High School Students Making Sense of the History of Slavery in America Through an Aesthetic Practice of Art Journaling
Open Access DepositedRepresenting Self and Other
What does it mean to have students bear witness to the unspeakable pain and suffering of the other when education curriculum and pedagogy primarily privilege the spoken and written word? This qualitative, art-based, interpretive study examines how six students at a large mid-Atlantic high school express their emotions about and associations to the history of slavery within an African American history course through mixed-media art journaling, followed by the students’ spoken reflections on their individual work. The study reviews literature on anti-Blackness and antiracism in curriculum and on the psychic difficulties for students when learning about the history of American chattel slavery. The literature review also discusses how this study differs from a defined arts-integrated approach in its mobilization of art journaling with psychoanalytic underpinnings. Three psychoanalytically informed concepts—difficult knowledge, symbolization, and potential space—inform the thematic analysis of the data from 21 student interviews, 60 journal entries, and one focus group. The analysis also employs creative analytic interpretive practices, such as mixed-media collage, visual mind-mapping, and the development of experiential texts. The study presents student profiles, along with interview excerpts and art journal entries, to support theory-applied interpretations. The study reveals the unique psychic dimensions and contours of difficult knowledge for each student according to their subjective experience with the history, as well as the potentiality of art journaling for exemplifying an antiracist onto-epistemology.
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SmithDuss_gwu_0075A_17622.pdf | 2025-12-12 | Open Access |
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