Thinking/Making: A Discussion of Method in the Emerging Arts Activist Programme's Chewing the Cud and Angry Youth Workshops

ABSTRACT

This article investigates and reflects on the methodologies employed, results achieved and questions raised in two recent transformative educational interventions. Both interventions fall under the broader Emerging Arts Activist Programme created by artist and educator Farieda Nazier. Chewing the Cud, the first workshop, was held at the Apartheid Museum in 2013 and facilitated by Nazier; the Angry Youth Workshop was subsequently held with students of the New Nation School in Fietas, 2014, led by Mocke J. van Veuren with mentoring by Nazier and Cedric Nunn. The authors compare the ways in which transformative processes and methods developed in their own critical arts practice have influenced the design and delivery of the youth-oriented arts interventions mentioned above. Processes of conscientisation, decolonisation, and the exercise of agency are explored through arts practices that address the interface between historicity, the everyday and personal experience as a field of critical discourse. Through the analysis of creative outputs and student feedback, and reflection on methodology, this article forms part of an on-going project, which aims to develop and test youth-focused critical pedagogies specifically focused on dealing with the aftermath of apartheid.

Keywords:

• critical pedagogy
• transformation
• praxis
• visual art education
• Freire
• Rancière