The Jam: Speculative-Mutant Pedagogies, Aesthetic Education Theory, and Becoming Joy with Children in a What If World

Designing pedagogical spaces that affirm and embody the aesthetic theories that guide practitioners in art education (and education broadly speaking) isn’t always easy. Those theories call for experimentation, creative expression, protest, rejection of repetition, and a collective creation of newness and difference. In other words, these theories call for pedagogues to be comfortable with the unpredictable and emerging ways of being and becoming within specific entanglements of place, children, materiality, discourses, bodies, sound, affect, and so much more. In this graphica piece, the authors illuminate an enduring pedagogical event that was designed for and unfolded at an informal, no-fee, community-based education center for youth [second author] directed for six years. Affectionately called “The Clubhouse,” this neighborhood-embedded space centered critical aesthetic, relational ways of being that we have conceived of as a what if world. While James (first author) was aware that their carefully planned sessions with the youth were being carried away by the animated entanglement of children, music instruments, and an affirming space, and was uneasy that the “noise” produced by those participants might be bothering others or distracting from James’ own presumed learning objectives, they carried on and lived through theories of aesthetic education joyfully. The piece suggests that constraining forces that push toward compliance keep living theory and living theory joyfully at bay. Maxine Greene, Felix Guattari, Herbert Marcuse, and Jacques Ranciére make guest appearances in this graphica, like wise and brilliant mentors offering affirmative and ethical ways of thinking, being, and doing with these young music-makers who have faced so much institutional rigidity and educational repetition. We also hope readers will enjoy and make new and different meanings with the inclusion of the Grateful Dead as a long-enduring band-event that has always been about creating newness and difference through experimentation far beyond conventions of art. Researchers and practitioners can hopefully glean powerful glances into critical feminist posthumanist arts-infused research. They might also recognize the theoretical and practical promises of being with children in the noisy, unpredictable, and sometimes – maybe oftentimes or always – unsettling spaces created when we follow the courage and hope it takes to live out theories of justice and equity through aesthetic theories. Maybe, just maybe, in doing so, we can lean into our own mutant-speculative pedagogies and experience a little more justice and joy where we are.