Seeds in the Classroom: The Place of the Arts in Education

Abstract

This article examines the role of the arts in education through a detailed sharing of a research project, Hum Hindustani, on children and citizenship. Using examples of work co-created with children in art workshops for the project, the article offers an understanding of the place of the arts in the classroom to provoke a larger conversation that can lead to meaningful ways of engaging with children. It looks at questions of children’s voice, authenticity and positionality to argue for a reflexive teaching practice that can challenge pedagogies that emphasise tests and results, and instead allow for the development of the whole individual.

‘Arts in education’ is a phrase that is often used as an answer to a variety of ills that plague our school system. Arts-integrated learning is also called upon in NEP 2020 as a way to make learning joyful, particularly at the elementary stage. The arts are often a source as well as an expression of joy, but what does it really mean to include the arts in education? Is it about teaching children different kinds of art practices? Is it about exposing them to a variety of art forms? Is it about allowing themselves to express through art? Is it about finding artworks that help teach concepts in the curriculum? Questions like these abound and while the phrase is used freely, it has not been given the due consideration required to really imagine and understand the role of the arts in education, or the role of the facilitator who is to bring the arts into the classroom. Henry A. Giroux’s (2019a, p. 511) critique of contemporary neoliberal education, that ‘Neoliberalism is a disimagination machine that remakes social identity by turning civic subjects into consuming and marketable subjects’ cautions us to remember that without a critical awareness, even the arts can fall prey to the ‘disimagination machine’, becoming a mere tokenistic jargon to be consumed and marketed. Henry A. Giroux (2019b) has spoken of education as killing the imagination:

It is also in some ways about killing the imagination, in some ways in educating people to adjust to conditions in which their own sense of agency is basically limited. For instance, we often see pedagogies that teach to the test, we often see pedagogies that are simply about accountability, objective standards, pedagogies that in no way take into consideration the experience of students, in no way speak to important social issues … And I think that it’s rightly so to call those pedagogies, pedagogies of repression.

Can the arts challenge the practice of these pedagogies of repression that emphasise tests and results? Can they allow for the development of the whole individual who seeks to alter conditions rather than adjusting to them? In this essay, I offer my understanding of the place of the arts in the classroom to provoke larger conversations that can enable us to find meaningful ways of engaging with the arts together with children. The conceptual framework guiding the project and this essay draws upon three key ideas: The need to listen to children contextually to move away from an emphasis on the authentic voice of the child, the question of researcher/educator positionality and the agency of the child in a process of co-creation.

I am a documentary filmmaker and children’s writer who also teaches creative practice across different mediums in formal and non-formal spaces. For me, the arts in education are about a way of seeing a philosophical approach that emerges from our understanding of education and its ultimate goals. To quote Giroux (2019b), ‘Education, in the final analysis, is really about the production of agency … What kind of narratives are we going to produce that students can understand, that enlarge their perspective not only on the world but on their relationship to others and themselves’. Seen through this lens, the arts are a perfect pathway because they can make a place for children’s voices as an active part of creating those narratives. For education to be a means towards enacting social justice, enabling an understanding of the world and of the self, it is necessary to recognise the diverse contexts of children and integrate those into the learning experiences. This can help in empowering children from marginalised communities and spaces to think critically about their rights and enable children from privileged spaces to develop empathy and a nuanced understanding that fosters a spirit of equity and social justice. A focus on children’s voices expressed through the arts allows an examination of the challenges and possibilities that lie in educational practice to do so. As an example, I share work from Hum Hindustani, a research project that engages with select groups of children from Grades 6 to 9 to understand what citizenship means to them.

Hum Hindustani was conceived as a research project that would both examine and enable children’s engagement with the arts and citizenship. Drawing upon my prior experience and understanding that children’s self-expressions are enabling and can often convey layered meanings, I chose to conduct short art workshops with children at three sites, using poetry-writing, drawing and collage. The project sought to understand how children make sense of the key ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity enshrined in the Constitution of India through this process of co-creation, accompanied by more detailed interviews with a select few. The collective articulation by children through the artworks and the interviews points towards new understandings and relationalities that focus on ways of addressing the challenges of citizenship by listening to children’s experiences and on the role of the arts in educational practice.

Research Context: The Three Sites

The sites chosen for Hum Hindustani bring attention to children from marginalised spaces: Shaheen Bagh in Delhi, one of the sites of protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) ¹ ; rural Firozpur in Punjab, active in the Farmers’ Protests ² ; and Kitaab Mahal, a library catering to Dalit and Muslim children in Govandi, Mumbai. All these three sites have a history of purposive activities to provide education for children: Kitaab Mahal is a library that organises a variety of learning activities for children, and at the Shaheen Bagh and the Farmers’ Protest sites, libraries were set up where volunteers conducted educational sessions. These spaces together provide a range of experiences and identities that draw attention to the historically marginalised. While all children are dependent and vulnerable, it is important to remember that they are vulnerable in different ways because they come from diverse contexts. So, even as they grow out of childhood dependencies, the extent to which they will continue to be subordinate adults will vary based on their context such as class, caste, race, gender and so on. Thus, the voices of children from these particular groups enable an exploration of how the understanding and experience of citizenship is determined through the complex interplay of state policy, school education and everyday lived realities.

Shaheen Bagh, Delhi

A neighbourhood in South East Delhi, Shaheen Bagh shot into prominence in the winter of 2019 with the sit-in led by women becoming a symbol of the protests against the CAA. Part of the urban sprawl around Okhla Gaon that developed from the 1990s, Shaheen Bagh and other contiguous neighbourhoods like Abul Fazal Enclave are largely inhabited by Muslims, with most families having migrated to Delhi for education and livelihood. It is a diverse neighbourhood with working-class and middle-class families living in close proximity. The presence of children at the protest site became a contentious issue with the state and right-wing groups claiming that children’s security and safety were being compromised. This was countered by protesters saying that not bringing children to the site would effectively mean that the women could not protest as they did not have other child-care options. Instead, they demonstrated how the site could in fact become an educational space by setting up libraries and even a pavement school.

I interacted with 13 children at Shaheen Bagh—7 girls and 6 boys living in and around the area. Five of them attended Delhi government schools in Jasola. They are from working-class backgrounds with the fathers involved in trades like tailoring or driving auto rikshaws and mothers staying home as housewives. Four attended English-medium private schools. They are all cousins from the same extended family, middle-class in background, with one father running his own business and the other two in salaried jobs. One child had lost her mother several years ago and the other two mothers are both schoolteachers. Their house is a relatively large, bungalow-styled house and in one of the better lanes of the area. One boy attends the DAV Public School in Jasola, and three of the children are enrolled at a private school in Abul Fazal Enclave that provides Islamic education along with an English-medium curriculum. These children are also middle class, that is, one’s father owns a successful export business, and he had been quite active in the protest, and another’s father works in Dubai in a managerial-type job. The flats they live in, however, are quite small and basic in infrastructure. The mothers are both housewives though one, who was also the primary field contact, had set up a pavement school at the protest site. The children had all been to the protest with their families. While some had just sat in the tent listening to the speeches, others had made posters and sung songs.

Kitaab Mahal, Natwar Parekh Compound (NPC), Govandi, Mumbai

Kitaab Mahal is located in NPC, a collection of high-rise buildings in Govandi. It was built in 2007 as a part of the Slum Rehabilitation Authority’s provision of formal housing to slum and pavement dwellers from different parts of Mumbai. People from more than 10 different locations have been relocated here, making way for various urban infrastructure projects across the city. With more than 25,000 inhabitants, the 5-hectare neighbourhood is one of the most densely packed urban areas in South Asia, and the relative space available per person is as low as 1.9 m (Community Design Agency, n.d.). Many inhabitants of NPC are permanent residents, but there are also several who are tenants. The attached bathroom, piped water connection and elevators in each building were attractive for most who moved here, but the reality is that infrastructure remains a big challenge. The alleyways between the buildings are piled up with year-old garbage, broken drainpipes discharge sewage to the streets and damaged streetlights are common. Much of this is being addressed as part of a revitalisation project by Community Design Agency, an organisation that has been working in the area since 2016. One of the steps taken in collaboration with the residents to find solutions for the challenges faced by the neighbourhood has been the setting up of a library for children, Kitaab Mahal, envisaged as a catalyst for building community engagement and creating a space for children to learn.

In Govandi, 13 children—8 Dalits and 5 Muslims (of the OBC Ansari caste)—from Classes 6 to 9 were selected for the art and writing workshop. Of these, six were girls and seven boys. NPC is largely working-class though there are several examples of social mobility with families that were early settlers having been able to establish themselves more comfortably, with their children now in college. However, most of the participating children in the workshop were from more precarious backgrounds. Of the eight Dalit children, six had fathers doing wage labour as cleaners or rag-pickers, and even if they had municipal jobs, it was related to cleaning or garbage collection. The other two Dalit children lived with single mothers; one’s father had died some years ago and the mother had a job as a nanny, and the other was not working and was dependant on her natal family. Of the five Ansari children, one had lost her father, three had fathers who were engaged in trades like electrician or mechanic and one worked in a salaried office job. The mothers of all 13 children were tailors, henna artists, beauticians or housemaids, except for the Dalit family where the mother stayed in her natal home. Six were enrolled in the local municipal schools and five were in low-fee private schools, including two at a low-fee English medium school that also included Islamic education. Two of the children were out of school as their family had moved to this area during the pandemic, and the parents had not yet received the transfer certificate from the earlier municipal school. As daily wage-earning rag-pickers, it was difficult for them to make time to follow up on this, so the boys remained out of school at the time of the workshop.

Firozpur District, Punjab

The Farmers’ Protests in 2020-2021 saw tremendous mobilisation across the villages of Punjab with different farmers’ unions sending groups of volunteers to maintain a continuous presence at the protest sites on the outskirts of Delhi. Additionally, given Punjab’s extensive network of roads that are used to transport agricultural produce, the toll plazas on the highways also became sites where people gathered to protest. Zira block of Firozpur district has a strong presence of the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Krantikari) ³ with the women’s wing being particularly active on issues of drugs and domestic discord. While the protest included diverse groups, from farmers with large landholding to landless labourers, the involvement of farmers who had less than 10 acres of land was the highest. Many of these came from the Jat Sikh community. Caste segregation continues to be active in the villages with separate gurdwaras for the Jat Sikh community and for those considered to be Mazhabi Sikhs, from the lower castes. The protest became a space where some of these lines were blurred although not erased. Punjabi and Sikh identity, in conjunction with the identity of a farmer, was foregrounded in a battle that was seen as being waged against the central government, a continuation of Punjab’s history of conflict with Delhi.

The children I interacted with in Punjab were from different villages in Zira block of Firozpur district. Of a total of 13 children, 9 boys and 4 girls, 8 were from Jat Sikh farming families with varying landholdings, from about 8 acres to 20 acres, and 5 were Mazhabi and Rai Sikh which are categorised as Scheduled Caste. The fathers in these families worked in masonry, or were mechanics or landless labourers, and the mothers were housewives. Even in some of the landed Jat Sikh families, the fathers had other occupations such as running a grocery store or being an electrician since the small landholdings were not sufficient to meet the family’s needs. Of the Jat Sikh children, only one went to the local government school, the rest were all in private schools. All the Rai Sikh children were enrolled in government schools. The children in the group had visited the protest sites at the toll plazas near the villages or had gone to the Delhi sites with their parents for a few days at a time. Some had gone more than once. Most of them had done sewa, helping to serve meals or tea, and had made posters.

This essay highlights key insights gathered from my engagement with children at these three sites. These include the critical need for curriculum to include children’s lived experiences, pedagogic approaches that enable children’s participation and can lead to transformative experiences and how these together can contribute towards the creation of knowledge, in this case on citizenship, from the lens of the child. Another key insight is with regard to methodology and the importance of recognising subjectivity in research as well as in classroom practice. This essay uses select examples of artwork and poetry from the project that substantiate the key arguments being made.

Being and Becoming

One of the key findings of Hum Hindustani is the reiteration of how the arts contain the possibility of simultaneously being and becoming. The act of expression and responses to that are central to building self-identity and a relationship with the world (Bonnett & Cuypers, 2003). For example, in an exercise on equality, the children in Govandi were asked to draw situations from their lives where they had themselves experienced or witnessed inequality. One of the boys who was out of school—he had last been enrolled in Grade 2—drew two figures on a road, one in a car next to which he wrote ameer [rich] and one walking on the road next to which he wrote garib [poor]. In the follow-up interview that included general questions on the idea of equality as well as questions specifically about the drawing, he spoke clearly about the need for equal rights for everyone, about rich people being rude to poor people, and that inequality could be removed if the poor also became rich. He identified himself as the one on the road, saying that he thought it was fine to be that because ‘chal ke jaane se dekhne ko milta hai. Yeh gaadi se jayega raftar mein, bolega kuch dekhne ko hi nahin mila’ [You can see so much when you walk on the road, this guy will go fast in a car and say he got to see nothing]. The drawing, thus, prompted a reflection on living with inequality.

This example demonstrates how the arts encourage children to look at their world and to look at it in ways they may not have looked before, enabling children to articulate and form at the same time. Even as they express something from their lives, making sense of their lives and worlds, they open up the possibility of another way of being and living, sometimes as a question, left open for themselves and for those who engage with their work. The humanist psychologist, Carl Rogers (1961), wrote about the ‘experiencing of the potential self’ theorising how the process of therapy allows for an awareness of what one has experienced. Later it ‘may be recognized that what was being experienced may all become a part of self’ (ibid., pp. 77–78). Engaging with the arts, as practice or even as an audience allows for this process that emphasises the felt experience. Rogers writes:

In therapy the person adds to ordinary experience the full and undistorted awareness of his experiencing—of his sensory and visceral reactions … In this sense the person becomes for the first time the full potential of the human organism, with the enriching element of awareness freely added to the basic aspect of sensory and visceral reaction. (Ibid., 1961, p. 101)

A similar possibility in the arts of becoming aware of what one experiences viscerally and how that is linked to developing the full individual can be seen in an exercise on liberty. The exercise focused on the children’s everyday experiences of freedom, asking them to think about their feelings. Children were asked to choose a background colour representing their idea of freedom, draw a symbol for freedom and then write a line about why they had chosen that particular symbol. A Grade 8 girl at Shaheen Bagh created a collage of balloons against a purple background. The colour purple was chosen as an expression of her freedom to choose a colour she likes, and the balloons signified freedom through their ability to float in the air. Alongside the balloons, she wrote, ‘I want freedom to burst like a balloon when friends say racist things’. She went on to explain that as a Muslim she had felt bullied in her private school, particularly during the anti-CAA protests, when other children called her a Pakistani or terrorist, but there was nothing she could do about it. Another girl at the same workshop came up with the symbol of a bird with a balloon in its beak and air all around as a symbol of freedom because all three can move freely. The first reflects ‘being’—conveying the girl’s feelings at being bullied, and her sense of repression. The second reflects ‘becoming’—it presents an aspirational ideal of what liberty can mean for a girl child, often living with a circumscribed everyday in which her comings and goings are monitored. Together, they are a window into the developing selves of these girls.

Is This Art and Are the Children Artists?

The arts in the classroom, formal as well as non-formal, often work through a process of co-creation in which dialogue is key. The process is clearly adult-led with the facilitator introducing children to ways of creating. Children play with words, colours and forms. They think about what they want to create, draw upon their lived experiences and connect ideas to material. This is creative engagement akin to a workshop process, not necessarily an art product. However, it is the process rather than the product that is of significance when we bring the arts into the classroom. There is no one creative process, and there can be no prescriptive process, other than the emphasis on the dialogic process. This makes art practice not only a creative space for children to reflect but also a medium of engagement, a pedagogic approach that can prompt deep critical thinking. Art exercises can be designed to engage children with concepts contained in textbooks, thus becoming a mediating tool that facilitates connections between textual material and children’s lived experiences, unravelling concepts and addressing concerns.

An example of this is a poem by a 14-year-old girl that emerged from an exercise on fraternity.

My People ⁴

Those friends who are with me in difficult times

Are those my people?

Those neighbours who fight on small things

Are those my people?

Those people in my family

who gave money for my sister’s wedding

Are those my people?

That grandmother who is always suspicious of me

Are those my people?

Those people at Kitaab Mahal library

who give me a chance to try everything

Are those my people?

Those people who walk into Taj Hotel

Are those my people?

Those teachers who listen to me and understand me

Are those my people?

Those policemen who take money from the rich

and falsely accuse the poor

Are those my people?

Those people in the Powai chawl

who on April 14 celebrate Ambedkar Jayanti with me

Are those my people?

Those people who tear down mosques

Are those my people?

We began with a conversation on the idea of fraternity that translates in Hindi as bandhuta. However, as this is not a word commonly used, I chose to use the word apnapan that evokes a sense of belonging in reference to people one considers one’s own. Thus, the prompt I gave them to write was Mere Log [My People] and to enable them to express in their voice, I asked them to draw examples from their lives and their worlds. The children spoke of people they felt were their own, with their responses revealing overlapping spaces and groups where they felt a sense of apnapan, for example, feeling both a sense of belonging as well as alienation at different times in school.

I then created a structure for the poem that they could use and flesh out with their own examples. I first identified the spaces that we would explore—the home, school, neighbourhood and country. I then asked them to make a list of situations for each space when they had felt a sense of apnapan and when they had not. This helped to connect the abstract ideas of fraternity and belonging to tangible material spaces and lived experiences. I then suggested that select examples from their lists be written up, creating a rhythm for the poem through the use of a repeated line. At first, I suggested a repeated line like ‘They are my people’. But this would not work for the situations lacking in apnapan. So, I suggested that throwing it open as a question may be a better approach, leading to the use of the repeated line—‘Are those my people?’ Thus, each space was explored through a juxtaposition of situations chosen by them, where they experienced apnapan and where they did not, followed by the interrogative repeated line.

Such an approach with the facilitator framing the exercise, thinking of the prompt, sharing stylistic devices and presenting scaffolding structures and questions that provoke reflection, is clearly not an objective process. The process unfurls bearing the imprint of the facilitator’s subjectivity. However, this is no different from any other classroom interaction—the teacher’s subjectivity influences the way students engage with even a prescribed text. Also, just as children studying history do not automatically become historians, children engaging with the arts do not necessarily become artists. What is of value is the process of engagement and what that can provoke. The dialogic process of co-creation seen in this exercise allows the child to express agency by choosing the lived experiences that go into the poem. The adult facilitator can ask questions and make suggestions but cannot control what the children respond with, what examples their lived experiences throw up and what is written into the poem. Thus, even though the adult exercises authority in choosing prompts and ways of creating, they are not authoritarian.

The Question of Authenticity

A question that some may ask is whether the meaning we then glean from work produced like this is ‘authentic’ or does the adult-led process mean that the work does not reflect the pure voice of the child? I would argue that we need to move away from an emphasis on the authentic voice of the child and in fact, question the idea of authenticity itself. In conventional classroom practice, the question of authenticity is rarely raised as the teacher’s voice is mostly seen as a carrier of prescribed texts and there is little room for children’s voices. However, a classroom is always a space of performance with both the teacher and the students putting forward what they anticipate the other needs or desires. Even in conventional classrooms, teachers are mediating the text through the manner in which they present it and themselves. A classroom engaged in creative practice, such as the process described above, is in fact more self-aware about this and the teacher has to carefully consider the mode of presentation and communication.

Spyros Spyrou (2011) has written about research with children and made a case for the researcher’s self-reflexivity so that we may acknowledge ‘the messiness, ambiguity, polyvocality, non-factuality and multi-layered nature of meaning in “stories” that research produces’ (Ibid., p. 162)This does not take away from the meaningfulness of what children articulate; it is simply that the meaning must be assessed in the context of how the child expresses herself. We can never be completely certain of what is authentic, even when it comes to adults. Yet, there is meaning in every interaction, even in a short engagement. Instead of an emphasis on authenticity, it is important to focus on the need to contextualise the process of recording children’s voices and experiences to draw nuanced meanings.

The creative work produced in Hum Hindustani reflects the ambiguous, poly-vocal process with multi-layered meanings that Spyrou has written about. The finished poem (or artwork) emerges from an intersection between the adult voice and the child voice. This may not contain certitude but does contain the possibility of multiple meanings and of evolving meaning. The examples chosen by the child-writer, as a response to the prompt for the poem above, reflect the tapestry of everyday working-class lives: The tension within families that destabilises the idea of family as belonging, class inequalities that restrict access to certain spaces and power inequalities that make the poor vulnerable to police action rather than feeling protected by the police as citizens. This particular child-writer complicates the idea of apnapan emerging from caste or religious groupings when she writes of the coming together of different people to celebrate a Dalit festival, and the Dalit thinking of the masjid-goer who will lose the masjid when it is torn down. She shared in an interview that she chose those examples because she feels a closeness to the Muslim family she has grown up with and so she is attuned to incidents about contested mosques in other parts of India even though she is not Muslim, and the mosques are not in her vicinity. This choice challenges conventional notions of belonging and while she may not have arrived at an answer, she is certainly considering the question of who her people are.

There is a sense of uncertainty in this, that is, a fluidity. Such a classroom interaction will not necessarily end with finality or a neat tying up of ideas that most conservative educators would desire. This requires that teachers in the classroom are prepared for uncertainty, prepared to hold space for ambiguity and complexity that the process throws up. It requires that teachers are thinking about their place in both the classroom and in the world.

Reflexivity and Positionality

The need for contextualizing is not only about the children’s contexts but also about the facilitators’ and the context in which the process unfolds. Lata Mani (2014) has spoken of how the researcher’s positionality is determined by many things that are the focus of research: the sites, participants and stories that emerge from them. The process in Hum Hindustani was prompted by me as the adult facilitator, coming from a position very different from the participating children’s. The poetry and art that emerged are examples of the intersection between adult and child when different positionalities come together. This is not very different from interactions between adults in the research space; adult voices too are documented within a power structure. This question of positionality, so critical for the creative practitioner, is one that the teacher too needs to ask, particularly when bringing the arts into the classroom. This kind of reflexive approach builds interrogation into the process, making the teacher not only a conduit to transfer skill but also someone who creates an interactive space where diverse possibilities may exist.

Scholar of children’s literature, Clementine Beauvais (2015) uses the phrase ‘the mighty child’ to theorise the power relationship between an adult and a child in the context of the children’s book. She contends that though the adult may be in authority, the child wields a kind of power or might in the act of reading the children’s book written by an adult. So, the children’s book may become the source that teaches the child something that the adult does not know yet, and the child may make meaning that the adult is unaware of. Drawing from this, I believe that the child’s articulation through the arts may fulfil the same role of meaning-making, with the adult-child interaction working in a similar way. While the adult wields authority as someone who anchors the process enabling the articulation of children’s voices, the work created by the children does not emerge merely from a top-down approach and may contain layers of meaning that the adult was unaware of. By enabling children to tell their stories, we create opportunities to learn from their perspectives and also support their developing sense of self and of the world. In this lie the seeds of transformative pedagogy. The possibilities that lie in collaborative creative engagement, however, cannot be realised in the absence of a reflexive teaching practice. As a creative practitioner, the question ‘what is the place that we create from?’ is a constant one for me because I am often different from the people I film or write about—in age, class, caste and so on. Perhaps, a variation of this can be the start of a reflexive teaching practice: what is the place that we teach from?

Conclusion

Bringing the arts into the classroom enables a form of pedagogic communication that would serve well across disciplines because it brings a focus on children’s voice, children’s agency and adult-child dialogue. The examples from Hum Hindustani demonstrate how children’s creative expressions can inform adult understandings that are richer and more nuanced.

When a child writes, ⁵

Because I was very happy to see the Taj Mahal

Because I was very happy when we went to hoist the tricolour with my family

Because I like to celebrate Eid and Diwali

Because I like to wear kurta and pyjama

Because I like to eat dal roti

That is why I am Indian

He is emphasising the multi-layered way in which identity is formed, drawing attention to how the normative understanding of citizenship can be challenged. This emerges through the process of reflecting on lived experiences. Education must lead to individuals living an examined life, growing to become who they choose to be and working to create the world they seek to inhabit. This is a continuous, evolving process. So, as practitioners inside and outside the classroom, as artists and teachers who engage with children, we need to remember what Joan Miro, the Spanish painter and sculptor, said so eloquently, ‘More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed’.