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

Abstract

This 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.