Disparate Disciplines Help Form New Learning & Practices

(Published in Integrative Pathways, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Oct. 2017) for the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies,
​Edited by James Welsh IV, ISSN 1081 647X)

So much of what we focus on in interdisciplinary research is how content knowledge from seemingly disparate disciplines comes together to create new learning and practices. As an artist and university lecturer, it is about how I teach students as much as it is about the content. What I value as a visual artist is often times what I value in research and teaching such as interaction between people and reflection on lived experience. These integrative processes are concepts that cross knowledge boundaries and academic silos.

As an artist, I integrate my thoughts and research into my photographs, installations, and performance pieces. In my most recent work, the images are a culmination of my research into artistic self-censorship. While the images may not be blunt and obvious to the viewer, it is the practice of making the piece that brings further illumination to my own thinking, perpetuating a reflexive cycle of investigation. For the viewer, it is an act of negotiating their lived experiences with the image to make meaning.

Expanding academic research into a visual practice is one facet of my instruction in non-arts college classrooms. Philosopher Maxine Greene, at the root of her philosophies, believed that participation in creating and/or appreciating art in the classroom dramatically changes the quality of student involvement. She believed that arts and the, “role of the imagination is not to resolve, not to point the way, not to improve. It is to awaken, to disclose the ordinarily unseen, unheard, and unexpected”(p. 28). Art is a way of knowing, a way of learning, and a way of seeing.

In teaching Social Justice to undergraduates, I utilize in a visual strategy that is rooted in Participatory Action Research (PAR), a broad umbrella of research based on collaborative inquiry, called PhotoVoice. Like other forms of PAR, the research is interactive with specific communities. Traditionally PhotoVoice is a formal project where a group uses photography to bring attention to a particular issue or movement. Typically, PhotoVoice research uses real cameras. In a college classroom accessibility is paramount in a class with a limited window of time and resources and opt for students using the cameras in their phones. I combine the intensive in-class discussions of social theories with a large group PhotoVoice project. The students create a research topic as a class that they then must go out and explore in their communities using their phones as cameras to collect guided research. The images are discussed online in a class blog as well as in class as a way to approach new ways of thinking about specific theories and ideas. The students are asked to create dialogues about what they are learning in class, what they were attempting to capture in an image, and if this image is conveys some of those ideas. Much like standard research, sometimes the students come back with images that challenge their thesis, forcing them to reconsider their current position.

So often, first year students in undergrad, the majority of the students I teach, are trying to figure out what is expected of them in college.  They will memorize and regurgitate their facts and figures back onto the page without thinking about why they are being asked to study them in the first place. It is more challenging to think about what the ideas mean to you and then to show the class in a visual format with a verbal explanation referring to the texts. From there, the discussions burst into life. It is personal and the students begin to make connections to the ideas that help them create an informed opinion around a topic. I do not have the authorization to publish the students’ images. However, it isn’t the images that are most important here.  It is that in the end, the students were engaged in a critical dialogue with the issues we were studying beyond the classroom, into their daily lives, and with their communities.

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[1] Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, p. 28.
[1] In Nicholas Mirzoeff’s book How to See the World, seeing is more than what we do with our eyes.  It is an embodied experience of how we are situated in our environments, life experience, socioeconomic and political backgrounds, and communities. To see involves our entire being, all of our senses, and experiences. It is not a stretch to think that taking a visual learning approach to understanding theories and philosophies in the classroom could open up experiences for the students that could allow for a different understanding that is personal to their lived experiences.
Mirzoeff, N. (2016). How to see the world: an introduction to images, from self-portraits to selfies, maps to movies, and more. New York: Basic Books.