Teaching intervention enacting intersectional social justice within GCD at CSM
This intervention seeks to make a contribution to addressing the attainment gap between Home BAME / International students and Home white students on the BA Graphic Communication Design course at Central Saint Martins. Current UAL statistics show attainment for Home White students is 90%, Home BAME is 81% International 80% (UAL, 2022/23).
The canon of graphic design and typography is historically Eurocentric and male-dominated, resulting in teaching materials, references, and models of taste measures of excellence that are highly biased towards the white European male perspective. This privileges white middle-class male students. While “we sometimes don’t notice our own privilege because it is so ingrained within our culture” (Harding, 2024), being aware of this can help us diversify and decolonise the teaching environment.
My intervention is a short typography project. Students will be asked to choose a quote and design a poster that communicates the meaning of the words through typographic means. Although not explicit in the brief, my hope is that students will choose a quote that they connect to through their own, potentially intersectional, identities. Their choice will also be framed by each student’s positionality, acknowledging “the need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed” (Crenshaw, 1991).
I’m conscious that these kinds of projects encourage students to “reveal hidden parts of their identity which leads to vulnerability and unpredicted exposure” (Thomas, 2022), and this is something to be mindful of.
By starting with language, students can explore the relationship of typography to various religious, cultural, social themes, allowing them to explore a decolonial approach. Language will create empathy, enabling students to step outside of their own experience and to understand the emotions, mindset, attributes of their peers’ diverse (religious/racial/social) backgrounds. Learning from diversity is a key aspect of the project, as Sister Corita Kent says “we are each other’s sources” (Corita Kent, 1992).
This intervention takes a small step in hope of changing this situation, creating what bell hooks calls “the most radical space of possibility within the classroom” (hooks, 1994). The hope is the work created, conversations had, empathy created, critique will lead to further challenging of the European perspectives on graphic design and typography and creating experimental new visual languages that will permeate out into design practice and industry, and as Sydney J Harris states as the purpose of education “to turn mirrors into windows”.
Bibliography
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color, Stanford: Stanford Law Review
Harding, M (2022) Instructions for running the Privilege Walk, University of Warwick. Available at: https://warwick.ac.uk/services/dean-of-students-office/community-values-education/educationresources/privilegewalk/ (Accessed: 20 May 2024)
hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge
Kent, C. (1992) Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit. New York: Bantam
Thomas, C. (2022) Overcoming Identity Threat: Using Persona Pedagogy in Intersectionality and Inclusion Training. Social Sciences 11: 249.
UAL Dashboard, Available at: https://dashboards.arts.ac.uk/dashboard/ActiveDashboards/DashboardPage.aspx?dashboardid=cdf319c3-c4df-49aa-abcd-00cbdb5186e2&dashcontextid=638524406282856029 (Accessed 23 May 2024).
#positionallity #intersectionality #privilege #decolonisation #diversity