“Born in the first light of the morning”: Feminist pedagogy in art museums and exhibitions toward a new professional development of care

Abstract

We share our own experiences of visiting exhibitions as a practice of feminist pedagogy and how we used them to help master students in a residential care programme in Master in the University of Milano Bicocca to expand their thinking about the idea of care. We reflect on how the idea of taking up ‘care’ as (dis)connections to the land based on an experience of visiting First People’s House at the University of Victoria, and returns to childhood sites of memory. Using one particular art exhibition by Dineo Seshee Bopape’, who uses organic materials to explore concepts of land, memory, identity, and colonialism, we discuss how this exhibition actually enabled new thinking as witnessed in the research dairies kept by four students. Based on diary entries we developed I-poems to show how understandings of care had expanded using art and exhibitions to break boundaries of normative thinking.