Running head: ANALYSIS OF VIGNETTE #1

ANALYSIS OF VIGNETTE #1
Ryan Shields
UBC Student #: 51134070
ETEC 532

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Stacy Friedman planned to use art to "explore the idea of racism in art
education . . . throughout history and in our culture, whatever Canadian culture is"
(2004a, 6:20). Friedman engineered a situation in which students could generate
their own knowledge and navigate their own understandings. An important element
of the situation that she created, though, was her own reflection upon how it all went.
As she says, "being confronted with the evidence of my own classroom forced me to
question what actually did occur within the course, between the intended and the
lived curriculum" (2004b, p.3). Creating the video and writing about it created
secondary and tertiary artefacts through which students were able to see their
instructor critically deconstructing her own processes and products and reflecting on
the import of her findings. Her video also generates voice appropriation analogs that
could be used later to understand the initial issues in the lesson more deeply; it
allowed her to learn about the ethics involved in video based media editing; and, it
allowed her students to witness the process of self-analysis and modification for
improvement.
The learning that Friedman and her students did was in line with Goldfarb's
(2002) call for students to be trained in the means of production in the sense that, in
Friedman's class, they learnt that they could use a lesson in making puppets in order
to later help their own students learn about their interactions with cultural elements.
These student teachers produced conversation amongst themselves as they will
later go out and attempt to produce conversation amongst their students. They also
participated in the creation of Friedman's secondary and tertiary learning elements,
which they can now recreate in their own lessons.

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Appropriation of voice remained an issue for all three artists. Friedman, in

theorizing her initial lesson plan, contemplated a number of issues that might arise
with students and impede their participation in her projected learning process. These
issues, as she notes (2004b), did come up in the class, and, thus, Dane's learning
experience was also influenced in the course of interactions with his classmates.
Sylvia Kind, while she was participating in a separate art endeavour in which she
"cut things up and put them back together thinking through the idea of disability as
socially constructed" (2004, 11:26), also faced issues of voice. Most explicitly, her art
is a manifestation of her understanding of and relationship with the idea that society
puts individuals into groups and affects the voice of the individual by categorizing it
and subjecting it to social tendencies towards the assigned group. In each artist's
case, they are speaking on behalf of an other to create an artefact that they can then
examine to learn something about their own relationships with culture and identity.
That learning is valuable; if we are to learn from our mistakes, we need to examine
what they were, how we made or make them, and how we can best move forward. In
this way, the appropriation of voice that was involved in these art endeavours was
really a worthwhile examination of self.

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References
Friedman, S. (2004a). Art education culture: A puppet based exploration of identity,
racism, and responsibility. Retrieved from:
https://connect.ubc.ca/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?cour
se_id=_73024_1&content_id=_3184907_1&framesetWrapped=true

Friedman, S. (2004b). Responsibility and re/presentation: Reflection on digital video

and puppet-based inquiry. Retrieved from:
https://connect.ubc.ca/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?cour
se_id=_73024_1&content_id=_3184907_1&framesetWrapped=true

Goldfarb, Brian (2002). Visual pedagogy: Media cultures in and beyond the
classroom. Durham: Duke University Press.

Sylvia Kind -- Textiles. (2004). Retrieved from:

https://connect.ubc.ca/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?cour
se_id=_73024_1&content_id=_3184907_1&framesetWrapped=true

Vignette: art, culture, identity and representation: a conversation with three art
educators - Stacy Friedman, Sylvia Kind and Roger Dane. (2004). Retrieved
from:
https://connect.ubc.ca/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?cour
se_id=_73024_1&content_id=_3184907_1&framesetWrapped=true