Abstract

How do the personal beliefs of a teacher impact the content and method of art teaching practices? This question initiated my reflection on my previous art teaching at Chicago Moms Art, located in Wheeling, IL. I was able to reimagine and reconstruct the pedagogy of art as a liberation method through self examination of my art practice and utilization of Freire’s pedagogical models. I recognized the oppressive phenomenon of deficit learning in my previous art teaching experience, and this recognition transformed my understanding of what art is. I was able to find the pedagogy of liberation that is enlightening and engaging through working with the students at Chicago Moms Art. The students of the Chicago Moms Art fit into a narrow marginalized population: middle-aged immigrant women who speak either limited or no English—a group with whom I share my own background. From an initial investigation of how Chicago Moms Art’s students can use their funds of knowledge to explore their past memories to reimagine their art practice, I designed a lesson plan that the students participated in over three weeks of classes. Further inspection of this question allowed me to examine the students’ reactions toward a new approach for teaching and learning. This study facilitates the importance of artmaking through asset-based pedagogy and the transformative impact it has on these students and their connected communities. The asset-based pedagogies offer a counternarrative to deficit ideology outcomes by valuing students’ insights, languages, and cultural practices (Flint & Jaggers, 2021). More importantly, this pedagogy allowed the students to explore their past memories and create their own understanding of the world around them. After the students and I pivoted our art practices to process-based experiences, beyond advancing technical skills, we were able to branch out into an exploratory future to find liberation through art making. With the power the students and I possess in our lived experience, we will continue to pursue and discover the ways our world works through questions with progress toward transformation. This is a journey to rediscover our untold stories and find our artistic paths in the midst of the United States.