Thinking together through pictures: The community of philosophical enquiry and visual analysis as a transformative pedagogy

This qualitative study explores how a community of enquiry pedagogy in combination with a social semiotic approach to visual analysis influenced the changing knowledge and concepts of knowledge experienced by students in an undergraduate teacher education course. The art of the Constitutional Court of South Africa was the focus of our study and students developed structured and logical frameworks for analysing artworks as well as playing with laterally extending concepts such as art, justice, equality and humanity. The findings suggest that the dialogical and embodied practice of a community of enquiry pedagogy and the meaning-making strategies offered by a social semiotic approach to visual analysis strongly influenced my students’ and my own awareness of knowledge as a creative and experiential opening up and as a companion to the equally valuable experience of not knowing. Visual and embodied forms of knowledge explored through artworks forged a link between ‘self’ and ‘learning self’. These findings have implications for the selection of appropriate teacher education pedagogies.


Introduction
Easy access to a range of meaning-making strategies in the early learning phases of schooling can enhance learning and create an inclusive environment for learners with different learning styles (Bruce, 2004: 107). This suggests that art education should provide rich and generative possibilities for children in our primary schools. Due to a history of purposeful exclusion of creative activities for the majority of children, South African school authorities have an immense challenge in transforming schools into welcoming, productive and creatively shared spaces incor po rating the arts into the curriculum in a meaningful way. Tertiary institutions of education have, as one of their many impossible tasks 1 , that of transforming students into art teachers for the general education and training band. What has emerged through working in the arts with student teachers, however, is that the learning goes beyond the Freire (1972), Kallantzis (2006), Brubaker (2012) and others have critiqued the practice common in formal education since its inception which can best be described as a 'banking' style of education. Most of the students who attend the institution in which this study was done come with experiences that comfortably fit this description. Wanting to stimulate thinking and creativity in students rather than receiving back repackaged versions of my own lectures, I also intended to model enquiry-based teaching that my students would hopefully be inspired to emulate. My own apprenticeship into art history teaching was through the manufacture of a seductive narrative presented as if it was the only one (the Western canon and a selected few outside of it), speaking in the dark to a silent audience. I had subsequently been influenced by scholars deconstructing the discipline (Lippard, 1990;Minor, 1994;Preziosi, 1989) who named its partialities and selections and by the emerging and widening field of study called visual culture (Mirzoeff, 2002). Visual culture studies (Freedman, 2003) and multicultural education (Cahan & Kocur, 1996) explore the pedagogical implications of these critiques and pose a challenge to the more strictly discipline based forms of art education 2 in schools.

Motivations for the course design
The second reason behind the course design had to do with a persistent and serious problem experienced in undergraduate courses. There is a high degree of plagiarism emerging from written assignments in the courses run at the institution and both local and international research into academic access and English second language learning suggest that this is a common and controversial issue in tertiary education (Lea & Street, 2000;Archer, 2006). Some compelling research done on this phenomenon suggests the need for more verbal and discursive activities prior to the writing of assignments (Morita, 2000;Thesen, 2001;Sowden, 2005).
The course represented a high stakes enterprise. The time available in the B.Ed. degree timetable to introduce the many aspects of art education to the students means that the selection of content is crucial. The students are mostly first time art learners. Our challenge is to give as rich an art experience as possible so that students are able to experience their own creativity and have the opportunity to recognise what the subject 'art' might look like in a classroom setting. Apart from feeling under pressure to fast track the art learning of these students new to the field, another reason the stakes are high is the current and urgent need 169 for transformation in schools. This transformation would include a conception of teaching that relates to democracy and the values of the constitution not only in content but which is experiential in practice (Ndofirepi & Mathebula, 2011).

South African schools and their teachers
Drawing data from a wide range of research undertaken in primary schools in South Africa, Fleisch (2007) identifies the low expectation that teachers have of their learners as a key contributor to poor performance among children in South Africa. Another common feature of classroom life is one of reading and reciting text without understanding its meaning (Fleisch, 2007: 120139). I set about documenting one of the art methodology courses I taught to undergraduate education students in which an enquiry-based methodology was employed. An enquiry depends on full participation and original thought: individual histories and experience is central to the negotiation of meaning and understanding.

The study
The art of the Constitutional Court of South Africa was the focus of the study and students developed structured and logical frameworks for analysing artworks but also explored laterally extending concepts such as art, justice, equality and humanity. The selection of works in the collection is not implicit nor part of an already existing and inaccessible narrative or inherited canon. The works were seen in their original state, not only as reproductions or as uniformly sized digital slides. The works had been donated or chosen with the intention of creating a visually meaningful environment for the court whose mandate was to uphold the new constitution. The site chosen for the court building was that of the Old Fort Prison where prominent opponents of apartheid had been held as well as thousands of pass-law defaulters and other ordinary citizens turned criminal by an unjust system.
The project linked a study of contemporary art with an exploration of the concept of justice. The aim was to give students an experience of generating an argument about a discipline specific problem drawing on relevant theory, while positioning themselves and drawing on their own opinions, insights and interpretations. These thinking moves are to be expected in any academic writing exercise. I intended to offer students the opportunity for embodied learning and meaningmaking through direct encounters with works by contemporary South African artists grappling with current issues around our constitutional values. By inviting the realworld life experience of students into the study of justice, the abstract concept was pulled and stretched in all directions. This is what Kennedy and Kennedy (2001: 272) refer to as "cracking concepts" through enquiry and it also represents what Ellsworth (2005: 1) refers to as "knowledgein themaking", rather than encounters with "knowledge made". Both social semiotics and the community of enquiry acknowledge the role of our multiple resources that include body, mind, experience and history in our meaningmaking practices. This process of meaning making will be expanded on further in the paper.

How the study was done
The class was a diverse group of twenty students including inservice foundation phase teachers from Limpopo, postmatric students, some older students, ranging in age, gender, class, language and nationality with two students from other Southern African countries.
Thirteen of these students were interviewed at the end of the course and the sample reflected the diversity of the group as a whole. It was an entrylevel course for undergraduate teaching students lasting approximately ten weeks.

Sequence
The students were invited to generate questions in response to art postcards. In groups, the students shared their questions and engaged with each other's postcards. Engaging in an ordering process, students then examined the questions they had produced to see if they could be categorised into groups or types of questions. Categories emerging were consistent with those proposed by Charman, Rose and Wilson (2006): those of subject matter and meaning (what?), object or the material (how was it made/displayed?), context (the backstory) and finally one's personal reaction (which often has implications for the other three). The students each developed a tool (a pack of cards, a dice or a similar instrument) to be used in a gallery setting, to guide questioning around an image. The tools scaffolded a process of breaking down the message of the text into smaller elements and slowing down the interpretation process, allowing a detailed reading. Students took this tool with them to the Constitutional Court where they were given a guided tour of the art collection, learnt about its origins, the selection/acquisition processes and were given information about each work. Using their tool, the students generated a detailed descriptive analysis of their selected work and recorded personal feelings, associations and unanswered questions. The approach to visual analysis that I acknowledged was the contested nature of the field (GaztambideFernadez, 2013). While I paid some attention to a formalist artbased visual analysis (seeing art as a language with grammar made up of elements like line, shape, form, contrast, balance etc.) I focussed more on the meaning-making practices of visual culture studies and social semiotics where intertextuality, fluid and changing interpretations are valued. Charman et al. (2006: 57) take a similar position to my own: inbetween these two approaches. They use an analytical approach as a "way in" but then problematise the categories by introducing the "personal" as a connector to wider processes 3 .
As a class, we participated in an hourlong enquiry around the topic of art and justice after the tour. In preparation the class read and discussed texts on human rights, its history and its contended and changing meaning (Carrim, 2000). The group generated a number of questions and chose to explore the following one: 'How can art be used to bring about justice?' The enquiry allowed students to discuss the works they had seen in the court but they also referred to other iconic South African images, notably Sam Nzima's photograph of Hector Pietersen. 4 Issues of nationhood and citizenship were contrasted with ideas about common humanity and empathy.
The most important course assignment was a research and writing activity in which each student selected one work from the collection on which to conduct a detailed study. Students then wrote an essay about the artwork, discussing the relationship between the concepts of art and justice.

What is philosophy for children and the community of enquiry? Key characteristics of the pedagogy
Philosophy for children was originally developed as a school curriculum for North American children by philosopher/educator Mathew Lipman and his colleague Ann Margaret Sharp. It draws on the Socratic tradition and the work of pragmatist philosophers C.S. Peirce and John Dewey and Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (Lipman & Sharp, 1978). Philosophy for children, or P4C, has developed in different directions in different contexts and continues to grow and be extensively developed, practised and theorised by writers such as Splitter and Sharp (1995), Fisher (2008), Green (1999), Cam (2000), Kennedy and Kennedy (2001), Haynes (2002), Ndofirepi and Mathebula (2011), Haynes and Murris (2012).
A comparison between the enquirybased learning pedagogy and that of commonly practised formal education clarifies the dramatic impact this approach can have on practice. Table 1 below provides a summary of the shared practice of the community of enquiry and while some of the points in the left column may seem anecdotal, they have resonance in my own practice and in the accounts that students give of their learning in other courses. The points made here have been simplified into a dualistic opposition but in reality occur in a range of combinations.  Kennedy and Kennedy, 2001;Haynes, 2002 andFisher, 2008)

Conventional teaching Enquiry-based teaching and learning
Outcomes planned Outcomes not planned Focus on content and skills Focus on dispositions and practices Assumption of unequal ownership of knowledge Assumption of equality of intelligence Rows or groups of desks Circle Students listen to teacher Participants listen to and respond to each other Teachercentred or learnercentred The enquiry or the question is at the centre Teacher uses questioning to identify misunderstandings Questioning is at the centre of the pedagogy and opens up enquiry The teacher plans and directs the lesson The group agrees on basic procedures and then drives the process Conflict, confusion, disagreement seen as disruptive or undesirable Conflict, confusion, disagreement seen as opportunities for deepening the enquiry Children/learners seen as 'future' citizens Children/learners practise democratic citizenship in the group Better explanation is better teaching Better facilitation is being able to be an equal member of an enquiry (coenquirer) Metacognition rare Focus on learning to know ourselves as thinkers

Democratic teaching and learning
In enquirybased teaching and learning, students take responsibility for their own learning, constructing knowledge through dialogue with their peers and teacher and through internal dialogue. They "make sense" of new ideas in terms of their own experience, contexts and prior understandings (Murris, 2000;. This constructivist approach is supported in the various versions of the post1994 South African curriculum that insists on contextual relevance and integration of knowledge, moving away from strictly bounded academic knowledge and the reception and reproduction of knowledge made. More broadly the South African curriculum, as pointed out by Green, has at its core all the P4C values listed by Splitter and Sharp (Green, 1999: 13). These include critical and creative thinking, working effectively in a group and communicating using a range of modes or literacies.
The crisis in South African education is expressed in the reported poor performance of South African children who score significantly below the expected level of achievement expected for their age groups. A deficit view can also be held about undergraduate students who have poor matric results and relatively low levels of language proficiency. To what extent does this imply that they cannot be invited to think? I argue that the big questions of art and justice and their expression in material form are appropriate subjects for a responding to art course for education students. Given a meaningful entry point (students' experience of democracy or the lack of it, issues of race, the causes of poverty) to a vast and complex subject (art history and theory), participants are more able to engage critically with the artworks and are able to view the material from their own acknowledged situated vantage point (Greene, 1977).

Learning about art and justice -Students' writing
Not only did the students make convincing claims for a relationship between art and the values of justice and human rights but they explored the cracks in the edifice of the idea of democracy and constitutionalism. They allowed the artworks to speak to them as active viewers. Whole, embodied, gendered, social actors with lives and experiences that carry truths that are not immediately visible or directly representable. In her essay on art and justice, student A notes: "Art is the other form of language that brings to the people what is unnoticed" (Giorza, 2012: 41). The realities of poverty, gender violence and unequal education were as equally present in the discourse as the possibilities of equality and freedom. It seemed as though the students were accessing through the works and the environment of the court, some of the key debates that had gone into the formation of the constitution and bill of rights. Sachs (2009) in his book The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law explains just how controversial the inclusion of socioeconomic rights into the bill of rights was. On the day of our visit to the court, a demonstration against inner city housing evictions was happening outside.

Figures 1 and 2: A Luta Continua by Thomas Mulcaire (above) and A Luta Continua in situ
behind Through the Barrier -1956 Treason Trial Frieze and Ladder by Georgie Papageorge in the foyer of the Constitutional Court (Constitutional Court Art Collection).
Student B observes: "There is another frieze which is mounted behind the ladder and is written, 'A Luta Continua' meaning 'the struggle continues'. I think it means that even if we have found the freedom, the struggle continues. People still have to work hard for better lives and for the better economic future of our country" (Giorza, 2012: 3940).

Figure 3: Albert Adams Tethered monkey (Undated) Acrylic on canvas (Constitutional Court Art Collection)
Student C:

The artwork also raises some questions regarding equality and freedom, questions like: "Do we carry the past with us?" I mean if one individual (Adams) has had it difficult to let go of the past what about the others (society as a whole?). The government has striven to equalise and democratise the country. Not wishing to take anything from our present government one may still question whether education for all has been provided as it is
claimed by the government officials? (Giorza, 2012: 40).

Figures 4 and 5: Judith Mason
The man who sang and the woman who kept silent 1, 2 and 3. Oil on board/mixed media (Constitutional Court Art Collection) Ten of the twenty students elected to study Judith Mason's "Blue dress" (see figure 4 and 5 above).
The work pays tribute to the courage of two African Nationalist Congress operatives whose deaths during the fight against apartheid were described to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission by the perpetrators of their deaths in security police custody. Judith Mason writes: Phila Ndwandwe was shot by the security police after being kept naked for weeks in an attempt to make her inform on her comrades. She preserved her dignity by making panties out of a blue plastic bag. This garment was found wrapped around her pelvis when she was exhumed. 'She simply would not talk', one of the policemen involved in her death testified. 'God… she was brave.' Harald Sefola was electrocuted with two comrades in a field outside Witbank. While waiting to die, he requested to sing Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika. His killer recalled, 'he was a very brave man who believed strongly in what he was doing'. I wept when I heard Phila's story, saying to myself, 'I wish I could make you a dress'. Acting on this childlike response, I collected discarded blue plastic bags that I sewed into a dress. On its skirt I painted this letter: Sister, a plastic bag may not be the whole armour of god, but you were wrestling with flesh and blood, and against powers, against the rulers of darkness, against spiritual wickedness in sordid places. Your weapons were your silence and a piece of rubbish. Finding that bag and wearing it until you were disinterred is such a frugal, commonsensical, housewifely thing to do, an ordinary act… At some level you shamed your captors, and they did not compound their abuse of you by stripping you a second time. Yet they killed you. We only know your story because a sniggering man remembered how brave you were. Memorials to your courage are everywhere; they blow about in the streets and drift on the tide and cling to thorn-bushes. This dress is made from some of them. Hamba Kahle, Umkhonto (Farewell, freedom fighter)" (Judith Mason, in Sachs, 2009: vi-vii).
The responses to this work included the following from student D, I chose this piece of artwork because when it was explained I felt emotional about how the poor Phila Ndwandwe was treated and killed because she represents all the women figures in our Republic of South Africa who kept silent when raped, abused and hurt. I chose the "Blue Dress" because it reminded me of two incidents which I experienced when I was a teacher before coming to university. I was teaching both grade one and two. I discovered that two girls in my class were repeatedly raped by their fathers. The mothers of these girls were working in the city and come home once at the end of the month. These girls have been left with their fathers whom I thought they will take the responsibilities of the caring as the parent, to look after their children and maintain the trust, love and relationship between a father and his daughters but they turn into monsters and predators such as hyenas as Judith Mason painted it on her artwork. Instead of taking care of their children they turn into nightmares (Giorza, 2012: 40-41).

Student B also responded as follows:
The philosopher Arthur Danto, cited in The Tate Gallery Handbook (Charman et al., 2006: 53), talks about art as embodied meaning. When I looked at the blue colour of the dress I interpreted it as a symbol of the sky. The sky is where religiously we believe that is where heaven is. According to Christianity, there is justice in heaven and all humanity will be judged. So the dress is a constant reminder that if we are not doing justice to humanity, humanity will one day get justice from above. The dress is also reminding us that if we are not doing justice to fellow human beings, history will judge us.  Carrim (2000: 7) argues that "human beings are fundamentally relational". By this it is meant that human beings always, throughout all time and space, exist in relation to and with other human beings, other living creatures and their environment. What I think Carrim is saying in relation to "the man who sang and the woman who kept silent" is the following: Are we treating women as equal partners? Do we value their social and economic contribution to society? If the response is negative then the blue dress is reminding us that justice is just a dream in our society (Giorza, 2012: 41).
Questions arose and confronted this student when his own life experience encountered the stories being told by the artist. These questions allowed him to relook his own assumptions and understandings of the concept of justice. Kennedy and Kennedy (2001: 272) describe this process "concepts… emerge and develop as a result of both experience and reflection, and both transform and are transformed by experience".

Student experiences/reflections
Interviews with students at the end of the course confirmed what I had expected in terms of changed views about the nature of knowledge and about pedagogies that they would now choose to match their ideas about teaching and learning. This included not wanting to "be a stumbling block" for children (student interview, Giorza, 2012: 43). This was significant and students remarked on how big a change it was for them to see children as competent and likely to have valuable ideas themselves. However, many of their responses went beyond what had been anticipated. This new conception of knowledge affected students profoundly. One student described her experience of reading text in a new way, of actively 'dialoguing' with the text while reading -thinking and reading. This seemed strangely obvious to me but also deeply significant as the motivation of making meaning is what is so obviously lacking in the lives of so many teachers that have participated in the studies referred to by Fleisch (2007). She described being newly alive to experience in general, particularly visual stimuli. Some students felt compelled to relate the learning in this course to significant experiences in the past that in some way formed them and their attitudes (for example, experiences of police brutality, of betrayal or sidelining by political allies, of witchhunting and suspicion during apartheid, also of art forms remembered from earlier experiences previously excluded from conceptions of 'art'). Their learning in the course somehow affirmed their prior life learning and connected their learning self with this other 'home' self that was previously left out of learning (Ellsworth, 2005: 167).
Somewhat less expected were clear descriptions of changes in attitude in relation to diversity in the group. Students shared in the interviews that they had noticed their own ability to value contributions from people they previously had not paid any attention to due to their accents or background. These students were still framed as 'other' but were now nuanced and complex rather than stereotyped (Benhabib, 1992: 159).
Students had been energised by their newfound ability to express strongly felt responses that challenged other participants' positions. Rather than shying away from any dissention, they appreciated the importance of difference. Students described a sense of their own intelligence and the sense of pleasure in learning.

Findings The visual is a way in to 'looking deeper'
Visual texts resist the coding and analysis that traditional semiotics would apply in an attempt to unravel them (Machin, 2009: 181190) but instead, the unfixed quality of the visual invites personal, narrative, sense, memorybased and embodied forms of knowledge production (Stein, 2008;Newfield, 2011). Multimodal learning allows learners to recruit a range of resources that incorporate own embodied and experiential knowledge 'in the making' rather than depending on received, textbased 'knowledge already made'. By recruiting their oral resources, students were better able to think through their ideas before developing them into written material. This suggests that the resorting to plagiarism by many students could be due not only to a lack of access to academic language but more importantly to the lack of an authentic voice with which to express experience and embodied ideas about their own learning. This critical aspect of the research has implications for initial teacher education as well as for the general education and training (GET) band. In these contexts student life worlds and knowledge systems may well clash with the dominant one and learners need to articulate this knowledge and be heard.

Multiple voices add value
Thinking together means thinking better and being listened to enables one to listen to others. A culture of listening facilitates learning and is something we cannot achieve alone. Benhabib (1992: 38) makes a similar point when she states, "we are not moral on our own". Agreement about systems and environment are crucial to the working of democratic, respectful learning spaces.
The biggest value of multiplicity is that it is a diverse multiplicity, not a multiple of sameness. Both Biesta (2006) and Kallantzis (2006), writing from very different positions, one from philosophy of education and the other from the multiliteracies discourse, emphasise the positive and generative nature of difference and diversity to a learning community.
The community of enquiry turns the pattern of teacher talk on its head and challenges the centrality of explication. Participant dialogue becomes the mode of learning. The assumption is one of equality of intelligence (Ranciére, 1991(Ranciére, , 2003Ross, 1991). The shortlived laboratory school promoted by Dewey (1934) at the turn of the last century placed high value on the creation of this kind of deliberative community of learners (Eisner, 2002: 94). The Philosophy for Children movement and enquirybased teaching and learning more broadly, builds upon this philosophical heritage.

Enquiry-based learning invites the world in
The findings in this study illustrate how both enquirybased learning and a social semiotic approach to visual analysis do not thrive in closed classrooms free of distraction but rather value the unpredictability the outside world brings. It does not attempt to shut it out. The existence of an inside and an outside, when made explicit, changes the classroom. The Constitutional Court, two blocks away from the classroom, offered its own pedagogy of place and opened the cracks for conceptual enquiry.

Deep learning is about change and uncertainty
Deep learning requires our being open to our changing selves. As a teacher, I needed to relinquish the role of knower and become coenquirer. Learners needed to become knowers in the sense of making their own meaning and knowledge. In an enquirycentred school or classroom, the official curriculum and subject content becomes the vehicle for a deep and authentic learning rather than an end in itself.

Conclusion
In this paper, I have argued that an enquirybased approach to the study of contemporary artworks has the potential to generate deep and personally relevant learning. The students on the course were introduced to the practice of art enquiry -a methodology appropriate at all levels of schooling. Besides gaining experience in a participatory pedagogy and a social semiotic approach to visual analysis, students experienced a change in their own learning behaviour.
The community of enquiry in combination with contemporary visual art analysis offered a way of learning together through dialogue and reflection and the outcomes of the project suggest that the approach provided better access to the practice of academic argumentation than the more commonly used textbased approaches. The value placed on personal experience, opinions and ideas and the use of oral communication allowed students to connect their own sensemaking processes with their new academic practices. Students became aware of how the same processes might work for children in primary school.
The practice of enquiry, as described above, instils in regular participants the capacity to allow uncomfortable and dissenting voices to be heard and included and be probed more deeply for their rich offerings. Diversity and difference are always present as resources and are essential to a democratic community. Teachers need skill and practise in recognising and harnessing these resources.
Teachers do need a better understanding of mathematics concepts and a better grasp of English grammar but concern about content knowledge misses the point about what is going wrong in the teaching and learning relationships in our schools. Knowledge and certainty have been shown to be part of the problem, not the solution, in that they shut down thinking and interfere with democratic, dialogic practice (Freire, 1972: 56;Kennedy, 2014: 5). Most importantly, our teachers need a large dose of uncertainty and an openness to the fluid and changing nature of knowledge and a sense of wonder about the process in which they are involved. This openness and wonder has a direct bearing on the patterns of interaction and dialogue that will emerge in their own learning and in their interactions with their learners when they work in South African classrooms. Further research needs to be done on ways to incorporate the community of enquiry pedagogy and the study of contemporary artworks into generalist teacher education, possibly as elements of a generic tutorial structure. The inclusion of these two complementary practices in undergraduate teacher education programmes could enhance students' current learning and their future teaching.

(Endnotes)
1 DarlingHammond (2006) outlines the complex and rigorous demands that face higher education institutions that seek to offer effective teacher education programmes, one of which is the assumption on the part of the public and many policy makers that the task is a simple one. 2 A dominant form of art education in the 20 th century was one based on the disciplines of studio art practice, art history, art criticism and aesthetics (Eisner, 2002: 28). This model continues to exert influence. Visual culture studies have attempted to extend the focus of learning beyond what Dewey termed "a museum conception of art" (Dewey, 1934: 4) but also acknowledge the "social conditions and visual technologies of the twentyfirst century" (Duncum, 2006: 100). 3 The focus on art elements has its origins in the formalism of Roger Fry and Clive Bell and on American curriculum developments in the early 20 th century aimed at developing a reliably scientific basis for art education and assessment (Freedman, 2003(Freedman, : 2728. Visual culture studies pay attention to a wide range of visual texts and, using a social semiotic lens, how they constitute knowledge and how they work in our lives (Freedman, 2003: 86105). 4 Sam Nzima's photograph from the Soweto Riots of June 1976 shows the dying Hector Pietersen being carried by Mbuyisa Makhubo with Pietersen's sister at his side.