Friction and Failure in the Secondary Art Classroom: Cultivating Decolonial Transformative Pedagogies of Hope

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores how the colonisation of womens bodies, as perpetuated through the art trope of the female nude, has constructed a specific bodily ideal that still resonates and informs how we view women's bodies in contemporary life. I address how the same narratives that restrict our understanding of the female body, also restrict our understanding of drawing. I share part of my PhD practice research: PhEminist Skins of Resistance, a project conducted in my school, which sought to decolonise the legacy of the female nude and support the empowerment of the young women artists who populate the classrooms in which I teach. Theoretically informed by PhEmaterialism (feminist posthumanism and new materialism research methodologies in education), material agency is positioned as vital to an embodied learning experience and situates how I (re)position life drawing as a tool to re‐imagined and disrupt heteronormative and raced colonial imaginings of the female body. I further explore how this project created space within the secondary art classroom for creative‐activism, and the power of such learning environments to reach out beyond the constraints of neo‐liberal educational structures and inspire transformative pedagogies of hope.