Teaching as Art

Teaching others has been a lifetime mission of mine, formally and informally. I always loved playing school growing up. Pretending to do homework, studying during summer breaks, or playing teacher to my student brother or an audience of stuffed animals when he tired of me being bossy older sibling. I've been told I'm more of a rarer type of student by Vaimo and my Bestie who reminds me not everyone relishes in work related to learning as much as I. This became most clear when I went back to school and Vaimo witnessed me rewriting my lecture notes, creating a physical and digital set of flashcards, studying in every moment of "free time," obsessing over the ins and outs of my art history class including not only the content but also the pedagogical approaches of my profs. Some of this was learned behavior from a highly organized and regimented approach to study passed on to me by my father, and some of this was years of experience as a student with honed techniques on how to maximize time, hack cognitive strategies, and a lifetime of developing my personal stress and time management life skills as student and teacher. I can remember clearly, the exhilarating feelings of having my own class of undergraduates as a graduate student. Leading eager undergrads through a sixteen-week learning journey was a true highlight of my life. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but years of teaching swim lessons at the Coronado Club and coaching young swimmers provided me a good grounding for what it meant to be a teacher. As did my undergraduate time as a campus student leader, conferencing, presenting workshop sessions, organizing learning, creating our own versions of the messy blurring of playing house mixed with playing teacher as a young person coming into legal drinking age. I always liked the mental challenge of thinking through how to present a concept clearly to others who may not know much about the subject. When I walked into the college classroom as the main instructor a few years later in my early 20s there was a rush and a thrill of doing so. There was a theatricality of it all “being on,” being in charge, being in front.

With the explosion of memes and creative image and text merging from younger millennials and gen z-ers there is such a beauty in the open ways that life through their eyes becomes filtered out through internet culture. This strikes me as a major pulling the curtain back moment and revealing the ordinary wizard behind the giant holographic spectacle. They have named fully the process by which graduate students and even tenured professors are sometimes only slightly ahead of the class in terms of the teaching journey. Whether lecturing, facilitating learning through talking or writing, or deeply engaging a text (all staples of my teaching style) there were days when I was prepping lecture slides moments before walking into the classroom, or cramming the re-read of the essay we were turning toward, or in the super scary moments reading the work for the first time before discussing it. I’m not here to commend or condemn that practice, nor to wax poetically about the ethics of such behavior, nor to pontificate on the systemic factors that lead to this absolutely atrocious and anxiety producing prep sessions before a classroom wrangling, only to say that it happens often. And I’m certain my experience was more typical than unique. In my case it was the quotidian result of a heavy teaching load, multiple classes per semester all different preps, teaching all levels of your discipline’s core courses, and especially as the only full time faculty member in a program providing a major, three minors and a certificate program. Again, trying to stay away from judgement even as my wounds try to drag me down into the snark of it all. I’m simply trying to peel back the curtain.

And I am peeling back that curtain because several times this week I have turned to my Twitter timeline, or my Instagram story feed and thought, how do I share my heartbreak of Putin's invasion of Ukraine in ways that feel honest, authentic, bold, yet open to learning? How do I decry war abroad anywhere? What is the use of this protest in light of our current geopolitical contexts that privilege some attention to victims of war over others? I regularly used to teach a global feminisms course. My tweets and IG posts often start here. As my attempt to mark my experience of reading anti-war feminist theories and critiques, of deeply engaging with Third World Feminisms, a body of feminism that intersects and influences Chicana Feminist theory, as evidence of some expertise on the matter. Teaching that class was so difficult every semester because to do so one must engage with histories of violence, colonialism, imperialism, of turbulence, of particular intersections of how military conflicts merge with the everyday sexisms that take on unique and completely sadly universal truths about how cis and trans women and their children bear the brunt of war through the destabilizing of peace, by way of physical and sexual violences. The terror of state violence and armed conflict remains something I have gratefully not experienced to the level that I am currently traumatized by my experiences with it. Of course, this is not to say I am not carrying the trauma of my ancestors, just that the traumas are of the historical makings not from my day-to-day existence. Sure I’ve had my run-ins with militarized police forces at protests I’ve attended, been pulled aside for extra screenings by Border Patrol as my white travel companions breeze through reentry points back into our country of citizenship. Sure, election judges have attempted to turn me away from voting in a state that has same day voter’s registration (I was registered). Sure, I experience a deep level of dis-ease provoked by the vision of men wearing guns in or out of uniform. But, I have not had to survive through an active armed conflict, I have not been a refugee for reasons related to conflict or climate disaster. I’ve only seen countless documentaries, read first persons accounts of women fleeing conflict zones, studied from the distance of not only geography but through the mediation of a book, or a film, on the horrors of war.

There is something different about thinking through these ideas with others in the space of a classroom that does and does not translate to 280 characters in a tweet. There is something different about thinking through these ideas in writing vs. orally where these two forms of communication prove different in how the words come out and how we choose to edit (or perhaps self-censor) those words based on the audience, the method, the probable reception and so on. Of course, in today’s day every method of communication can be read as a text, so that a reporter on CNN stating that Ukraine is different from Afghanistan live on the air realizes his mistake as he’s talking in implying Ukraine is civilized while Afghanistan isn’t. And this attitude should be critiqued, because it creates and maintains the hierarchies of Western Civilization as somehow innately better than other cultures. And, I guess, what I’m seeing is that in a context of dis/misinformation campaigns, cancel culture (as it’s practiced and as its politicized), censorship by the state or corporate interests, true freedom may be being able to say the messed up stuff as long as we learn from it. As long as we think about what it means when called in about it, as long as it can eventually inspire more peace, more conversation, less taking up of arms.

I don’t believe in some made-up rules that one has to use their feeds or that our art needs to always speak to the current political crisis at the moment. Even as, evidenced by this essay, I feel strongly compelled to do so. My ego would like to be rewarded for paying attention, for thinking deeply. However, I do believe that as participants of a representative democracy it is our duty to engage. And that there’s a role for expertise, there is something to marvel at the number of foreign policy “experts” taking to twitter after a crash course in learning about golden passports. Perhaps what I’m saying is that it may be tempting to see these teaching/learning experiences as the same. That new tweets fired off with urgency in our attention economy is the same as a twenty-two year old me leading 18 year olds through content I had just only learned myself. And, I know it is different because in the classroom there is dialogue, there are questions, there are tools related to how to think about an idea. There is the ability to say “I don’t know,” or “I’ll have to think about that,” there are methods on how to evaluate sources, there is a community in which we are invested in each others’ understandings. There is more room for nuance and complexity that doesn’t always exist in other public squares. And, I must also say, there must be room for us to find joy when we have access to it, and to live this one life we have to the fullest. Perhaps, I’m writing these things out for you so that I too can believe it. I’ve been sleeping pretty soundly all things considered and I am grateful for every meal, every peaceful sunrise, every moment I hear the birds singing to each other in the mornings which recently began at the ChicFinn indicating the transition from winter to spring has finally started.

Always one to struggle with where to end, I share something that has been on my mind these last few days. In 2014 Vaimo and I had the occasion to travel to Cuba for our honeymoon. With our Witness for Peace delegation of women we traveled the streets of Havana on the first of our ten night trip. We were thoroughly enjoying the warmth of an island in February, and the sounds of music and sights of people dancing in bars and on street corners. A woman approached our group and asked if we were “American.” Some of us shyly said yes, having been advised by others in the group to claim Canadian citizenship instead to avoid stigma. Having noticed our hesitancy she smiled and welcomed us to her country. My brave Vaimo asked, "how can you be so welcoming to us after everything we have done to your country?" And she responded, “we don’t hate you, we hate the actions of your government.” What a gracious teacher.

What I’m Reading

1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei

Not the typical memoir I would usually pick up, but when I saw that “new!” sticker on the cover of this rather thick book and the cool drawings I thought, hmmmm let me learn about this artist. And then wonderfully as books often do, I learned so much about Chinese history and the realities of surveillance, detention, human rights violations and political challenges of contemporary China through Ai Weiwei’s perspective. I found the organization of the book intriguing, like a folded fan, you know each of the creases make the whole and so on each turn of the fabric we gain a jump back in time or forward about various important moments in Ai Weiwei’s life. His focus on his father as another method to tell his story is compelling and beautiful. I was struck so many times by his words that I kept jotting down important quotes. Take this one for instance after he was almost arrested and quickly took to his blog to share a message with readers, “‘Reject cynicism, reject cooperation, refuse to be intimidated, refuse to ‘drink tea’’…I sensed that this might be my last chance to state my position clearly. Inviting a dissident to ‘drink tea’ is the secret police’s way of issuing a warning, their way of intimidating you and weakening your resistance. But self-censorship amounts to self-abasement, and timidity is the road to despair.” Another gracious teacher. 

Artist Offerings

• Ok, Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom has been one of my personal scholar crushes, but this video of her discussing her creative practice, how she teaches, and business savvy is a must watch.
• ​Don’t have time to read a nearly 400-page memoir, check out this Art21 profile of Ai Weiwei 
• I learned about Danie Cansino’s work through an Artforum article about LA shows to see and I’m absolutely in love with the painting titled Palatero that is painted on a serape. I wish I could see this work in person.

Creative Ritual

Last week I opened this wonderful email saying that one of my Roots paintings was not only accepted to the LatinxArte Biennial but that it was awarded the Juror’s Choice Award by one of the jurors. Omaha, here we come! I can’t wait to meet her because she seems like a really cool Latina feminist artist I should be friends with IRL! I also had the chance to do a virtual class visit for my Prima, who invited me to talk about my artistic practice for her class about Latina/os in Minnesota. It was such a fun time and the questions from the students were so deeply engaging. I’m most grateful for their love of my Kitchen Saints! It was also good to answer their specific questions as I start to prepare for my upcoming show at New York Mills Cultural Center! Squeezed in an artist talk for the closing reception of my Cohort show last week and have been painting every day. How I manage to keep all of this on the tracks I don’t know, but we persist! We must!

Questions to ponder

Who are your teachers? 
Who do you teach? 
How are you living life to your fullest, with urgency and joy? 
What is your expertise, how are you sharing it? 

Thanks for journeying with me. I hope, as always, that you take what you need and leave the rest for someone else, or for another time. 

-KCF

Many thanks for those who support this work. Your support helps me maintain my studio and continue to shape it into the utopia that enables me to have peace as I paint and create. Thank you for being part of my crew of supporters who help fuel the continuation of my work. Support comes in many forms and I appreciate all of it.