STANDING ITEMS: CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES IN SOUTH AFRICAN ART DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE
Edited by Brenden Gray, Shashi Cullinan Cook, Tariq Toffa & Amie Soudien, 2020
“Standing items: critical pedagogies in South African art, design and architecture courageously engages many of today’s burning issues, in the quest to bring a more human face to the arts. In doing so, this volume … enters boldly into fiercely contested terrain to address persistent gaps in educational discourses within the arts.”
Antonia Darder, Foreword
"As structural inequalities are thrown into relief by the challenges of the COVID19 pandemic, students and educators are thinking in new and radical ways about pedagogy, in relation to questions of access, technology and community. It is our hope that this volume will serve as a critical but also creative contribution, rooted in the idea and ethical framework of pedagogy as a political and deeply relational human praxis" - the editors
Standing Items: critical pedagogies in South African art, design and architecture is a multidisciplinary volume on critical pedagogy (or pedagogies), as applied and reimagined in localized as well as broader global south contexts of creative practice and institutional learning. Presented in an accessible, open-access e-book form, the volume aims to address some of the many ‘standing items’ on the agenda of South African art and design education – most particularly, the paucity of scholarly literature dealing explicitly with issues of critical pedagogy and social justice in the fields of art, design and architecture education in South Africa.
Edited by Brenden Gray, Shashi Cullinan Cook, Tariq Toffa and Amie Soudien, the volume is loosely grouped into three sections: ‘Policy, discourse and rhetoric’, ‘Educator reflections on alternative pedagogies’ and ‘Theoretical interrogations and explorations’. In the inevitable entanglement of these thematic categories, contributing authors identify a range of structural challenges, from the continued racialisation and segregation of teaching and learning environments to the prevalence of neoliberal ideologies in emergent discourses such as ‘design thinking’, and the contradictions that emerge between academia, social responsibility and commercial design. In doing so – and as practicing educators writing for educators – they recommend alternative, multiliterate and decolonial ways of thinking and doing critical pedagogy.
With a foreword by Antonia Darder, the volume includes a range of voices and positions that together make an important contribution to the necessary – indeed urgent – re-thinking of higher education in postapartheid South Africa, and the ways in which entrenched inequalities continue to undermine the creative possibilities of teaching and learning in the creative fields.
Standing Items is a collaboration between the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD) and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Art and Design Education (STAND).