An alternate tracing as arts-based inquiry: Recognizing past-present trajectories of schooling and Whiteness in an art student-teacher observation

Abstract

In this article, I revisit an art student-teacher observation in an elementary school in which I encountered unsettling approaches to discipline practices. Using process philosophy as a theoretical guide, I describe my arts-based inquiry into what transpired in the school that day as events that were produced in a field of relations. Sensing that there was something I was not initially able to recognize about the field of relations from which the events were catalysed, I pursued an alternate tracing of the events as juxtaposed with texts relevant to the history of schooling in the United States. This process brought to the fore the role of Whiteness – past and present – in the disciplinary norms around which schooling in the United States is centred. I further explore the role of Whiteness in the disciplining of bodies, sounds, affects and emotions in schools – all of which affect students’ and teachers’ ways of being in art classrooms.