Page 16 - Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century

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Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching and Learning 2021
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Homeless homes and photovoice
BA Visual Art honours
As part of the BA Visual Art honours programme, students participate in annual community engagement interventions. The eight-week theory module presents participatory action research (PAR) and visual research methodologies for students to learn and apply participatory and ethical approaches in practice. In previous years, this has involved field visits to rural communities to conduct visual research, paint murals or contribute meaningfully to community objectives, such as HIV and gender-based violence campaigns. The previous intervention was an inter-faculty engagement with the community of Lothlekhane to co- design a community centre with the village elders using indigenous knowledge systems (see Berman and Kembo 2022). In 2021, due to Covid-19, group interventions were limited and students had the option to choose a project that would be suitable to conduct within the Covid-19 restrictions.
In 2021, Carlo Gibson, a successful local fashion
designer from the label ‘Strangelove’, chose to return to postgraduate study and joined the BA Visual Arts honours class. He presented a project called MAKEGOOD that he and a collaborator, Toni Rothbart, established during the 2020 Covid-19 hard lockdown. Gibson designed a ‘homeless- home’, a jacket-sleeping bag for the homeless. The students decided to collaborate with their new classmate and assist in a PAR exercise, with collaboration as a key feature. Participatory action research holds the position that research is done with people and not for people (Reason
& Bradbury 2008). The approach of PAR holds that people in power who have resources should not determine what
is good for members of the community without fair and equitable consultation or collaboration. The brief for students was to find methods and approaches that extend beyond a charitable initiative of ‘giving out’. The students were asked to find out from community members (in this case, to connect with their contacts with homeless people living on the street) what they wanted and how they saw change. Participants were given the tools to tell their own story, and the role of the students was to learn, gain insight, support and document the process.
see the leadership of artists as active citizens who employ participatory values in their work as co-creators with communities.
At the end of both of these projects, all the students participated in a self-evaluation exercise, as well as a group evaluation, which documented the key outcomes. Each student wrote an essay, produced videos and used social media to document and publicise the materials. The manuals represent a repository of teaching and learning research materials (see the links in the appendix). The students also created an online archive of teaching materials, such as lesson plans and videos. This provides a toolkit of psycho- social support strategies that can be accessed as a blended- learning platform for the art therapy programme in future years.
These quotes from students and facilitators about the project reflect the enormous value that was generated by this project:
How wonderful that this project can provide medicine to the soul, especially to those who need it the most.”
It’s so fulfilling to develop ways of repurposing and recycling everyday items into new objects that hold meaning and therapeutic value while enabling a sense of connection and we make art to heal, express and speak our minds and it is how we tell our stories.”
The best ideas come out of a bit of hardship and a great deal of teamwork and our hope is that you’ll not only find simple and effective ways to express yourself creatively, but that you will experience the power in doing so.”
The comments speak to the value of engaged learning that is reciprocal and empowering and not simply a charitable approach that is sometimes a critique of university-led service-learning.
Project