CHALLENGING DISTRACTION IN EDUCATION: DISRUPTING PATTERNS OF INFORMATION DELIVERY THROUGH THE BODY, THE VOICE, AND THE ARTIST’S PRACTICE

Abstract

This dissertation deconstructs the organizing principles that govern information delivery in the classroom, presenting them as a significant obstacle to democracy. While federal and state regulations have advanced standardized testing, instructional materials, and teaching methods, these strategies are highly contested by progressive educators and critics, such as Henry Giroux and Diane Ravitch. In contrast to the education theories that inform educational criticism, this project explores an alternative path through the work of artists and philosophers who challenge the control of a single-voiced narrative, including Franco Berardi, Mikhail Bakhtin, John Cage, Mark Lombardi, and Tim Rollins. My research focuses on Berardi’s argument that technological advancements have automated and restricted the relationship between sensibility, communication, and labor. At this intersection, the dominant patterns of information delivery in the classroom reveal that data collection serves an agenda that disregards both the individual and the social body. In response, this project traces a brief history of school regulations to uncover the techniques that impose student distraction. Given the prominence of technology in automating classroom work, I aim to expand the discourse on technology from a focus on devices to encompass the techniques that organize both information and bodies. To counteract these automated methods, my project proposes a double-voiced practice, “Double I/Eye Mapping,” to decenter the reductive rules of analysis through the assembling techniques of artistic expression. By exploring “artists as teachers”—such as Josef Albers and Tim Rollins—I demonstrate how artists use negotiation strategies to interconnect language and imagery. Furthermore, I show how the voice, as a metaphor, is evident in the artist\u27s work, offering students the flexibility to understand the function of organization in different kinds of work.https://digitalmaine.com/academic/1068/thumbnail.jp