Author: Meera Rampalli

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 51

ISBN-13:

My thesis explores how critical place-based pedagogy and decolonial education strategies contribute to civic leadership through a qualitative ethnographic study of leaders and organizers who catalyze positive community change. The purpose of this study is to better understand effective grassroots leadership in public arts organizing and cultural sectors. I am a teaching artist with 4 years of experience teaching in community art practice, and my research and experience contribute to this autoethnographic study. The primary question I sought to answer was, what factors contribute to civic leadership and effective positive change in collective organizing? Following this I asked, how might teaching with decolonial methods through the lens of critical pedagogy of place inform a community arts practice? In order to answer these questions, I interviewed practitioners whose life works are exemplary examples of positive community change. These organizers included Emory Douglas, the former Minister of Culture of the Black Panther Party, Blanche Suggs-Killingworth, a representative of Neighborhood Housing Services and active founder of the North Lawndale Historical and Cultural Society, and Dr. Azure Thompson, who uses place-based approaches in community research. Over the course of one year, I collected data in many forms, including field notes and personal interviews. I transcribed conversations and wrote journal entries based on my own observations. I discovered that these dynamic leaders consider environment as more than simply “site.” They critically analyze current spatial relationships to better understand their own professional practices, operations, and codes of conduct. By recognizing their own leadership as functioning within a hierarchical structure, these leaders challenge this structure by fostering earnest and active connections to the communities they serve. There is a gap in existing research concerning the ways in which leadership methods inform community art practice in art education. By uniting decolonial methodologies and critical pedagogy of place theory in my research and analysis, my goal was to identify effective orientations toward and strategies for grassroots leadership in public arts organizing, thus providing future teaching artists and arts administrators with frameworks reflecting critically on their own agency as artists and leaders functions within larger power dynamics.