The Art and Craft of Literacy Pedagogy

Profiling Community Arts Zone

Jennifer Rowsell

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367583804
• eBook ISBN: 9780429754296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In tracing community, and how art and craft can be harnessed to express and manifest communities, this book raises fundamental questions and issues about the nature of literacy in everyday lives. Threaded throughout the contributions is an abiding belief in the expansive and flexible nature of literacy, which might one moment involve photography; in the next, drama; and in the next, invite song coupled with movement. Something happens to literacy when it is seen through multiple modalities of meaning and communication: it moves from a thing to a thought and a feeling. Pedagogically, the book offers readers a carousel of places and people to witness literacy with, from young children all the way to grandparents. This opens up a sense of geography and age, proving that literacy really does reside in the centre and corners of our lives. With nine chapters by scholars in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, all researching under the umbrella of the same research study, the collection provides a unique perspective on human and aesthetic communication and shows differences between social groups.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Pedagogies: An International Journal.

Expressing community through freedom market and visual connections

Joanne Larson, Courtney Hanny, Joyce Duckles, Hoang Pham, Robert Moses and George Moses

ABSTRACT

Building on a long-term university/community research partnership, this article examines how different ways of conceptualizing, interpreting, and producing murals impacted how an urban community saw itself. Using a participatory action research design, university researchers worked alongside community researchers to ethnographically document the transformation. Findings indicate that the mural project constructed pathways for building relationships and community in ways that made neighborhood transformation possible. The mural project embodied this transformative goal by providing a space where people gathered with shared attention to talk and to envision how their lives and their community could be different.

Introduction

Community .... It is an intimate, insider term for the inner city, working class people often apply to themselves and those in their circle of solidarity. (Flower, 2008, p. 22)

How do urban communities transform themselves? Who decides what counts as transformation? What systems of knowledge or modes of expression are employed and recognized in initiating and evaluating transformation? These social, historical, political, and epistemological questions became central to the work of community and university activists and researchers working together to improve social and economic futures in one neighborhood. Residents of the Hollywood¹ neighborhood of Rochester grew tired of what they saw as a pattern of “outsiders” coming into their community to “rescue” them. As they expressed it, wave after wave of well-intentioned politicians or university researchers had come to this area of Rochester with a pet program designed to remediate problems identified as needing to be addressed. After a certain amount of time, the project or grant would end without much evidence of change. Anyfindings or results the research may have generated were not shared with the community, and the neighborhood would be left wondering what was learned, if anything. As a leading community development organization,² Northeast Area Development (NEAD) decided to change this dynamic and develop community-driven initiatives using community assets to do the work of transformation themselves. To define community, we, as a collaborative team of university and community researchers, draw upon one resident’s comment that, “Community, people have common cultural, living, existence, coexistence” (Interview, January 2015). One community initiative the team began focusing on was the challenge of urban food deserts (Pothukuchi, 2005). Food deserts are geographies common in high-poverty urban areas marked by the absence of access to fresh food within a mile of homes. The Hollywood neighborhood has been identified as such an area. To address this lack of access, NEAD purchased a corner store across the street from their main offices with the explicit goal of transforming the store from a transactional space to a transformative space as part of its mission of economic development, improving education, and improving the quality of life in this neighborhood. This shift toward transformation focused on moving away from simple economic exchange (e.g. store purchases) to relationship building, which emphasized improving how residents viewed their relationship to the community and their role in changing it. Using data from a collaborative ethnography of this effort, now in its sixth year, this article focuses on the residents of this neighborhood, customers who patronize the Freedom Market, the processes of commissioning and creating murals, and the dynamics involved in co-researching these practices. The mural project was sponsored by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant under the name Community Arts Zone. Building on the literature about how arts integration impacts community, the research team partnered with this international research group to bring arts and community into dialogic encounters toward new social futures by way of a public art project.

As mentioned briefly above, the Freedom Market started as a community development project intended to address the problem of urban food deserts by transforming a typical urban corner store into a cornerstone of community health and education, a space where relationships were to be built with the goal of transforming how the community viewed itself. A long-term participatory action research (PAR) project was developed, which included these community activists, university professors, graduate students, and, later, local mural artists. The initial object of inquiry for the larger project was on health and nutrition practices, but through a holistic and dialogic approach to data collection and analysis, broad conceptual categories surfaced encompassing a range of emergent and contested ways of knowing. The research team learned that this project was about much more than food once we began the collaborative process of data analysis. It seemed reasonable to the research team to focus on food in a food desert and given that the project began by examining a corner store. However, our collaborative data analysis processes revealed, more importantly, that interactions around food and in the Market were spaces for relationship building. The mural project was an extension of the focus on relationship building as artists, residents, and the research team conceived and installed several murals. It has always been a goal of NEAD to build relationships in each of their initiatives. The mural project embodied this goal by providing a space where people gathered with shared attention to talk and to envision how their lives and their community could be different.

Researching ways of knowing in a PAR context should take account of the institutional discourses or knowledge regimes (Blommaert, 2013) that set the parameters for what constitutes knowledge and how is it valued and recognized. In other words, challenging the parameters set by the academic institutions needs to be part of the project (Nelson, London, & Strobel, 2015). As Flower (2008) recognizes, “‘community’ stands in sharp relief to the ‘university’ arriving with its vanload of white, middle-class, educated outsiders, short on savvy, long on good intentions, and comfortably invested in their own set of elite, academic, literate practices” (p. 23). This article presents a close look at the ways in which three discourses (academic, community activist, and artistic) grappled with, and were drawn upon, within the (co)construction of a shared conceptualization of the murals. “Artistic media,” as Percy-Smith and Carney (2010) point out, “are particularly relevant to critical reflexivity because of the multiple interpretations and different ways of seeing that are engendered through the representation or transformation of reality that takes place in the creative process” (Percy-Smith & Carney, 2010, p. 26). This challenge to ways of seeing (interpretation) and to whose voice/knowledge counts (epistemology) came to bear on the development of the murals, their reception, and our research on these processes.

Context for transformation

NEAD is in the Hollywood neighborhood of Rochester which has approximately 6000 residents with area challenges associated with concentrated poverty. NEAD is founded on the seven principles of nguzo saba³ – unity, self-determination, work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith – which guide all the work that they do in this community, and played a key role in collaborative data analysis and the construction of the model of interdependence described below. Following the principle of cooperative economics, NEAD has been working to pull resources that have left the community back in. While the Market project is superficially about food, the work NEAD is doing has always been about economics and relationship building. In addition to the Market, NEAD runs a Children’s Defense Fund Freedom School,⁴ a pizza parlor, housing development programs, partnerships with local schools on parent engagement, and job development efforts. Recently, it is collaborating with a local university/school educational partnership to reengage students who have dropped out of high school. That program is housed in the Freedom School and prepares students to take the Test for Adult Basic Education.

The work involved in producing the murals we discuss in this article is synonymous with the work NEAD does, specifically the work in the Market. The murals are strategically placed on the outer walls of the Market and main offices across the street. The road between them is a major thoroughfare across town which is used by residents and nonresidents. This is also predominantly a walking neighborhood, with only 40% of residents owning cars. Anyone driving or walking by can see that something transformative is happening and that someone is doing it. As we discuss below, we found that the murals are the embodiment of the transformation of the community and have become part of the walking tour NEAD gives to people interested in their work. In important ways, the murals are pictures of the transformative work of NEAD across all the nodes in our interdependence model.

It was in this context that the idea for murals on the store and the main office emerged during one of our research team meetings. Given that there were two significantly large empty walls at both the Market and the NEAD main office, we imagined together that these spaces could have murals represent the work we do in this community. The research team conceived of the murals as standing for the interaction of word and image. The first mural would be rooted in the mission of nguzo saba with the explicit placing of words on stones along the path to freedom. The mission in the second mural would be seen through the sankofa⁵ bird which symbolizes reaching back into history to frame the future. What emerged was a set of murals that would be connected through visual messages and intentionally placed locations to represent cultural history, activism, and commitments to the principles of nguzo zaba that are deeply rooted in African-American culture in this neighborhood.

Theoretical framework

To make sense of these various interests and concerns that attended the mural component of Freedom Market project, including the academic, community, and artistic discursive traditions, as well as the historical, political, and epistemological concerns that attend any questions of representation, we drew from a range of related theoretical lenses. Theses lenses reflect a dialogical approach to knowledge and identity construction; the recognition that a multimodal (specifically here, the visual) approach to social construction can helpfully dismantle the tendency to rely on strictly textual forms of meaning-making (what might be seen as the dominant modality of the university); and the post-structuralist notion of the rhizomatic nature of knowledge (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), which eschews a linear or predictable trajectory in favor of a distributed, unpredictable, and generative dissemination of power. A close consideration of how knowledge and meaning were constructed and understood in settings such as the Freedom Market and in the production of the murals required thinking about what, precisely, community identity – with its complex, historical past and positive, possible futures – means to its members, and how that meaning is represented to members and to others. The three discourses mentioned above – academic, community, and artistic – converged in this dialogical space.

The professors and graduate students who comprise the academic portion of the research team work with the traditions of critical and emancipatory pedagogies that see dialogic interactions (shared spaces in which to speak publicly, deliberate, or voice dissent) as central for bridging or illuminating cultural or ideological divides between variously positioned subjects, hence fostering better understanding and more just ways of being together in communities. The collaborative mural project was particularly illustrative of this dynamic. Shifting away from an emphasis on textuality and individual agency (what might be seen as an academic discourse) toward a more dialogical and multimodal approach to knowledge production opens a way for better understanding the ways that community identity was negotiated in terms of both the development and reception of the mural. As Percy-Smith and Carney (2010) point out, “Visual media facilitate ‘knowing’ holistically and viscerally without losing the richness and complexity of the experience” (p. 25). Hence the value of murals as testimony to the lived experiences of the community could be foregrounded – as opposed to a more academic analysis of the process or product. Participatory research that employs modalities beyond the strictly textual/linguistic can facilitate participants’ practices effort to “claim their collective right to knowledges that are meaningful to their lives” (Licona & Russell, 2013, p. 2). The mural project, both in its collaborative development and its social reception, lent authenticity to representation and dialogical meaning-making across spaces and contexts.

In dialogical approaches to knowledge production and representation, knowledge and meaning are regarded as co-constructed in interactional spaces (i.e. community/ university research teams) by variously positioned interlocutors. This undergirding sensibility, whether it is termed “intersubjectivity,” “intertextuality,” or “dialogicality” is where cognition happens through interaction. Thinking and concept-building, then, are seen as participatory endeavors (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Nasir & Hand, 2006; Rogoff & Lave, 1984). But participatory endeavors do not equate to shared meanings, and the assumptions that participants are on the same page can work against collaborative efforts (Hanny & O’Connor, 2013; Larson, Webster, & Hopper, 2011). In short, the endeavor to design and produce public murals so that they would serve as an educational tool of sorts, reflecting a complex past and socially conscious future, reflecting local experience and transcultural, diasporadic values, was not only a matter of aesthetics, but a matter of ethics and epistemologies. Licona and Russell (2013) point out that “community literacies” mean “not only the lived, relational, and situated knowledges that circulate in and across communities, but also the ways in which those knowledges are produced and communicated” (p. 1). As Marková (2003) describes such interactional p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Passing through: reflecting on the journey through community arts zone
• 1 Expressing community through freedom market and visual connections
• 2 The fluid infusion of musical culture: embodied experiences in a grade one classroom
• 3 Seven chilis: making visible the complexities in leveraging cultural repertories of practice in a designed teaching and learning environment
• 4 In amongst the glitter and the squashed blueberries: crafting a collaborative lens for children's literacy pedagogy in a community setting
• 5 Moving parts in imagined spaces: community arts zone's movement project
• 6 Embracing the unknown in community arts zone visual arts
• 7 Imperfect/I'm perfect: bodies/embodiment in post-secondary and elementary settings
• 8 Playlinks: a theatre-for-young audiences artist-in-the-classroom project
• Index