Exploring Memes as Pedagogical Instruments for Decolonial Discourse in Art & Design

This paper explores decoloniality as a pedagogical and creative practice following our experience of teaching art and design students how to be decolonial creative practices through an object-orientated approach to internet memes.
Through our collaborative interdisciplinary teaching practice at Cardiff School of Art and Design we aim to develop students who are agents for change; active disruptors, capable of critically engaging in global conversations, understanding, and empathising with different perspectives.
We deployed various pedagogies, such as dialectical approaches to teaching, decolonial methods, and engaging with creative practice, to engage students in academic debate around often unspoken issues including, but not limited to, race, politics, gender and sexuality. By cultivating a safe space to openly discuss this breadth of provocative issues we supported students in developing their own critical position and empathy towards a global community.
The students were provided with decolonial methods and resources for interrogating ideas that they can carry forward into their own work, both in terms of their written academic work and their creative practice.
They expressed their appreciation for being able to explore difficult topics and contextualise current issues. The development of our collaborative approach to tackling these ideas demonstrates that whilst challenging, this is achievable with the right allies.
We aim to develop a framework to assist educators to understand how they might introduce decolonial ways of thinking into their own teaching practice and question the existing canon of ideas.