Visual Art meets Engaged Global Citizenship
Visual arts teacher Zoe Coughlan with a student at Hong Kong Academy.
When visual artsteacher Zoe Coughlan learned about Empathy to Impact, she found herself on a journey of transformation.
“I started doing it (embedding Empathy to Impact in my curriculum) because it felt like the right thing to do for students, and it’s really had an impact on me,” says Zoe. “It’s made me think more carefully about my choices and my locus of control as a teacher. We have a huge amount of control about what we teach and what units we design, so how can we use that to create learning experiences with greater impact? And if we want our students to be engaged citizens, I need to be an engaged citizen, too. The whole experience has really changed me.”
Zoe teaches grade 6, 7, 8 and 10 visual art at Hong Kong Academy (HKA). She also teaches grade 12 students engaged in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program. She has lived in Hong Kong for 20 years and has taught at HKA for 7 ½ of those years.
“I came to arts teaching a bit late, as I was teaching English to adults in Hong Kong before I became a classroom teacher,” reflects Zoe. “At first, I just wanted my students to focus on making art and being free to focus on the art. But when I took the Empathy to Impact course, I realized it wasn’t ‘either/or’. Art is all about engaging the world, so I started thinking about how I could bring those approaches into my curriculum.”
Zoe now designs her courses so that the first unit in each grade level focuses on skills, and then the second unit offers a way to apply those skills in relation to global issues and global citizenship topics.
As an example, Zoe’s students in grade 10 spent one unit learning about postmodern principles and contemporary art. They learned about things like juxtaposition, time as a medium, the male gaze and female agency, and hybridity between 2D and 3D spaces.
Then, in the second half of the grade 10 unit, Zoe had students engage with three long-term HKA community partners to learn about their work and make connections to what they had learned about contemporary art. The community partners included an NGO that is an anti-human trafficking organization working with industries to assess supply chains to ensure ethical and fair sourcing. Another partner is an organization that helps textile and fashion businesses uplevel their ethics and practices. And another partner engages with homelessness in Hong Kong.
“We were doing school online when this unit started, and I organized virtual talks with these three organizations,” explains Zoe. “Students learned about the work and decided which topic they wanted to know more about, which is tied to the ‘care’ portion of the Empathy to Impact cycle. I wanted students to have agency to identify what they care about and then have choice in terms of what they respond to.”
After choosing an issue and doing some more research, students created contemporary art pieces as advocacy for their issue. They used the principles of postmodern art to create an impact for their audience.
Students created digital animations, visual art, installations, satirical pieces and more. All were exhibited on campus and curated online and on social media, as well, and each student recorded a statement about their art to add commentary and raise awareness.
“One student painted a portrait of someone who had been trafficked into the cocoa industry in West Africa, and used cocoa powder as the paint medium; that piece was called ‘Bittersweet’,” recalls Zoe.
Zoe’s grade 7 students learned about pop art, and then applied what they learned to issues related to sustainable food. Students worked in small groups to create plaster sculptures, and Zoe created a Padlet to help orient students to some key ideas and themes about sustainable food.
“In learning about pop art, we had explored how some artists use humor to communicate a serious message,” says Zoe. “In creating their sculptures, some students really ran with this idea. One group learned about slavery in the seafood industry, particularly businesses in Thailand, and then they made a sculpture of a giant prawn peeling a human. It was effective and really showed critical thinking about the issue.”
Zoe’s ongoing practice has been transformed significantly through her work with Inspire Citizens and the Empathy to Impact model. She also did an Inspire Citizens Eco Photography course with her students, and is planning to enroll in the Global Citizenship Certificate next year after she has moved to Lima, Peru.
Below: Art created by Zoe’s grade 10 students including “Bittersweet” (right).
