Yinka Shonibare's Earth Kid (Boy) on Classroom Participation
Prompting the voices that matter the most.
The University of Notre Dame’s Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, which was opened in December of 2023, currently features the arresting sculpture you see below by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, CBE. Labeled Earth Kid (Boy), the sculpture forms one of a series which includes representations of children, both boys and girls, dressed in Shonibare’s trademark colorful fabrics. All of them, through pose and posture and costume, seem to be threatened or burdened by the effects of climate change, capitalism, and colonialism.
We know the boy’s gender from the parenthetical word in the title, but most of his other features are indeterminate: his age, the exact color of his skin, the style of his dress, the time period in which he lives. He carries a fishing net filled with plastic garbage, for example, but his boots could come from the Victorian era. Whatever conclusions we might draw about his identity, the sculpture suggests struggle. The weight of the net clearly burdens the boy, as he seems to be straining against it, his body tilted forward and his head oriented to the ground.
Any story you might create about this boy will have some anomalies. I could easily picture him collecting trash on some touristy beach in Nigeria—but wearing those clothes? Those boots on the sand? Has he come from some wealthy home, with his perfectly tailored garments, cleaning the beach for a school project, or is he the recipient of some wealthy patron’s hand-me-downs, now returning to a hovel to sort through his trash?
Such questions were spurred in my mind by Bridget Hoyt, Curator of Education at the Museum, on a recent visit to the Raclin Murphy with a class of undergraduates. This summer I co-taught a course called The Art and Science of Learning with Kristi Rudenga, a neuroscientist and Director of the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence at Notre Dame. Kristi helped the students—which included current and incoming undergraduates— understand the physical grounding of learning in the brain, while I selected texts and experiences in which students analyzed learning in lived experiences and life histories (including The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which was featured in last month’s post). Co-teaching with, and learning from, a neuroscientist was one of the many treats of this experience for this English professor.
In the last week of the course, we visited the Raclin Murphy Museum to see another example of how learning happens beyond and outside of school; indeed, when we gathered in the atrium, Bridget pointed out to the students that museums are one of the major informal learning institutions that are available to people throughout the lifespan. Bridget started our tour outside of the Museum, nudging the students to consider the messages sent by its facade and outdoor sculptures about art and education, and we finished our visit by setting up a dozen stools in front of Earth Kid (Boy) to practice our skills of close analysis, led by Bridget’s insights and questions.
The close analysis I want to share in this post comes from comparing what I was seeing in the sculpture with what I was observing in the interactions between the educators and students in the room. The specific encounter described below took less than five minutes, but it reminded me of the essential work we do as teachers when we elicit and affirm new voices in the classroom—even when, indeed especially when—those voices have not volunteered to contribute.
We had a relatively participatory group of students in the course, with the caveat that we had some who loved to volunteer, and others who spoke only when invited. I have written before about Jay Howard’s description of the “consolidation of responsibility” which allows a small number of students to dominate a course discussion, making quieter students less willing or able to participate. Kristi and I worked hard to push against this classroom norm by having a variety of learning activities in the course that required all students to participate—but, on this penultimate day of the semester, I still could have told you immediately who would raise their hands and who would sit quietly if I threw out an open-ended discussion question.
At one moment in the discussion, one of the quieter students made a quick gesture that Bridget mis-interpreted as a raised hand. “Did you have something you wanted to say?” she asked the student. “Oh no,” the student demurred, “sorry.” This was 75 minutes into our visit, and this student hadn’t spoken a word yet--a normal pattern for her in the course. So I jumped in: “Well,” I said, “tell us what you’re thinking about anyway.” She laughed briefly and then, as always happened when we called on this student, she offered a very thoughtful response that demonstrated how engaged she was in our analytic task.
Which was great. But then, another quiet student, one who also had not spoken throughout the entire visit, raised her hand and offered an analysis of the sculpture that expanded our vision of its scope by connecting it to larger global concerns. And then, the first student raised her hand a second time—definitely a first—and pushed us even further into recognizing the sculpture’s significance in this moment in time. In the meantime, a third quiet student, who had proven reluctant to speak in class throughout the term, had been gradually springing to life through the visit, commented multiple times throughout our conversation about Earth Kid (Boy), revealing a passion for art that transformed our perception of her from a silent presence to a full-blown discussion leader.
After we finished our close observations of Shonibare’s work, we released the students into the museum for thirty minutes to have a final look around before we reconvened in the classroom for a final discussion of the day. I had intended to have a gallery stroll myself, but my head was spinning so much that I raced to the classroom so I could catch some thoughts in my notebook to share with the students, and now with you.
As with any good work of art, Earth Kid (Boy) yields many interpretations, but without a doubt Shonibare wants the viewer’s attention drawn to the damaging effects of the dominant-isms of the last few centuries. For centuries now, the loud voices of the colonists and capitalists rung our ears, and have shaped the ways in which we understand ourselves and the planet. Their chorus drowns out other voices, like the one that might emerge from a lonely boy, dragging trash across a beach, panting for breath from the effort. We might see him, with his strange clothes; but we don’t listen to him—or we have silenced him.
The question that Bridget posed to that quiet student—”Did you have something you wanted to say?”—is one that the viewer has to pose to the Earth Kid, because we have to learn from him. The dominant voices of the past remain dominant, and still shut out voices like his. We shouldn’t expect the Earth Kid to drop his trash and erect a podium to declaim his views to an audience of privilege and power. The Earth Kid, head tilted toward the earth, struggling under his burdens, will only speak if we create the space for him to speak, and then explicitly invite him into the conversation.
That’s the exact role that teachers need to play in higher education classrooms. I understand that multiple reasons exist for students not to raise their hands and share their views in a discussion. But many of the students who have very good reasons for not speaking are the exact ones we need to hear from. That might mean be the ones who lack privilege on a privileged campus, or who bring their neurodivergences to a traditional classroom structure, or offer an indigenous perspective on science in a STEM course. Heavy burdens may already be resting on the back of these students, and we might think—no, I can’t add to that burden by asking that student to speak when they have not volunteered.
Both Shinibare’s sculpture and that mis-interpreted hand gesture offered me another reason to reaffirm an argument I have made in the Chronicle and elsewhere: we should be willing to invite students into discussions even when they haven’t raised their hands. I prefer labeling this “invitational participation,” which reflects my practice of offering invitations which the student can always decline. Invitational participation only achieves its goals when we have created a warm classroom climate characterized by trust, and of course when we respect classroom accommodations.
But it grieves me to think how many students across higher education, especially those whose voices we need to hear, sit quietly in classrooms every day, assuming that nobody wants or cares about what they have to say, or feeling anxious about sharing their thoughts in front of others. We have so much to learn from the Earth Kids, wherever we might find them, and many barriers might stand in the way of them speaking to us. We need to gather our chairs around them, create the structures and spaces for them to contribute, and then keep asking them this question until they respond:
“Did you have something you wanted to say?”