Applying the Pedagogy of the Oppressed: A Review of Creating Together: Participatory, Community-Based, and Collaborative Arts Practices and Scholarship across Canada

Creating Together: Participatory, Community-Based, and Collaborative Arts Practices and Scholarship across Canada offers a series of real-life practical examples where the concepts of the book title are effectively applied and an impact is made in a range of places across Canada and with a range of marginalized groups. By using a comparative approach, this review links the material presented in Creating Together: Participatory, Community-based, and Collaborative Arts Practices and Scholarship across Canada to the concepts presented in Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The examples in Creating Together offer pragmatic applications of Freire's concepts and provide a series of pragmatic illustration for those that want to make a difference in community engagement particularly with those who occupy the edges of society. Keywords: Arts Based, Participatory, Community, Collaboration, OppressedCreating. Together. Participatory. Community-based. Collaborative. Arts practices. Scholarship. Canada. Each of these words is powerful by themselves and when strung together in a phrase - a book title no less - I needed to know more. When I received the book, Creating Together: Participatory, Community-Based, and Collaborative Arts Practices and Scholarship across Canada (Comad & Sinner, 2015), the picture on cover drew me in as I attempted to discover what I was looking at and then I noticed the subtle details like the collaged image wrapping around the spine with the edge of the image showing on the back cover.My background in studying communities and structural conflict as well as my experience in corporate training and teaching Economics shaped my perspective as I made sense and as I share that sense of the book. Overtly this collection of material is about participatory arts and scholarship, however less obvious, and arguably more importantly, the book effectively demonstrates Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed.In working with Brazilian adult learners, Freire approached learning from a nontraditional approach that focused on collaborative or mutual learning that recognized the impact of a power differential within education. He presented his thoughts in the book: Pedagogy of the Oppressed which was originally written in 1968, translated into English in 1970, and republished as the 30th anniversary edition in 2000. Although the ideas of Freire have been challenged (Stem, 2009), many of the concepts have provided significant insights and impactful direction for working with marginalized individuals and groups of society.In the forward to the book the editors are described as ''contemporary artist-educators concerned with activation, authorship, and community in their independent and collective practices" (p. vii). These elements clearly come through in the way the book was assembled and in the material that is shared throughout the book. Again and again, throughout the presented chapter the range of authors use art for drawing marginalized people into community and into the community. The following sections provide an overview of Creating Together followed by specific examples of connections between ideas from Freire and the material in this book.Overview of Creating TogetherCreating Together (Conrad & Sinner, 2015) is segmented into three sections: (1) participatory arts practices, (2) community-based arts scholarship, and (3) collaborative arts approaches. Throughout the material shared in these sections, art is used in a variety of ways for engagement of oppressed peoples, for sense making, and for community building. In the 14 chapters spanning 240 pages I found that it was beneficial to read slowly and process the material thoroughly because I started to get bogged down in the middle of the book and was missing key details during my first reading.The chapters included in the first section highlighted a range of participatory arts practices that were used to engage indigenous youth, high-risk youth, youth experiencing mental health challenges, new immigrant/refugee communities, and homeless women. …