Creating in a time where there needs to be justice, or there are too many injustices. Using art as a form of communication is important for students to learn, especially within the topic line of social justices.
I personally find that social justice themes and topics within art are extremely powerful, meaningful, and an insight to a past or other time. It is crucial that our students understand current events happening in todays society and contemporary times. Many of my personal friends are also artists and we have noticed that we tend to base our pieces on social issues happening in todays contemporary times. For me it was a large impact to look at what was going on and how I personally could help the world. Through art we are communicating. Visually we paint and draw and sculpt and photograph to tell a particular story.
Within our created curriculum it is most important to focus on multicultural and social justice lessons because it teaches our students to be active citizens and to develop abilities that reflect and act on the world to make it a better place than we found it. But within the classroom as an educator it is import to realize to not pressure students into believing what you do. Art is but a vessel going from one place to another. They themselves have to arrive there on their own, not with you. Educators need to understand many topics of social justices and let students express what I meaningful to them.
“Consideration of social justice issues involves helping students consider ethical implications of their beliefs and actions”
Their own beliefs and actions are much different from ours as educators. But we need to make sure students are having meaningful and thoughtful engagements with the current issues and situations.
Creating Pieces that Have Meaning
When in school myself, it was extremely important that my teacher was supportive of my vision that I wanted to come to life. Creating meaning with social justices can be hard but I think that each student should have the oprounity to share their voice! (Making sure it is school appropriate) When working with social justices in art we are trying to intervene a system that it flawed. We want to draw attention to or about a certain subject area, this could be equality, mental illness, animal rights, child abuse, politics, LGBTQ+, special needs, these are all important topics that can be focused on. And there are plenty more as well!
It is most important that when creating projects that focus on having a social justice topic or if a student chooses to work independently with a social topic they need to interpret , recognize, appreciate and understand the information they have presented before you. It is important that they have a strong passion for what they are mentioning in their pieces, and they need to understand what they are saying, along with how to provide proof or how to back themselves up in a debate.
We can also adopt different pedagogies to help assist students understand or continue an explorations of dressing social issues within their artwork. Different approaches could include and are not limited to, exploring public areas that resemble the same themes that the student wants to represent within their piece. We can also look at our on role within our culture, and also how we and others react in being in a public area. We can use these opportunities to address certain impacts and then draw inspiration from them.
Creating pieces relating to social justices are great exercises to use with students, it gets them practice their fine art skills and making them realize that they are a valuable messenger of todays society. But creating isn't always the way to go. We can learn more about a social topic by looking at past asrtist and studying what they have created as well. It is important for students to be able to analyze as well as create. By analyzing and talking about past pieces we can see what had happened in the past and how the social injustice had changed.
Social justices need to be focused in the classroom. It helps to establish a focus on production of original work in response to social justice, and we can use analysis of others art works to see differently through the lens of social justice
Reference and further reading found below:
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3011&context=masters_theses
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