Service-Learning as Postmodern Art and Pedagogy

Abstract

This article explores the idea that service-learning, when based on a postmodern art education pedagogy, is a work of art. The goal of service-learning is to deepen students' civic responsibility while providing opportunities for experiential knowledge in their academic study. While service-learning is meaningful and important across disciplinary boundaries, when it is combined with art education pedagogy there are explicit and implicit connections to the world of art and artmaking. Using Dominique Mazeud's Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande performance art ritual as an exemplar, one university art education service-learning program is described, reflected upon, and interpreted. Criteria are presented for the development of a postmodern service-learning art pedagogy as a transformative and socially reconstructive practice. These criteria are based upon the connection between the ritualistic nature of postmodern performance art and service-learning theories. The implications of this research extend the purposes of art education not only to include the power of the arts to educate, but to provide the service opportunities that transform and give us meaning in our lives.