Passing through: reflecting on the journey through community arts zone

Passing through, passing through.

Sometimes happy, sometimes blue,

Glad that I ran into you.

Tell the people that you saw me passing through.

Leonard Cohen, 1973

This special issue of Pedagogies is devoted to a unique research study that took place across multiple sites in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States from September 2013 until May 2015. Built on a belief in community regeneration through arts and literacy initiatives, the international research study reported in the special issue examines different ways that multimodality can be enacted across research contexts. Through the combined expertise of professionals, community members, and arts educators, young people designed and produced texts and improvised on their identities in active, felt ways. Funded by the Canadian government through a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Development grant, research featured in this special issue is relational, critical, affective, and semiotic in nature. And, most of all, it is humane.

In the light of its humane qualities, it is worth taking a moment to reflect on our journey since we embarked on the Community Arts Zone research study and ended it with this special issue. Just within the research team, the journey has seen changes in our own lives: members of the team have been promoted, moved house, changed universities, and very sadly, one of us has passed away. These are brief, passing references to complex human stories that have taken place behind the scenes over the course of 4 years. Not to mention the world stage with political upheavals, new presidents, and as I wrote this brief introduction, the death of iconic figures like Leonard Cohen. Life moves on and we pass through it. But, imprints are made.

The story of Community Arts Zone began with the research team’s desire to work closely within their respective communities to design and make meaning through modes of expression and representation. At the heart of this special issue is an effort to conduct collaborative, participatory research with, not on community members in their idiosyncratic contexts. Researchers from urban and suburban contexts looked inside the lives of people around them through the arts. In this way, we examined diverse ways of knowing through such artistic practices as photography or movement with a broader focus on literacy and cultural and social framings of literacy. Each project, in its own way, applies methodologies like co-production to reimagine how literacy practices in communities are applied and valued. Applying collaborative research methods meant yielding control and ownership of the process, making data collection dynamic, fluid, and at times even messy.

Within this special issue, you will encounter toddlers wandering around movable structures; teenagers and children making tableaux; language learners making media texts; community members planning and designing a community mural; teenagers depicting their thoughts, tensions, and convictions in conceptual photographs; first graders making music together; actors working alongside children in schools; and adolescents using drama to consider their bodies and senses of self – what is true across all of the articles is the power of the arts to shake us, affect us, and bind us. And, the arts’ capacity to make an imprint on our lives.

Indeed, a driving force of Community Arts Zone was to show the possibilities of expansive notions of literacy built around deeper work with modes. The arts and multimodality furnish wider-angled views of the possibilities for literacy pedagogy and practice. There is a growing awareness that lived literacies have outgrown schooled literacies. By lived literacies we refer to the panoply of ways that people write, design, tweet, read, view, think, compose, snapchat – the list of everyday, lived literacies can go on and on.

Research featured in this special issue brings acts of literacy to life, while correspondingly politicizing the frustrating uncertainty and anachronism of formal notions of literacy. Compositions about body image; social studies units put to music; biological processes put to movements; community murals as statements to community members; digital stories about culture and race – these are felt inscriptions performed, viewed, and enacted with what Rancière calls in his work disensus. Rancière (2010) maintains that politics is inherently aesthetic in nature and aesthetics has an inherently political nature. Rancière argues that the arts and aesthetics move beyond sensible notions to offer transformative action in spaces. There is a politics of sorts that plays out across articles in the special issue: DiGiacomo and Gutiérrez’s sensitive and careful rendering of relational equity through multimodal design work built on cultural practices; or, Larson, Hanny, Pham, Moses, and Rutherford’s focus on food and healthy eating as the leitmotif of a community designed mural which changed the way community members lived their lives; or, Rowsell and Vietgen’s conceptual photographic work that stretched young peoples’ capacities to reflect on their lives, afflictions, pleasures, and preoccupations. These topics may strike readers as gentler forms of politics. They make a statement nonetheless.

Participants involved in Community Arts Zone were often, literally and metaphorically, brought to life through artistic improvisations. The combined expertise of arts educators with arts professionals amplified sense-making – making multimodal teaching richer, deeper, and bigger in ways that we did not think possible before the research. In a world often characterized by digital communicative practices, research featured in this special issue is digitally light. This is yet another reminder that multimodality cannot be equated with the digital but instead digital domains sit alongside other modal repertoires.

Sustained and profound educational change that is activist and political in nature requires moving beyond more scripted methods and tighter framings to explore complexities and entanglements through art-making in communities. Artists know this and recognize the beauty of diverse shapes and frames. Thinking again about the poet and song writer Leonard Cohen who found shapes, light, and frames in his work, as he famously said: “there is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” (Cohen, 1992).

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for supporting the research (grant number 430-2013-1025). We are grateful to all of the community members, teachers, students, professionals, Fourgrounds Media, and anyone else who helped to make Community Arts Zone such a successful research initiative. We are grateful to all of the reviewers and to Pedagogies: An International Journal for making this special issue a reality. A note of thanks as well to Cheryl McLean for providing careful, thoughtful feedback on this introduction. Finally, we are grateful to Jennifer Turner for her meticulous and laborious work on the research – right through to the end of our journey. This special issue is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Debra McLauchlan – a strong advocate for the arts and her Niagara community.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

We are grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for supporting the research (grant number 430-2013-1025).