Narrative, photography, performance, and experience worked together to create visual culture jams that enabled my participants and I to embody CRAE. Positive experiences, similar to this one, encourage participants to integrate discussions of race, ethnicity, and culture into their own pedagogy and curriculum. As expressed by Sleeter (2012), “What makes more sense is for teachers to bring to the classroom an awareness of diverse cultural possibilities that might relate to their students, but then to get to know the students themselves” (emphasis added, p. 571). Pre-service educators were able to experience the “awareness” described by Sleeter (2012) and recognize the complexity of cultural identity, especially in regard to White cultural identity. Now, it will be up to the participants to merge their awareness of culture and its complexity with their teaching pedagogy and, ultimately, into their relationship with students.
Artmaking served as a creative ground for participants to artistically explore their cultural identity and gain more exposure to culture-based art curriculum. Further, storytelling through performance opened up participants to share various experiences with one another encouraging a classroom environment described by Greene (1995),
They [our classrooms] ought to resound with the voices of articulate young people in dialogues always incomplete because there is always more to be discovered and more to be said. We must want our students to achieve friendship as each one stirs to wide-awakeness, to imaginative action, and to renewed consciousness of possibility. (p. 43)
Identity should be understood as fluid, ever-changing, blurring, and transforming (Garoian, personal communication, December 4, 2012; Greene, 1995); therefore, the performances interpreted here and others created through this curriculum should be seen as “jams” in these participants’ cultural histories. I say this because this project required for students to stop, consider, re-consider, and perform their cultural identities in relation to their lived experiences up to that specific moment in their lives. For some students, this may have been the first time they were asked to seriously consider their positioning within a culture, for others, it could have been another opportunity to investigate their identity.
I believe this project could be utilized in other pre-service art education programs as a way to promote discussions of race, ethnicity, and culture in relation to teacher identity and student relationships. Conversations and projects that encourage pre-service art educators to explore these issues in relation to the self enable our educators to gain a stronger foundation in CRAE and helps to counteract color-blind ways of seeing. By acknowledging color, even the color White, educators begin to peel away layers of silence and gain confidence, and more importantly experience, with culturally responsive pedagogy.