Ethic of Justice and Ethic of Care in Relation to Community Arts

Hi Everyone,
The first blog assignment is to comment on the ethic of care and ethic of justice perspectives and how they relate to my community arts work.

My understanding of the ethic of justice perspective is that it is based on an assumption of the self as separate; in this view, communities are comprised of many separate selves. The ideal here is that each person has equal rights and that no one ought violate the rights of anyone else. So in the case of the Heinz dilemma, Jake sees it as" sort of like a math problem with humans". He addresses the question: what's more valuable, life or property? And he answers that life is more valuable because the druggist can  get his money later from rich people with cancer; but Heinz can never get his wife back because each person is different so Heinz cannot replace his wife with a different person. Therefore the only logical solution is for Heinz to steal the drug.

In my community arts work, some of my reasoning was based on the ethic of justice perspective. I felt that my own rights as an art teacher were being violated and that the subject I taught was being given less than equal treatment.

I include the picture at left of a self portrait by a first grader to illustrate the power of children's art and its value, not only for the children but for anyone fortunate enough to view it and be moved by it. This first grader was new to the school. She was black and poor, a Metco student who was bussed into this predominantly white upper middle class school community. She seemed sad and lonely and her self portrait captures this beautifully. The figure is on the left side of the page superimposed on a light green background streaked with black thick jagged lines emanating from a large red-orange, sun-like shape.  The face is a large oval painted brown with two black shapes indicating eyes quite high on the forehead. Red tears stream from the eyes leading to a small smudge indicating the nose. The mouth is a black line with red spots on either side. The body is a blue rectangle with brown arms coming from the shoulders. On the girl's shirt is a red heart in the center with an X on it. What does the X mean? What does the portrait mean? It is almost impossible to put it into words which is precisely the point. Children's artwork expresses what is beyond words. It comes from a different and perhaps a deeper place. And to trivialize this work is to trivialize the inner thoughts and feelings of a fragile and vulnerable population. In including this picture and describing it, I am trying to bring to life the feelings underlying my motivation as an art teacher.  

When I began teaching in Arlington, I was assigned four entire schools and was responsible for the art education of about 1500 students. In addition, in most of the schools there was no art room so that I moved from one class to the next with materials piled high on a cart. To add to this situation, my classes were back to back, each class allotted only 30 minutes. By the time materials were distributed and instructions given, students had only a very brief period to work on projects. To make matters worse, there was no time between classes and the schedule often involved moving from one end of the school to the other end with no time to accomplish this.

I applied to the doctoral program at Lesley in part to provide some meaning to my life outside of my family. I had really given up trying to make my work as an art teacher meaningful. I was just going through the motions at work doing the best I could but felt there was no way to really improve things.

However, as I related in the seminar class, I had noticed that there were gender differences in the styles and topics of children's drawings. And I was fascinated by this. In the doctoral program I started reading feminist literature on development and gender differences and then became immersed in feminist and postmodernist philosophies. Both philosophies posited a new and different concept of the self as being part of a web of relationships rather than being separate.

These philosophies gave me the idea to solve my problems at work. I reached out to the community and it was like magic. Everything fell into place and the program that had been static and meaningless become exciting and dynamic. Furthermore, I was no longer alone in my struggle but had an entire community behind me. Together we were able not only to transform the program but also were able to gain more power because the entire community was watching what was going on.

Hence, my initial motivation for developing the community based art program was to rectify a situation that I had felt was unjust. Obviously, it was unjust not only to me as an art teacher but also to my students who had so little time to do hands-on art projects and so little exposure to art history, aesthetic understanding, and all facets of visual art that I might otherwise have presented. I must say that reaching out to the community was a huge move for me out of the darkness of isolation and bitterness and into the light of community and joy. But the initial motivation arose in part from my sense that my own rights and the rights of my students had been violated.

However, I could use the ethic of care perspective to tell the same story with a different emphasis and a different set of players and responses. So my conclusion is that I can assume both perspectives and I suspect that most people can. As to which one is more dominant for me, I really am not sure. In fact, I think for me at least, its often a mix of both perspectives that motivate my thinking and actions.

Wendy