Dreams of Collective Joyful Resistance

I am writing this editorial in mid–June 2023, as summer is beginning to unfold. In the northeastern United States, schools are concluding for the year. Many students are breathing a sigh of relief as they transition into summer activities, although summer vacation brings additional uncertainty and stress for families who lack adequate childcare or have economic concerns (Stewart et al., 2018). In the summer, teachers shift their focus toward family and friends, travel, curriculum planning, artmaking, and much-deserved rest. Teaching is always stressful; however, the teacher shortages are adding to this stress in a marked manner. In the 2022–2023 school year, public schools faced a continued teacher shortage. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES, 2022), as of October 2022 more than 45% of all preK–12 public schools reported at least one teaching vacancy. These shortages are not equally distributed, however; schools that are underresourced are unequally impacted (Turner & Cohen, 2023).

U.S. colleges and universities face similar challenges. While there is not a parallel shortage of professors or instructors, many colleges and universities are facing historically low enrollments, especially among Black, Hispanic, and low-income students (Binkley, 2023). These decreases create economic instability, especially for those institutions that rely upon tuition money for operating costs. Teacher education programs are especially hard hit, as reported by Knox (2022):

Between 2008 and 2019, the number of students completing traditional teacher education programs in the U.S. dropped by more than a third, according to a 2022 report by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. The report found that the steepest declines were in degree programs in areas with the greatest need for instructors, such as bilingual education, science, math and special education. (para. 3)

The COVID-19 global pandemic continues to negatively impact the arts. As reported by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA, 2022):

Between 2019 and 2020, the U.S. arts economy shrank at nearly twice the rate of the economy as a whole: arts and cultural production fell by 6.4 percent when adjusted for inflation, compared with a 3.4 [percent] decline in the overall economy. (para. 3)

These factors threaten arts programs that are already placed in precarious economic positions. Community arts programs, museums, and cultural centers in the United States have all had to reconfigure funding sources and forms of support. Many organizations are in dire situations, which are made even worse by current attempts to control and censor cultural art forms represented by the ongoing U.S. political culture wars. Perhaps the most hateful example of this can be found in attempts to establish laws that target LGBTQ + citizens, such as recent attempts to forbid drag performances. Montana passed an anti-drag law in May 2023, and similar laws are currently being considered in Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia (Chamlee, 2023).

While all of these challenges threaten the livelihood of arts organizations and institutions, they also lead to potential resiliency. One relevant example of this can be found in The Bearded Ladies Cabaret Company (n.d.). As they state:

The Bearded Ladies Cabaret is a queer arts organization that sits on your lap and sings you a story. Whether it’s an opera, a home-made cabaret, a musical walking tour, or a show on a truck, we employ song, spectacle, storytelling, and heart to welcome audiences into moments of joy, healing, and subversion. (sec. 2)

When COVID-19 shut down all performance venues in their home city of Philadelphia, The Bearded Ladies created the Beardmobile, a customized van that doubles as an outdoor performance space (Plettner-Saunders & Carnwath, 2021). The Beardmobile allows The Bearded Ladies to travel to nontraditional venues, such as public libraries and ice-skating rinks. It also provides these activist performances with additional visibility, potentially countering the hatred and homophobia espoused by narrowminded lawmakers.

None of the articles collected in this issue of Studies speak to these concerns in a direct manner. However, the major themes the authors present speak to many of the same concerns that are identified in U.S. public-school teaching shortages, teacher education enrollment drops, declines in community arts and museum funding, and attacks on LGBTQ + groups. These research articles present information on dream capital and economic disparity, art collectives and activism, happenings and trauma, flashpoints and joy, and museum access for those with developmental disabilities. These are varied topics, but one common thread is that art is presented in each as a form of expression that can identify problems and provide practical, emotional, and critical creative responses.

In “Disparities in Dream Capital Among Adolescents: Focused on the Role of Arts Education in Schools of South Korea,” Dooiee Kim and Jiyoun Ahn present an analysis of survey responses from 142 South Korean school children regarding the relationship between arts education and the participants hopes for the future. As the authors state:

Dreams, much like economic powers, refinements, and personal networks, can be described as capital since they can also be inherited, managed, pursued, and accumulated over time. Some adolescents possess an excessive amount of capital, while others experience a continued deficiency.

Using a Bourdieusian cultural capital framework, the authors theorize that dream capital is composed of four different qualities: imagination, optimism, hope, and resilience. This analytical framework allows the authors to work in an interdisciplinary way while speaking to aspects of social and economic disparity. They align these qualities with the goals and aims of art education, which motivated the authors to conduct their research and present their findings.

The findings they present focus on the relationship between dream capital, class, and geographical location. As the authors state: “Regional disparities influenced adolescent dream capital disparities. Except for authenticity, the average scores of all other dream capital indexes were markedly lower for adolescents from [small and mid-sized cities].”

They go on to say that the reasons for this correlation are numerous, as one might expect. The next conclusion based on the collected data shows that art education programs had more of an impact on the dream capital of students from small and mid-sized cities. While the reasons for this are also multitudinous, the authors hypothesize that this may be a result of greater access to arts programming in larger cities. Art educators who are invested in addressing social inequities and supporting the interior lives of students should find this empirical study of dream capital to be relevant, as it provides a language through which class difference might be better understood.

In “Yes, I Do: An Artists’ Community of Practice,” Carlos Camacho presents an in-depth discussion of a community art group in Cali, Colombia. As the author states: “I attempt to present the way in which artist communities in Cali have created spaces that allow artists’ voices to be heard by reacting to social phenomenon through art.” The author analyzes work created by a group of artists called Sí, Acepto (Yes, I Do) for the 45th National Artist Salon in Bogotá in 2019.

Using a/r/tographic theories from Irwin (2010) and Springgay et al. (2008) allows the author to analyze specific aspects of Sí, Acepto in a manner that takes into consideration the unique, dynamic qualities of the group. As Camacho writes: “The concept of a/r/tography recognizes social learning theory as necessary for revealing tensions within learning practices (Springgay et al., 2008), and facilitating an analysis of how artists conceptualize their practices, and possible contradictions, within their own discourses.”

Camacho discusses the challenges that relate to analyzing collective artistic organization. Some of these challenges originate from historical notions of artistic production that privilege the object, while others relate to the identities of those involved, as well as the time required for collaboration. The benefits of collectivity identified through the work of Sí, Acepto are shared artistic competencies and increased forms of social engagement. These forms of engagement have a pedagogical component. As Camacho states:

When this artist community of practice comes together, it happens with the intention of constructing valuable learning experiences for its members by encouraging contextual and temporary participation that depends on the opportunities for research and creation that emerge and define the moment while connecting participants who have built their membership between spaces of artistic production and the spaces parallel to them, and taking on the social life of its members as an arena for testing the value of their practices.

The ability for artistic practices to result in social change is a continual concern for art educators involved in community art education. This example of socially engaged artmaking will certainly be of interest to art educators who work in and between artistic and activist communities of practice.

In “Expressing Trauma Through Therapeutic Art-Based Trauma-Informed Practice With/in a Collective Happening,” Linda Helmick uses the framework of the happening to explore responses to trauma through artmaking. As she states: “While bearing in mind the mutual respect and creative collaboration within the space of a happening, we explored the ways in which observing and making art can prompt us to examine, validate, and share our traumatic experiences.”

The participatory, emergent qualities of the happening help to create the space where intersectional power differences are brought to the surface and personal identity markers are made visual. These are themes that factor into the research methodology used by Helmick, which she calls “feminist participatory visual research.” This research approach is combined with theories drawn from art therapy and art-based research to help analyze experiences that were organized in the 1-day art workshop featured in the article.

Helmick describes the processes undertaken by participants and analyzes the visual products that arise. She identifies the resulting themes of empathy and care, along with the impact of systemic racism and White supremacy. As the author states:

Given how viewing art with/in the social practice of a happening prompted participants and coresearchers to examine, validate, and share personal experiences and the empathy and understanding displayed as a result, I conclude that art viewing and discussions, a collaborative collage activity, or a participatory dialogue can open a supportive space for sharing fears and resymbolizing experiences of trauma, including the acknowledgement of racial traumas.

“A Phenomenology of Joyful Experimentation in Art Education,” by Sarah T. Travis and Tyson E. Lewis, presents an analysis of pedagogical flashpoints, which are, as the authors state, “educational moments when implicit, sociocultural knowledge carried in the body suddenly appears and makes itself part of the conscious experience.” In this article, they discuss the history of these phenomenological experiences as they relate to repressed traumas:

In conversation with the literature on critical phenomenology, flashpoint methodology provides a very concrete practice that is focused explicitly on writing descriptions and emphasizing jarring and disorienting flare-ups of affective scarring, ambiguous desires, uncanny sensations, and unacknowledged privileges that normally remain in the background of experience.

However, they argue that the research presented in the article represents a postcritical counterpoint to traumatic flashpoints, in the form of joy expressed through the creation and manifestation of artistic experiences. The authors describe such an experience that was organized around a work of art called New Basis for Personality (1994–present), which was created by Brazilian artist Ricardo Basbaum. The emergent acts that arose from interactions with this piece represent, for the authors, the type of joyful postcritical flashpoints that are ripe for art educational exploration and theorization.

In “Creating Visitor-Centered Museum Experiences for Adults With Developmental Disabilities: A Collaborative Story,” Anthony Woodruff argues that museum experiences have excluded visitors with developmental disabilities. In this article, he presents research conducted with adult learners at the Yeiser Art Center (YAC) located in Paducah, Kentucky. As he states:

The intention of this research study was to foster a collaborative learning environment at a small regional museum between myself, as the researcher, and the participants with differing developmental disabilities. The equal acceptance of the contributions of all participants allowed the research to change or transform during the research process.

In this study, Woodruff asks the following research question: “How can a museum create inclusive and visitor-centered programs for adults with developmental disabilities?” The mixed-methods research process he used is the transformative research paradigm, which is informed here by work from disability studies as well as the Inclusive Arts approach (Fox, 2014). Woodruff organized two workshops in the YAC where participants discussed specific works of art and made work in response to these experiences. These works were then discussed in participant interviews, which were later analyzed, allowing Woodruff to identify the following themes: understanding, accessibility, interactive, collaboration, communication, and evaluation. Recommendations for visitor-centered museum experiences based upon these themes are presented, emphasizing their importance in smaller regional museums and for groups that have been historically marginalized.

As the summer of 2023 fades, schools reopen, colleges and universities welcome students back for the fall semester, and community art programs and museums prepare for a new year of programming. The attacks on LGBTQ + cultural creativity will surely continue into the upcoming year, as the United States prepares for a presidential election. It is my hope that art can provide solace for those in need of a safe space, while it also presents a model for collective mobilization, creative expression, and joyful resistance.