Storytelling is my jam, even within academic scholarship. While teaching a unit on creative magazine writing to my BA 2nd year students, I shared research about how humans retain information better when we learn them as part of a story (Cooke 2012) . It must be true for songs too, since I can recall the musical notes of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ that my music teacher taught us in the tune of the song when I was about 12 – E E F G G F E D C C D E…. I met my teacher at a school reunion a couple of years ago and sang these notes back to his wondrous joy.
Video: Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ from Symphony No’ 9 link on YouTube (FreeSheetPianoMusic 2013)
Savage uses a similar technique of storytelling in her essay ‘”The New Life”: Mozambican Art Students in the USSR, and the Aesthetic Epistemologies of Anti-Colonial Solidarity’ (2023). Instead of just listing names, Savage uses historical narratives to platform voices often not heard in research and scholarship, ie, people of colour and people from the ‘Global South’. She creates a record of names of African artists and art students, which I found powerful.
Besides this, two other points struck me in the paper. The first was the foundational concept of whether art can be taught and examined. Who decides what is ‘good’ taste? Isn’t taste subjective and also dependent on cultural traditions? This is a thought I return to when teaching and – more importantly – assessing my students’ creative work. This is made more complicated when I teach students hailing from literary, linguistic and cultural traditions I am not familiar with. How can I teach them yet not impose my societally learnt standards on to them?
Related to this worry, is the second point in Savage’s essay that I was fascinated by, the cheeky outcome of a postcolonial and neocolonial attitude. The Mozambican students could push the boundaries of what was accepted politically in the USSR institutions because the Soviet instructors didn’t know much about Mozambique culture and history (though the Mozambican students were expected to know all about the Soviet Union). This got me thinking about certain cultures being treated as secondary and also us supervising students from cultures we may not be familiar with due to that hierarchy. Do the students from the UK and US have an advantage when conducting research about nations that hold hegemonic power? We can guide those students on not just research framework but also point them towards literature and share knowledge with them. Due to my Indian background, I can also offer similar support to my Indian students. Whereas, if we are supervising students from countries from the ‘East’ or ‘Global South’, we could only guide them on the rigour of their research. We may not hold contextual knowledge in those cases.
I say all of this from the personal experience of being an Indian student in the UK. I have felt a communication and knowledge gap with my teachers at different institutions because as an Indian I grew up knowledgeable about the US and the UK, but they did not turn that curious glance towards India due to postcolonialism. Now, in my position as a teacher in the UK, my aim is to provide better support to my students, but I am aware of the logistical challenges too – I cannot be familiar with the cultures of every country.
References
Cooke, E (2012) ‘How Narratives Can Aid Memory’, The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/15/story-lines-facts (Accessed 16 March 2025)
FreeSheetPianoMusic (2013) ‘Beethoven – “Ode to Joy” from Symphony No.9 Easy Piano Version’, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbXiKLA58SE (Accessed 16 March 2025).
Savage, P (2023) ‘”The New Life”: Mozambican Art Students in the USSR, and the Aesthetic Epistemologies of Anti-Colonial Solidarity’, Art History. DOI: 10.1111/1467-8365.12692.