While our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.
Ray Bradbury, preface, Zen in the Art of Writing
Like many instructors trying to navigate the choppy waters of interdisciplinary pedagogy, I tend to fall back on my disciplinary strengths – in my case a Ph.D. in political science. Not surprisingly the focus of my “Introduction to Human Rights” course, especially the lectures, tends to be rooted in the social sciences. Yet I wanted the humanities to be more present in my course as a counterweight to my own ‘social sciency’ tendencies so I incorporated an assignment asking students to investigate the intersection of art and human rights through a detailed focus on a work of art (or an artist’s body of work). The primary learning objective of the assignment was for students to draw on the key concepts of the course and to apply them in analyzing a work of art that addresses or engages human rights. In a blog post/paper assignment—posted online and shared with the class—students were given free reign to find and select a work that somehow related to the theory, history, or practice of human rights. The choice of artwork was not limited to fiction, non-fictional art, or historical fiction. The prompt asked students to keep the following in mind when writing their responses: What aspects of human rights does your chosen work of art relate to? Are you the first to find this connection? What do critics say about the art? In crafting their blog posts, students were encouraged to incorporate photographs, images, video, or music into their entries, and to provide live links where appropriate. The blogs were posted on a private course website where students were required to comment on at least two of their fellow classmates’ posts, thereby the goal was that this would facilitate student-led collaborative learning and exchange of ideas in an organic, low-pressure environment.
The blog posts ranged greatly in terms of artistic genre and content. Some students investigated paintings, photography, and even cartoons, while others explored human rights in film. A few found extensive human rights references in song lyrics, some from mainstream pop songs, although most of the music-based analysis was derived from singer-songwriters devoted to social causes. In fact pop music provided a rather surprisingly successful medium, for instance two students, working independently, wrote blog posts on Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” and its message of acceptance of gay, lesbian, and transgender people. Another strong post focused on the human rights implications of Francisco Goya’s work, specifically the paintings The Second of May 1808, and The Third of May 1808. Furthermore, allowing students to find artwork that appeals to them led the class, and often this instructor, to discover more obscure artwork with human rights ramifications, such as The Wavy Gravy Movie: Saint Misbehavin, a documentary about an activist for peace, who is a native to the Connecticut area near where the class was taught.
Despite many contenders, my favorite student blog post took up Top of Form Dylan Garity’s poem “Rigged Game,” a spoken word piece addressing the difficulties faced by ESL students in the U.S. education system. Garity’s powerful performance of the poem – as part of the 2013 National Poetry Slam – inspired the student writer to purport that the performance of the poem was “very moving to hear” and connected the poem to the broader theme of human rights, including Article 26 of the UDHR, noting “Although ESL students in the U.S. are not technically being deprived of an education, in practice they are deprived; they are not getting the same quality of education as other students for whom English is their native language.” The power of the spoken word, and the topic, engaged the students, as many responded online to the post, including a student who revealed that they struggled personally in English language only ESL classes.
From my experience with this assignment, I found that students learn best when they are allowed to research topics that interest them; especially in human rights. Students, including underperforming ones, produced high quality work, and I was impressed by the depth, breadth, and quality not only of their selections of art but of their analysis. I would recommend using this type of assignment later in the semester—at least in an introductory class—after concepts, theory, and practice of human rights have been widely discussed. This assignment proved to be a useful way to evaluate how students apply what they learned about the abstract ideas of human rights to real world examples beyond the classroom. It also is a good way to allow students the opportunity to explore the utility of art for opening new viewpoints about the world and sharpen their powers of ‘critical interpretation’ of a piece of art and exposure to varied types of cultural criticism. I still need to work through a few pitfalls with the assignment including: How to help students, especially those who have no idea of which piece of art to analyze, find one without dictating my choices/opinions on them? How to encourage more critical responses, as students proved to be more cheerleaders of one another on this assignment (especially compared to debates in class)? Finally, some students were shy to share their posts in-class, despite producing some of the best online posts. I would be curious to hear about other teachers’ experience with similar types of assignments, how to avoid these pitfalls, and how to effectively bring more humanities into a social science oriented course without giving art criticism the short shrift.
Prompt available: Bringing Art Back In-Assignment prompt.