Shifting Attention

“Reading is not a neutral activity” Victor said on Friday, “You always bring a bit of yourself into the reading.” On Monday the following week, I read through the article again. 

When reading the article ‘The New Life’: Mozambican Art Students in the USSR, and the Aesthetic Epistemologies of Anti-Colonial Solidarity, for the first time, I couldn’t wait to share with my peers that the researcher concluded that art students, heavily influenced by Russian socialism, did not become spiritually converted. Instead, they identified their positive experiences of hospitality, camaraderie and forged friendships with locals as shaping events that formed their future political values of solidarity and equality. The article is set in an international context of Higher Education in Arts, in the former USSR looking at the experience Mozambican art students had.

I will read the article a second time, considering the wider educational context when thinking of what I took from the article and how this might be relevant to my own teaching.