Fostering transformative learning requires a renewed vision for education and challenges students and educators to assess and redefine their roles, practices and worldviews.  Nadine Cruickshanks explores the experience of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, in Canada with their new ‘Children’s Global Art’ project.

Introduction

In a world characterised by inequality and a lack of engaged communication across geographical contexts, Arts education has the potential to create connections and links to the ‘Other’ over distance.  This paper describes three case studies from the ‘Children’s Global Arts’ project and highlights the potential of the project as well as some of the problems faced by participants.

            As the third millennium opens, we are faced with a world of increasing terror and injustice.  With rapid growth in globalisation, news of starving children in India, war victims in the Middle East, AIDS victims in Africa, displaced children in North America, terrorist attacks looming across the planet, the threat of a global pandemic, and the degradation of rainforests worldwide, life on earth is becoming increasingly threatened at every level imaginable.  Moreover, a materialist-consumerist and ‘all about me’-centred culture is spreading across the westernised world.  This frequently removes and desensitises humans from the ills of society and leads to a large proportion of us living a life of unprecedented privilege and abundance.  The irony is that this ‘rich’ westernised culture has created an expanding human dichotomy of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ across the world.  It is the ‘haves’ of our western societies, who appear to have everything, who often lack the awareness of a meaning worth living for.  Even our young people are haunted by an inner emptiness; an “existential vacuum” that manifests itself primarily in a state of student boredom, and student feelings of depression, aggression, and addiction (Frankl, 1984:129).  Increasing numbers of young people are falling “into the despair of hopelessness and appear to be apathetic in their responses to the future” (Ashford, 1995:76).

“At the same time that we face crisis in population growth, resource depletion, environmental destruction and new civil wars of horrendous brutality, many young people express cynicism, helplessness and despair that anyone can influence the course of events even on a local scale” (Ashford, 1995:75).

The challenge

The great challenge that we are faced with in the westernised world is to become part of events and circumstances that disorient us to such a degree that we begin to see the world and our role within it very differently, and move us towards relentless commitment and action to care for the whole of humanity without disregard or distinction. As today’s children are the citizens of tomorrow’s world, their feelings and attitudes about the world mirror their future capability and motivation to meaningfully participate in, and contribute to, society.  It is crucial to provide cultivating learning opportunities for young people that help them to face and confront the ills of society with an inspiring and liberating sense of hope, passion, and action.

            Fostering transformative learning for the 21^st century requires a renewed vision for education that breaks through desensitising barriers of ignorance, intolerance, and indifference, and seriously challenges students and educators to assess and redefine their roles, practices, and worldviews, in light of a new, more global and humane era of education.

“Educational spaces are critical for understanding, discussing, and developing a sense of democracy for children where they see themselves as active agents, are able to make changes, and are desirous of making changes, understanding their responsibility and role in community and greater society. It is the responsibility of schools to create those spaces, to create education for democracy, to involve children and their communities at an early age, to involve children in taking action, to transcend boundaries created by language and political difference” (Sanford & Hopper, in press:.3).

Breaking barriers through global arts

‘Children’s Global Arts’, a new initiative founded in the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, Canada, reminds us of the immense power and capability that children and the Arts play in breaking down prevailing barriers of ignorance, intolerance, and indifference.  It also highlights the value of the Arts in speaking and communicating a universal language. Based on a simple theme of ‘the world we want’, children’s artwork from Victoria, Canada, and war-torn countries of Iraq and Afghanistan, was collected and displayed at the November 2003 Learning and the World We Want conference in Victoria. The sincerity and integrity of these images reveal children’s realities of war and injustice, and their visions for peace, joy, and beauty. Their artwork teaches us about the world as it exists today, and the world that children imagine for their future - the future of the world.

            Since its inception in 2003, the ‘Children’s Global Arts’ initiative has grown contagiously, touching the hearts and minds of all those who come to know it. The process of creating children’s artwork has proved to be more than just sending out a message or the propagation of children’s visions and ideas.  Through an exchange of creative and cultural art forms that reveal the world we live in and visions for the world we want, children from diverse parts of the world (Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Canada, South Africa, Zanzibar, Nigeria, India, and Chile, thus far), are communicating and interacting with one another through visual realities that inspire us all to make a difference. 

            Through this art form of communication, we have the opportunity to see a reflection of our own lives through the illuminated lives of others, liberating us from a fixed sense of ‘I’, to an undivided connection and consideration of ‘We’ or ‘Other’.  This significant transformation shifts habits of mind, and sets the stage for meaningful recognition of identity, connection, citizenship, and social and environmental responsibility.  The invitation to participate in global arts provides a context for children and adults from diverse communities to build relationships around a common goal, and to transform barriers into gateways that unite and mobilise communities in the building of ‘the world we want’.

            One of the key intentions for the ‘Children’s Global Arts’ project has been to document ‘tales of transformation’ as shared by various global arts participants to discover how individuals learn to “see differently, hear voices of others, connect with the lives of others with different experiences, and collaboratively shape a new vision of the world” (Sanford & Hopper, in press:3).  As the power of stories may be the key to, and perhaps the best hope for human understanding, I am in the process of collecting an anthology of personal narratives that reveal insights of the global arts initiative, and identifying in these stories, any areas of transformation at an individual, institutional, and/or community level.

            Of particular importance are the transformational learning qualities identified within participants’ stories related to global arts that make them distinguishable from those associated with ‘informational learning’. Recognising these distinctions is a key feature for understanding the significance of this project - for having a more informed, nuanced, sophisticated, or deeper understanding of something (such as an idea, an assumption, or an educational practice) is not equivalent to transformational learning.  Transformational learning involves experiencing a deep, structural shift, or fundamental reordering in the basic premises of thought, feelings, assumptions, and action; a shift of consciousness that dramatically and permanently alters the way one chooses to live or act in the world (Morrell & O’Conner, 2002).

            Paulo Freire (2002) advocates that every human being, no matter how submerged in a “culture of silence” he or she may be, is capable of looking critically at the world in a diagnostic encounter with others. Provided with the proper tools and environment, the individual can become conscious and aware of personal and social realities as well as the contradictions within them, and ultimately play a part in the radical reconstruction of oppressive structures and situations.  The following classroom scenarios demonstrate ways in which the Global Arts Project, under the mentorship of experienced educators, has provided a safe environment for students of diverse age, background, and worldview, to provoke a culture of silence through creative and candid encounters with ‘Self’ and ‘Others’.

Two teachers’ perspectives

1) Joe Karmel, an educator from Victoria, decided to open up the notion of ‘the world we want’ through a middle school social studies programme.  Without pre-prompting or setting boundaries, Joe Karmel invited his students to draw their visions of the world they want freely and without restriction or expectation.  When they had completed and shared their artwork, Joe’s story revealed how most students seemed amused with what others had drawn. A few themes also quickly came to light:

“The first was the increased presence of guns and violence in their pictures of the world they wanted.  While not a theme present in all the pictures, it was a dominant theme.  Other drawings of the world they envisioned featured elaborate skateboarding parks, bike tracks, big screen televisions, computers, large houses, fancy cars, dollar signs, and so forth. While not a singular observable theme like guns and increased violence, collectively these fanciful wishes indicated a vision which included more possessions and items of luxury, aggression, or recreation” (J Karmel, 2005, pers. comm., February 15).

A week or so later Joe presented the images of the world children live in and the world they want as expressed by children in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003. The emotions and events illuminated in the 2003 artworks from Kabul are ones of fear, personal suffering, and uncertainty, and scenes of war, destruction, and injustice.  One image shows a woman floating just above ground yet tethered by a chain - it bears a caption: “Mothers that are educated can teach their children well”.  Another visual features two paths leading to a school; the boys’ path is clear, while the girls’ path is blocked by brambles and a Taliban soldier whose outreached hand prevents the girls from proceeding to school.  A further image reveals a self-portrait of a young Afghani child, named Froozan, who suffers ridicule from her peers after losing her legs when a missile struck her in the back. Another drawing reveals realities of violence against women and children, demonstrated by a knife penetrating the stomach of a child, and a missile entering the body of a young woman. A number of drawings also show destroyed buildings and villages, with captions revealing the desire of children to rebuild their beautiful country. 

            The vibrant and colourful images from Iraq reveal somewhat similar realities, and include pictures of the world children want: a world of freedom, justice, and natural beauty, with young girls going to school, fish swimming down a stream, and smiling, happy people celebrating family picnics, traditional dance, and dreams for peace in every country.