The Pedagogy of Waiting: Rethinking Art Education with Disability
Although disability legislation has provided increased opportunities for students with disabilities to learn art in classrooms and art centers since the 1970s, these students’ experiences have often been overlooked, dismissed, and/or stigmatized by normative understandings of art making and art learning. To challenge such disenfranchisement, this study advocates for the nuanced and differentiated experiences of people with disabilities that would otherwise go unrecognized by ableist art curriculum and pedagogy. By investigating the artistic processes and practices of artists who have disabilities through field observations, I argue for reconceptualizing pedagogical practices and educational content for all learners. Particularly, based on my data analysis of the artists’ everyday practices, I develop the concept of a pedagogy of waiting, which allows for a consideration of embodied differences. A pedagogy of waiting is attuned to non-symbolic and heterogeneous movements in bodies. It allows time and space for the recurring rhythms in artists’ and students’ experiences to emerge and encourages their differentiated ways of learning and being in the world.
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https://vimeo.com/user3913624/nicolestorm
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