Decision Points In The Classroom

My final project presents the lived experiences of student and teacher bodyminds within the unyielding structures of a capitalistic educational space. By illustrating a narrative flowchart, I outline the complex and often invisible set of decisions made by a ‘struggling’ student navigating neurotypical standards. They are often confronted with an illusion of choice regarding their fate within a limiting and exhausting system, resulting in negative self-talk that fuels conformity. By making an ‘unwinnable’ narrative, I problematize the system instead of the individual since the student’s choices are futile and all lead to the same ending. The flowchart represents my lived reality alongside two interviews I conducted with students from differing educational backgrounds. The audio clips from my interview with a high-school English teacher add another narrative layer, as her story brings out the ways in which facilitators themselves hold unwinnable positions in the institution.

This work is a pivotal checkpoint in my art practice as I redirect my framework towards the ‘without’. By focusing on problematizing the system instead of vulnerable individuals, and assimilating my practice into the values, theories, and vocabulary of the disability justice movement, I create work that empowers viewers to connect their personal experience to larger socio-political structures, since ‘the personal is political’.