Walking Through the Art Histories Classroom: Movement and Pedagogies
Nicola Cloete, Catherine Duncan and Anton Coetzee, University of the Witwatersrand
In 2019 we initiated a new postgraduate art history course, in the School of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. The course had co-productive goals: first, to respond to the ongoing calls for decolonized higher education curricula in our shared fields of visual and cultural studies; and second, to explore how the teaching and learning approaches loosely grouped under “walking pedagogies” might facilitate this curricular redesign and reimagining. In this paper, we present the successes, failures, and our ambivalences about the course as an example of collaborative and participatory methods in the visual arts. Furthermore, we see this peripatetic movement as a kind of “academic travel” in that it is a form of critical pedagogy involving experiential learning premised on movement into and across new environments and unfamiliar spaces outside the classroom. At the same time, it allows for an extension of the ways in which collaborative teaching practice happens, and a way to expand the expectations of the discipline. Originally we had envisioned the course as a way of contesting the multi-stranded sources of epistemic authority operating in the traditional art history classroom responding to the call for the decolonization of the South African higher education curriculum. As such we began to “walk-with” participants, landscapes (entrenched in settler colonial histories), contemporary arts-based practices, sensory enquiry and affect. In practice, participants found unanticipated sites of resistance, productive disruptions, and electrifying new directions. These included grappling with the manifold, unthought-of entanglements of pedagogic actors (human and otherwise) that arise when the landscape is not treated as a bounded object of analysis, contained by set curricula and examples. The calls to unsettle entrenched dominant Western narratives as part of the work of any decolonial project asks us to revisit our own assumptions about the ways in which the visual is privileged as a way of teaching and knowing. This, we argue, is a departure for a course in art history.
KEY WORDS: Walking, Decolonized Curriculum, Critical Pedagogies, Visual and Cultural Studies