Of Material Benefit: Thinking Beyond The Textbook And Outside Of The Course Pack In The Canadian Survey

Assembling the Canadian art survey course does not, and perhaps should not, come without concerns on content, particularly in the assembly of a course that is centered on settler-colonial visual production, and in light of recent calls for Indigenization and internationalization of content as well as decolonial approaches to pedagogy. In thinking about the ways these aspects intersect I always come back to the question of: How to situate the art being produced by settlers within the colonial context in a way that exposes and problematizes the settler-colonial bias of the content for students from the outset?
I have also been sitting with Eve Tuck and K. Wang Yang’s essay “Decolonization is not a metaphor” which asserts that “decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools.” Efforts to “decolonize the classroom” are viewed by Tuck and Yang as an alleviation of settler guilt, and in short, a critical consciousness does not equal land back. (Tuck and Yang 2012, 3)
As a settler, teaching settler-colonial art histories of and in Canada, my goal is not to teach Indigenous visual histories, for which there is an extraordinarily vibrant amount of scholarship in the field, but rather to show the ways they intersect, to expose the hegemonic institutional forces that shape the history and art history, and to allow students to situate the course materials, as well as themselves, within that history.
It is – to use the title of the UAAC session in which this talk was first delivered – a bit of a risky business here. In my limited capacity, within the bounds of a single university course, how can I work to ensure that decolonization is not a metaphor – that it is not a performative act or a gesture. For me, it comes down to course content and structure, the careful selection and delivery of materials, and the taking of a risk to think beyond the textbook and outside of the course pack by reorienting towards action and activation of those materials.
The safety of a textbook in course design takes the pressure off of instructors to make choices around content. The risk is that going it alone may very well replicate the exclusionary nature of a textbook. This is where red flags begin to pop up, particularly when we think about some of the texts that have and continue to be leaned on in teaching the course. Even more recent multi-authored approaches that cover a range of media as well as the regionalism that characterises Canadian art can’t possibly deal with the entirety of a complex, colonial, international, and transnational visual history.
So, what to do? Well, like most of us would do, I thought long and hard about the syllabus. A syllabus is the product of both the detailed oriented task of selecting readings and creating assignments and the formation of the whole conceptual underpinning of the course. In introductory survey courses I like to introduce and use historiography to show how art in Canada has been written about – in essence to expose the structures and systems within Canadian art history.
For example, the first day of class before we even get to the syllabus, we do a ‘Judging a Book by its Contents’ activity that gets students looking at two “foundational” texts in the field: J Russel Harper’s Painting in Canada: A History (1977) Dennis Reid’s A Concise History of Canadian Painting (1973). In small groups students assess what is included and excluded, and why that might be before debriefing as a class. This exercise is one that gets students thinking about who was writing about what, and when, how and why were they doing it?
The outcome of the activity is hopefully that from the get-go students are aware of the problems and limitations in trying to create a survey course in Canadian art histories, and that they begin to see the settler-colonial bias of the content. It provides students with a critical skill that they can apply to all of the course materials. It also provides me with an opportunity to provoke curiosity, prompt discussion, and to set the tone of the course by previewing the types of critical enquiries I hope to engage from course materials. When I introduce the course syllabus after this exercises, students should be able to bring this critical skill to their understanding of the course structure and content.
Each week students have three readings: a standard canonical style reading, such as Dennis Reid or J. Russell Harper, that I suggest they skim; a more recent (25 years or less) scholarly article on a thematic or issue-based aspect from the same time period/geographical region/ or body of works as in the Reid or Harper; and lastly, a current (last 3 years) piece of critical writing from Canadian Art often by a scholar who is Black, Indigenous, or person of colour and/or a voice from the trans, queer, disability, refugee, diaspora communities.
A week of readings might shape out like this:
- A primary archival source (to skim): Paul Kane, Wanderings of an Artist Among the Indians of North America (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1859).
- A source that has been both longstanding and widely leaned upon in Canadian art history (to skim): Dennis Reid, “The Major Landscape Painters and Photographers to 1873,” in “Our own country Canada”: Being and Account of the National Aspirations of the Principal Landscape Artists in Montreal and Toronto 1860-1890 (Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 1879), 111-164.
- A critical source that introduces issues of colonialism, imperialism, and racism on top of the biographical and descriptive content within the Dennis Reid source: Heather Dawkins, “Paul Kane and the Eye of Power: Racism in Canadian Art History,” in Vanguard 15.4 (September 1986): 87-100.
- A critical writing that not only suggests that such issues continue to occupy present discourses in Canadian art, but to give the final word to an Indigenous voice as a way to restructure and rethink knowledge and authority in the telling of art histories in Canada: Adrienne Huard, “An Indigenous Woman’s View of the National Gallery of Canada,” Canadian Art (27 September 2017)
The contemporary readings move attention to the now; to the presence and vitality of voices Indigenous and otherwise that are demanding sovereignty, abolition, and social justice. It also gives students the opportunity to participate and follow in real time issues in the Canadian field if you encourage students to develop their own knowledge networks by following the writers, artists, and activists that we read on social media platforms. It is a way to connect students to the active work of scholars, artists, critics, and curators – historical to contemporary – as having very real and present implications
In doing so my intention is that some form of transformational learning occurs. Transformational learning goes beyond the acquisition of dates and facts by supporting learners in the development of a critical consciousness with the outcome of a fundamental expansion of their own worldview. As Jack Mezirow suggests in Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Progress, “transformational learning is one’s becoming critically aware of tacit assumptions/expectations and assessing their relevance for making an interpretation.” (Mezirow 2000, 4)
So certainly to Tuck and Yang’s point, critical consciousness does not equate to land back, but in doing the historiographical work, and particularly by including vibrant and present Indigenous voices that expose, and hold accountable the gatekeeping institutions of art in Canada, I hope the message is clear in the entirety of the course premise and in each and every lecture, that decolonization is nothing short of Indigenous sovereignty and flourishing.
My hope is that through the stacking of course materials and activities and assignments that encounter and expose the institutional forces that drive and shape art in Canada, that we as a class are forced to sit with our own positioning, bias, and complicity within these systems. In doing away with the textbook – in taking the risky step of going it alone – I think the answer to “how do we start to design our survey course?” particularly in a course so fundamentally ensnared in the concept of place – of Canada – is to begin with that concept itself by rooting ourselves and the art, scholarship, and materials we encounter very presently in place.