Thesis update: Noah Benus

My name is Noah Benus, and I am a photographer and art educator. I grew up in Brooklyn and now live in the Bronx. Besides my current studies at CCNY – MA in Visual Art Education, I am also participating in an art residency, virtually teaching art to a group of students in Brooklyn.

As a disabled artist, I reveal often overlooked moments through modes of portraiture, photojournalism, and studio works. In my photographic works I use alternative processes, and analog and digital formats to educate and advocate for access. I believe art can nourish ideas and create a community, and I imagine that art is more than mere expression but a tool for building support systems and maintaining networks of care.

For my thesis I am interested in how disability justice can be used as a framework to design curriculum and a radical environment in art classes.

I am researching how inclusive practices used in special education classrooms can be implemented as standard practice in general education art classrooms. I hope to gain insight about how social justice art education can incorporate disability by examining pedagogical approaches to art making, timing, personal or classroom rituals, and community building. I have noticed that the ways in which teachers and students engage with learning in “Special Education” classrooms are already primed to support all students, regardless of ability. Providing students accommodations and individualized care is not a special need; rather, it’s a fundamental aspect of social justice education. The same tools and systems used in Special Ed. should be used to create an inclusive gen. ed art class with a student centered approach, and a community oriented system of instruction. I will be interviewing and collecting lesson plans from art educators who work with students with disabilities in a “special education” setting. Organizing the research will help me understand how to design an accessible and radical space for learning about and making art.

I want to share two examples of individual classroom art projects that collectively built a neighborhood. We used Romare Bearden’s The Block as a reference and discussed the relevance of learning and living in Harlem. We explored images of the current neighborhood, and connected our artworks to the concept of community which the students were already focusing on in other classes. I played music while we worked and each student contributed to our shared resources by cutting paper that we then redistributed. Each student interpreted their buildings differently, sharing out about their choice of shapes, scale, and orientation. Finally they constructed their own skyline as a class. This lesson supported students with disabilities by presenting limited but directed choice, a clear agenda with guided instructions, and using accessible materials and adaptive tools.