what could be. What can be questioned, discovered, uncovered, and learned through these lyrics? How are these lyrics an interpretation of and how do they relate to the lives of individual Israeli and Palestinian youth musicians, each as an individual and as a part of various religious groups and ethnicities exposed to particular narratives, histories, routine realities, and claimed truths? At our spring retreat in April 2017 at Neve Shalom–Wahat al-Salam, or “Oasis of Peace”–I listen to their song add life to the boomy room we are in, which is technically a bomb shelter. At first, I hear the steady beat of the darbuka capturing a waltz of contradictions as lilting singing enters almost like echoes, and then all of a sudden after a moment of silence, euphoric harmonies and driving drum set beat with backup guitars and keyboard transform the entire atmosphere. I feel myself grooving to the music, moved that the ensemble has reached this important place in their educational process as individuals and as a cohesive group. This milestone withstood episodes of intense violence, routine violence, societal pressure, life changes, difficult dialogues, and even administrative flaws which practically tore the ensemble apart. The educational process we developed over the previous years in the nonprofit Heartbeat (heartbeat.fm/), a youth music education-encounter dialogue organization based in Palestine-Israel, was strong enough to bring the members of the ensemble to this point of commitment and responsibility to each other. And the love present was genuine, not based upon simple philosophies, but rather through understanding the complexities present, and the need for questioning and critical thinking as a lens through which to look at the world.

Upon reflecting on their song in a dialogue session, some in the ensemble interpret that hope exists – that one day things will change. Others understand the song speaking to remorse and suspicion because of the lack of change, questioning whether change will ever arrive. The lyrics can be read both ways, like how Haifa is Israel and Haifa is Palestine or perhaps East Jerusalem is Palestine and West Jerusalem is Israel. The multiple interpretations of the song, which are also mirrored musically, can be viewed as a reflection of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself. The longer I am a practitioner in this field, I wonder daily as I work alongside Palestinian and Israeli youth musicians: How can we recognize each other’s aspirations and pain equally in the same place? How can we learn to question our histories and current realities in the same musical line? How can we struggle for existence, coexistence, and co-resistance in small and large ways of our choice? I have come to believe we can ground the rights of Palestinians and Israelis in the same educational space through a process of uncovering and revealing marginalized narratives, power dynamics, and the telling and witnessing of intergroup oppression complexities (Gottesman in discussion with Kela Sappir, 2017). Even as the conflict, occupation, and systemic violence continue to see another day, maybe we can continue by enabling a multiplicity of possibilities through self-reflexivity and the co-creation of realities, existences, and authoring with always further questions, challenges, and possibilities.

I always remind myself that this story is not merely mine, but rather it belongs to my students as they traverse the barren roads in search of oases of shared living. They continually remind me and teach me of young people’s resilience and power to transform conflict. They persist, even amidst a conflict that is painful, scary, and arduous, by looking into the mirror at their own narratives, collective memories, and understandings. As a woman, a musician, and an educator-activist, I am in solidarity with them throughout their struggles to be recognized and equal in a society where there is not only “the gray,” but rather there is the white, the black, and the gray all present, consistently influencing each other in various ways. In one land with two peoples, Israeliness, Palestinianess, and bi-nationality are all present, when not suppressed by the intergroup oppression complex to uphold the status quo of either/or. Recently, upon reflecting with my colleague about our experiences in this work, we decided the term “intergroup oppression complex” was necessary in our field, influenced by Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) term “intersectionality.” This term is needed due to the intermingling web of factors of occupation, systemic injustice, minority marginalization, patriarchy, and colonialism created by and as a repercussion of the conflict, enabling the conflict to continue in complex ways affecting race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and religious affiliations circuitously. Not to mention, contextualization within education is paramount. Fostering new frameworks, patterns, and structures developed for and about coexistence, co-resistance, peacebuilding, equality, justice, and human rights is not a short-term exercise. Building trust while re-learning what we think we already know are both delicate processes “at the heart of the educational mission” (Palmer, 2010, p. 50), so we can grow to read our world to then change our world (Greene, 1995). The call for dialogical musical spaces for Israeli and Palestinian co-creation to generate and regenerate witnessing and telling of experiences of intergroup oppression can begin to put cracks in the wall, metaphorically, figuratively, and perhaps literally, of erasure, shame, fear, and trauma (Berlak, 2004).

Sometimes I think I am not prepared to do this work; sometimes I think maybe I am not supposed to do this at all. After all, am I not also part of the system? This is in the back of mind all the time – submission of another kind that must also be disrupted. If the conflict and occupation relentlessly force my students and me into submission through its cyclical routine, domination, and impossibility as it oppresses both Palestinians and Israelis in differing ways, then we must be disruptive with equal force. Perhaps this is simply nonviolence, which can also be described as positive force. Perhaps in transformational educational spaces of the arts, this is where we can awaken to see and hear our true selves, discovering our power to overcome and co-create beyond what is, as Arabs and Jews, Palestinians and Israelis and then maybe as a binational society. As my teacher, educational philosopher Maxine Greene taught me, we must never settle with what is. In her words, “If the uniqueness of the artistic-aesthetic can be reaffirmed, if we can consider futuring as we combat immersion, old either/ors may disappear. We may make possible a pluralism of visions, a multiplicity of realities. We may enable those we teach to rebel” (Greene, 1977, p. 295).

Prelude: Positionality – who am I?

My journey into this field comes from a personal place connected to my own history, background, and upbringing. Born in Houston, Texas thanks to my mother’s career as a violist in the Houston Symphony, I started playing the violin from the age of six years old, and was socialized into a reality that was partly American–partly Other, as a Jew surrounded by the stories of my Holocaust survivor grandparents and my father born near Haifa in 1956. I was a young activist in high school, and yet because of my socialization about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I was also a young person who could have benefited greatly from an encounter dialogue program. There was so much I simply did not know or I had been told only parts of the story while other parts had been neglected. Overall, there were many hushed realities that felt too risky to explore out of fear of being expelled from my community, and the domination of collective memory and sometimes everyday realities.

In the prior five years before starting to work with Heartbeat, I devoted myself to a rigorous re-education about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the entire Middle East from religions and cultures to histories and politics. My ability to re-educate myself was also enabled by those who I became close with during that period of time, often individuals who were radically different than anybody I had met before or had been “prevented” from meeting, who were also friends, neighbors, musicians, and strangers, born in the Middle East or of Middle Eastern origin, and scholars in Middle Eastern history and popular culture. In the process of doing so, in some cases I upended relationships, became suspect, and was pressured by my own family and community to “return” to who I was before.

I am not painting this picture to look heroic, but rather this background is important to share in the beginning as the personal is political and the political is personal (Hanisch, 1969; Lorde, 2012). It is crucial to make a point of positionality, recognizing that power dynamics and marginalization exist in different ways within communities, and how oppression plays out in similar and different ways in and between communities (Kumashiro, 2000). Choosing to place myself as the writer is to bring attention to the concept of positionality through which my writing flows and my background can be understood. Through this lens we can also understand further how to analyze my examinations and thoughts, which originate from years working in practice with grassroots Israeli-Palestinian youth programs and engaging with educational philosophies and theories. From here we can understand what is present, and also at the same time, understand what also exists through simply not being present. By examining myself through positionality, we can understand my place of privilege to write this chapter, from the writing itself to having the ability to continue in this field. As Hess (2017) writes, “a paradox emerges,” (p. 180), when somebody such as myself is immersed in anti-racist work, since I have already been afforded the privileges by society to share controversial ideas, contrary to an individual with fewer privileges doing anti-racist work. We must take this paradox into account within this chapter and field of work.

Ultimately, I do not think this work is complete without direct Palestinian co-authorship, and in this respect, this chapter is undoubtedly lacking and cannot fill this space. Therefore, at the very least it is my responsibility to bring to light this reality and provide fertile ground in which to be questioned and challenged. By doing so, I choose to open a dialogical conversation on the topics discussed, which is also a crucial aspect to working in this field. I welcome critical examinations of my reflections, and appreciate in advance the devotion present. Finally, I am also merely connecting the dots of already great and relevant research from pedagogues Paulo Freire (2000) and David Hansen (2008) to Randall Allsup (2016) and Lalitha Vasudevan (2013) to Maxine Greene and bell hooks (1994), among others. My attempt is to make connections, while adding deeper processing from earlier works, which were influenced by the wonderful teams of Israeli and Palestinian, Jewish and Arab colleagues and musicians I have had the honor to work with. Still I wonder if I am saying anything new here? At which point does inquiry become new or outlooks renew? Let’s start connecting the dots from every beat to every harmony to every dissonance to every sounding of existence.

First notes: Musical space of “becoming” with and through a liberatory pedagogy

In the multidisciplinary field of peacebuilding and human rights education, music education, and youth agency, youth programs throughout the world are using music or even musicking (Small, 1999) in various ways to challenge violence, “negative peace” (Galtung, 1967, p. 12), systemic injustice, cultural violence (Galtung, 1990), and protracted conflict. Music education scholar Christopher Small defines musicking as re-understanding the word, music, altering it to be understood as a verb, as in to music (hence the “king” at the end). In this way, musicking “brings into existence among those present a set of relationships” (p. 13), where we “do not just learn about those relationships, but we actually experience them in all their wonderful complexity” (Small, 1999, pp. 13–14, author’s emphasis). Hence, all who are present bear a responsibility to each other. And yet I am left to wonder, is that all there is? The concept of musicking on its own is certainly appealing, but is it enough to fill the gaps in human dignity, equality, fairness, and freedom as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict recreates itself daily?

I have engaged with programs based upon such ideas, where musicking in itself could be enough, a means and an end. In a place of protracted conflict (and all locations with systemic injustice), we must look at the process of what is being uncovered and how learning is happening in order to begin to question whether what is created is a liberatory space, as radical feminist and educator bell hooks (1994) speaks of. This includes not further internalizing conflict and oppression. If musicking is used as a form of liberatory pedagogy, then Israeli and Palestinian youth musicians must be able to embrace vulnerability through a dialogical process of locating and fostering reflections of themselves within the music they make, through storytelling, self-expression, emotional processing and healing, and within their personal realities and futures. Authentic co-creation requires vulnerability, truly being seen and heard, so that issues of fear, trauma, witnessing, erasure and mourning the multiple ways the conflict is oppressive, can be addressed and challenged by discovering our own mechanisms of renewal and responsibility in the present and for the future. Expanding of space, musically and socially, for Israeli and Palestinian youth musicians to “become” and continually rediscover their voices, separately and together, is needed. As music education philosopher Randall Allsup (2016) proclaims, “we are more than makers of music; we are made by the music we make” (p. 11).

While working for more than six years in the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Reflective readers
• Introduction
• 1. Dialogical musical spaces: Raising youth critical consciousness in equalizing intergroup settings
• 2. Documentary theatre as a platform for hope and social justice
• 3. Sustaining dance education in exile: Contemporary perspectives of dance teaching and learning inside and outside of Syria
• 4. The embodiment of hope: A dialogue on dance and displaced children
• 5. Shifting tides: Re-searching values for critical Pacific dance pedagogy
• 6. Accessibility, mutual learning, and new pedadogical approaches: Developing a professional theatre school in Mato Grosso, Brazil
• 7. Teacher preparation during an epidemic of mass incarceration: The challenge and hope of arts and education
• 8. Building mutual respect and trust through co-dependency, deep collaboration, and co-teaching art
• 9. Experiencing Palestine through performing arts exchanges
• 10. CASA San Miguel: Art as the practice of hope in a local community
• 11. Hope emerging
• Index