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A diffractive analysis of a grade 10 art project conducted at the Tygerberg Art Centre situated in Parow, Cape Town
Summary
This South African study analyzed a grade 10 art project using diffractive methodology — a posthumanist approach — to explore student engagement with environmental crisis themes. It examines how arts education can help young people grapple with large-scale environmental threats including plastic pollution.
Despite indisputable proof that humanity's attitudes and actions towards the earth pose alarming threats to both the earth's life-supporting systems and humanity's future as a species, we generally seem to exhibit little evidence of any real fear of the doom that might be awaiting us.Traditionally these concerns fall within the parameters of environmental education.However, according to some theorists, current environmental education modules are failing to foster any meaningful engagement with the vast, complex, interrelated and intertwined problems facing the contemporary world.I am of the opinion that an alternative route to this end could be explored in art and art education, due to the fact that certain aspects thereof allow for open-ended exploration that may create spaces for transdisciplinary investigations.My recent introduction to posthumanist, new materialist and affective theories opened up the possibility of interesting perspectives on issues related to our being (and doing) in the world, as they encompass notions of our dynamically shifting bodily enmeshment with the material world and our responsibility to be accountable from where we are in our situated position.They provided me with the theoretical tools with which these issues could be explored as interrelated entities in an integrated whole.The research entailed an in depth, post-qualitative analysis of an art project that had been conducted at the Tygerberg Art Centre from April 2016 to June 2016.Diffraction was used as analytical tool to establish whether useful insights, which could fruitfully inform the development of art projects that critically examine how we as humans live in relation to the earth's systems and other life forms, might be revealed.The main aim of the study was therefore to explore the role of art education as medium in facilitating critical awareness in learners of the relation of humans to all non-human others on earth.Diffraction was chosen as analytical tool for its potential to elucidate insights that might not have come to the fore if other methods were used.The study indicated that before learners will truly be concerned about the destruction of the earth, they first need to understand the materiality of their own bodies, and the latter's intra-active coconstitution with all other matter.Yet, theorists maintain that education curricula still mostly ignore the body as site of learning.These curricula are entrenched in humanism's dualistic thinking patterns with an inclination towards established, predetermined answers and outcomes to problematic questions, which foreclose the discovery of new possibilities.
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