Funds of identity and self-exploration through artistic creation: addressing the voices of youth

ABSTRACT

The school system is permeated by systems of social exclusion and discrimination in ways that are usually invisible. This neglected symbolic violence reproduced in our educational system reflects some weak points within the Catalan intercultural paradigm, which lead to the reproduction of systemic violence to many young racialized people. Educational regimes which prioritize the adult agenda and the curriculum, urge teachers to impose control and directionality. In this circumstance, students’ acts and statements may be seen as merely disruptive, and hence their voice is delegitimized. The educational system, thus, fails in its duty to provide these young learners with the space to explore themselves and to foster self-reflection of their histories, interests and knowledges. In response to this perception, we developed “Who am I?”, an educational program based on Funds of Identity to enact self-exploration through art creation. Two secondary classrooms participated in this program. The results reflect dialogic events in which students talk about daily violence, their strategies to resist it, cultural negotiation and identity-construction processes. By means of a narrative-based analysis, we provide both a critical revision of our intercultural educational system and an enrichment to the Funds of Identity framework through the subjectivity theory lenses.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. As we will discuss in the following, we intentionally use (sometimes) this term in quotation marks to show the contradictions that our educational politics have, since Catalan educational policies for cultural diversity are commonly (not always) referred to as “intercultural” by many researchers, educators and other professionals in education.

2. Protocol PRODERAI-CE: Prevenció, detecció i intervenció de processos de radicalització als centers educatius (Prevention, detection and intervention in radicalization process in educational centers), see in http://educacio.gencat.cat/documents/PC/ProjectesEducatius/PRODERAI-CE.pdf.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO), the Spanish State Research Agency (AEI) and the European Regional Development Fund (European Union), Grant number EDU2017-83363-R.