From Familiar to Strrange

There has been an immense growth in the development of community-based Art Education in our schools. Flavia Bastos, author of “Making the . . . . .” ) proposes a modification to CBAE framework that draws onto local community art and culture rather than art education and community. She explores the idea of “ Making the Familiar Strange” by using locally-produced art work to create an awareness of cultural identity, and a complex dialogue about community into the classroom. Her frameworks is partially derived from Paulo Freire who believes that a learner’s position in the world provides humans with conditions of interpretations (Flavia pg 72).

Flavia works closely with three disadvantage rural communities in New Orleans deriving. She uses the example where students create chairs from paper mache. They then work with the local furniture department to understand the needs of the community in relation to the child in the classroom. One school teacher knows that most of the children within her classroom will end up working closely in the surrounding area. This teacher then creates a curriculum to help them investigate career choices within the community. This kind of learning becomes enriching not only to the student but to the community.

I found this reading very interesting. I am drawn to her idea of Making the Familiar Strange. I feel that in our communities we tend to forget the importance of various details because we are so accustomed to seeing things one way. I agree with Flavias ideas, and found it very useful for my classroom in the near future. After reading this I felt the need to readjust one of my lesson plans. In this lesson I am using the artist Mark Bradford. He creates wonderful collages using posters and advertisements from his surrounding communities. So I thought if my students could do the same, but have local merchants join us to display their local advertisements and allow the students to create new ones, thus developing a partnership. The...