Chapter 20: Sowing Seeds of Social Justice Through Performative Pedagogy: Middle School Students Explore Genocide

This chapter chronicles the work of a teacher of eighth-grade students and a college researcher who, together, engage middle school students in art conversations, independent study, and collage in order to build understandings of social justice (in)formed by a close examination of genocide. Through performative pedagogy, the authors occasion students’ examination of genocide. Specifically, students compose and intermix various key notions in a series of performances intended to develop an awareness of power, domination, and resistance while transmediating some of these compositions and readings in multimedia hypertexts, performance, and finger painting.

We, the coauthors, Mary Ann Reilly, an associate professor in New York, and Rob Cohen, a teacher of eighth-grade students in northeast New Jersey, have been investigating the uses of collage as an organizing force for teaching social justice in Cohen’s language arts class. Together, we have been wondering in what ways the use of collage might influence students to engage in double-voiced readings of texts (Bakhtin, 1981, 1984) and how such readings might influence their composing processes as well as their sense of social justice. Bakhtin defines double-voiced discourse as the presence of two voices, dialogically interrelated. Bakhtin (1984) writes, “Two embodied meanings cannot lie side by side like two objects—they must come into inner contact; that is, they must enter into a semantic bond” (p. 189). In thinking about Bakhtin’s understanding of double-voiced discourse, we wondered if collage might act as a conduit occasioning inner contact. Brockelman (2001) says postmodern collage “produces a kind of tension between the specificity of its signifiers and the truth they represent” (2001, p. 14, emphasis in original). We wondered what tensions might be produced as economically privileged students investigated poverty and genocide and did so through performance. The text that follows focuses on the students’ performances with Wilkes’s (1994)One Day We Had to Run: Refugee Children Tell Their Stories in Words and Paintings and locates the students’ responses to Wilkes’s text within a larger study of genocide.