Introduction
Q: What is perhaps the most meaningful thing for a person to know, but is never
actually taught?
A: How to love, and love well.
Where do we learn to love? Is it our parents who teach about love, showing us
how to love another human by first caring for us? Do we learn romantic love from our
partners, who stumble through love with us as we learn how to be with each other? Or
are we our own teachers, learning first to accept and eventually to love ourselves in mind,
body, and spirit? Why do we assume we have successfully learned lessons in love, and
how do we really know?
What does that word, love, even mean? Is it passion, is it caring, is it
commitment? Is it compulsion, emotion or action? A thing of the mind, body or soul?
Though many of us would say we know about love and lay some claim on it as ours, the
process of learning to love and love well is generally seen as an instinctive one, as more
subjective and personal than most anything else. People do not necessarily question how
they learned to love; they certainly do not imagine it to be a question of “skill.” Often,
they only wonder if they have missed something when painfully confronted with their
shortcomings in love.
There are many assumptions commonly made about love that affect our human
relationships, one of which being that love is an innate force, and therefore un-teachable.
Ironically, it is this assumption that most of us are taught; not formally, but through
reproductions of culture such as the love stories we grow up with, experiences within
family life, and media constructions of love. These sources tell us that love is such a
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personal journey that its lessons cannot be imposed upon a person, and that love is not a
topic to be learned in a traditional sense. But what can be gained by considering love a
possible subject within the realm of transformative teaching? How can we (re)envision
our relationships as benefactors of concrete lessons about love? In contrast to cultural
reproductions that tell us we cannot be taught how to love, the self-help section of any
bookstore suggests the overly simplistic view that one can learn to love, and that the
learning process requires nothing more than following a step-by-step guide. I would like
to propose that the work of love—that is, learning how to love and have healthy
relationships—falls somewhere in between. It seems that, in fact, loving well is an art
and that the ‘art of loving’ requires both skill and innate qualities. But love is not
considered to be a valid subject in education, and so individuals are often left without the
tools needed to be successful in their relationships. For this reason, we must teach the
work of love in a more conscious way.
The Lessons of Love
One of the first lessons we must teach relates to another assumption often made
within our society about love: that women are the guardians of love. We make the
assumption—after deciding that love is an innate force—that the work of love primarily
belongs to women. In other words, society commonly dictates that women are loving
creatures, and are therefore better at or more apt to love than men are. This myth creates
an enormous amount of pressure for women to love well, especially when it comes to
romantic love, and so the consequences of unsuccessful love can be quite high for
women. Beyond heartache, with which most people can identify, women may experience
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a strong sense of failure due to their perceived roles as the more loving partner in a
heterosexual relationship. This emotional strain causes tremendously unhealthy feelings
among women, primarily that they are unable or even undeserving of love (hooks, 2002).
The belief that women are the guardians of love also implies that they should be
more giving and more forgiving in love than their male partners. At best, this means that
a woman may be more compromising than her male partner; at worst it means that she
may believe she is expected to take on a submissive role in her heterosexual romantic
relationships. The issue at stake is therefore the prevalence of patriarchy in romance. As
bell hooks (2002) so plainly writes, “love cannot exist in a context of domination” (p.
xvii).
The tendency of women to enter into romantic relationships of inequality affects
adolescent girls in a particularly serious way, because while their bodies are fully
developed, they often lack the experience and emotional maturity to critique the sexist
role they are being asked to take on. Adolescent girls thus frequently find themselves in
compromising situations where they believe they must be submissive to a male partner.
There is no question that the consequences of such relationships can be severe. For
example, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy reports that “more than one
in ten girls who has sex under the age of 15 describe it as non-voluntary and many more
describe it as relatively unwanted” (Albert, Brown, & Flanigan, (Eds.) 2003, p. 9).
Clearly, the power relationship between adolescent girls and their partners is unequal.
Without more structured teaching about healthy relationships, girls will continue
attempting to fill the submissive sex role that is so often viewed as acceptable. This
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education I am proposing must take on a feminist standpoint, problematizing patriarchy
and accentuating a need for equality.
Teaching on Love: Past Lessons
Although the lessons of love intended for girls have varied dramatically in the
past 200 years, history provides us with several models for educating girls about their
coming of age and relationships. In the late 1800’s, for instance, there was a shared value
among Victorian middleclass women to protect the character and chastity of girls. This
value was expressed through networks of girls, single young women, and matrons who
were involved in girl-centered social groups. In these networks, single women developed
close mentoring relationships with adolescent girls that replaced the more intimate bond,
in terms of learning to be a woman, which girls previously shared with their mothers.
Although these mentorships existed in a sexually repressive culture and functioned to
prepare girls for traditional roles in marriage, it was highly effective in providing girls
with emotional support during their transformative years (Brumberg, 1997).
This network of support largely fell away during the 20th Century, and more
clinically informative lessons about the body, sex, and disease emerged in the form of sex
education by the 1950’s, which continues to be taught in schools today (Brumberg,
1997). Sex education, while undoubtedly more factual and informative than its Victorian
counterpart, wholly lacks any lessons about the emotional or ethical aspects of
relationships. Indeed, one could say that teachers now take exceeding care in formal
educational settings to instruct adolescent girls about sex, but never about love. While
some girls are fortunate to receive protection and mentorship from caring families or girl-
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centered organizations (for example, the Girl Scouts of America have provided support to
middleclass girls since 1912), the value of protecting girls by teaching them about love is
hardly present in our current society. Based on statistics about negatively impacting
romantic relationships among American teenagers, it is clear that we simply cannot rely
on families or social networks to provide girls with a progressive understanding of love
and healthy relationships. Those girls lacking support or other privilege have few options
but the media as an instructor on love and relationships, and receive lessons that are
overwhelmingly sexist and lack positive messages about equality.
Teaching on Love: New Lessons
If we are to educate adolescent girls about love and encourage them to develop
healthy romantic relationships of equality with members of the opposite sex (as well as
with members of their own), our methods for teaching about relationships must change.
Effective lessons on relationships will need to surpass current sex education by teaching
about both sex and love, and must support girls while allowing them the freedom to take
control of their romantic and sexual relationships. Lessons should be positioned within a
feminist framework that reveals patriarchy and includes dialogues about equality and
reciprocity in addition to those of safety and responsibility. Students must be given the
tools to recognize and deconstruct unhealthy relationships as they exist in the media and
in their own lives and be introduced to more functional approaches to love. As educators
bring these issues of power and domination to light, they must encourage girls to examine
their experiences and begin to recognize the influence of patriarchal values on their
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relationships while concurrently seeking societal change. My thesis research is an
attempt to facilitate these sorts of lessons on love and relationships.
As the subject of love is quite personal, teaching on love requires a particular sort
of learning space to be successful. Acquiring the high level of trust required to teach
effectively on love can be difficult in the traditional classroom, so alternative types of
education are preferable. Therefore, I will conduct my research and teaching in the semistructured learning space created between mentor and a small group of students (such as
in an after-school club), where trust can be developed more fully, rather than the
traditional classroom. A voluntary, after-school setting is also preferable because it
provides more freedom to explore a curriculum on the topic of love and relationships.
The Art(s) of Love
The lessons I will create involve the study of visual culture and the creation of
personally expressive art as the key modes of teaching. One reason is that art education
allows for a meaningful exploration of visual and other popular culture through critical
media literacy. Critical media literacy is an educational tool for becoming aware of how
the media functions while questioning its complex power dynamics. It allows students to
re-read some of the most influential messages they receive from the media and empower
themselves by becoming aware of the tactics used to persuade them. I intend to use
critical media literacy to look at the cultural models of relationships that the media
presents and that often go unquestioned. Furthermore, I plan to have students respond to
the critical media literacy curriculum by producing images themselves.
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Art education is also useful for my topic because it allows for a unique personal
connection through art making. While the study of visual culture is, in my opinion, a
crucial part of art education, I would like to suggest that educators can go beyond critical
media literacy to further connect to, express, and validate the significance of students’
own identities and experiences. By creating art on personal topics after learning to think
critically about visual culture, students can be provided with the time and means to
critically explore their own experiences and decisions, reinforcing the lessons learned by
media literacy. The process of students expressing themselves and their personal
experiences through art will also be a way of building relationships within the group and
encouraging the discussion to center on issues relevant to the student’s lives.
Finally, my hope is that the students involved in the project will use the arts to
distribute some of the lessons learned to their peers. By creating small artworks that are
performative or can be passed on to others, students would have an opportunity to
creatively share lessons that are meaningful to them with others who might benefit from
the same information. This is also a way to begin to affect change beyond oneself
through peer-to-peer learning, which acknowledges a significant amount of agency in
young women.
Researching Relationships
I intend to investigate a number of questions through an action research project
where I will facilitate critical, meaningful and transformative learning with high school
aged girls. My goal is to facilitate art making and the study of visual culture to create
awareness and challenge the dominant cultural models of romance as they relate to my
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participants’ experiences. In order achieve this goal, I have developed several research
questions, the primary one being: what can be accomplished when female high school
students learn about love and healthy relationships from a feminist perspective in a
structured after-school setting? Other questions I will explore include the following:
Given the confines of educational settings, how can a productive environment of trust,
conducive to discussing such personal topics while remaining instructive, be created
between a facilitator and her students? And, how can critical media literacy and
expressive art making be taught in combination to encourage students to seek change
both within themselves and their society?
Personal Connections
Working with young women to facilitate lessons on love and relationships from a
feminist perspective is a meaningful project for me in several ways. First, it is important
to me because of bell hooks’ (2001a, 2001b, 2002) influence on my own thoughts about
relationships through her recent works on love. Writing from an experienced vantage
point, hooks’ writings on relationships are solidly feminist while remaining highly
practical. I have appreciated her sincerity and wisdom in examining my own
relationships and the cultural models of romance put forth by society.
Second, the project appeals to me because I have always taken interest in those
topics and methods traditionally considered too personal or subjective for academics. My
past work includes Experiencing the Dance, an independent research exploration of the
psychological, physical, social, and spiritual aspects of dance, and Vulnerable:
Subjectively Researching the Issue of Safety, a research and art project about street and
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domestic violence in my community. In these endeavors, my research employed
alternative qualitative methods including personal explorations, art making, and public
action, along with more standard data collection and analysis methods. I choose to work
in this manner again as a way of pushing the boundaries of research and academic
inquiry, as well as to promote feminist approaches to research.
Finally, my previous work with adolescent girls has contributed to an interest in
my research topic. I concluded a recent course by creating a museum teacher resource
packet targeting adolescent girls. This packet, Imagining Ourselves through Images,
used fine art photographs, commercial advertisements, and photographic image making
to critically examine female identity construction and body issues. I consider this project
to be a pilot study for my thesis research, as it introduced me to critical media literacy
and girls’ studies, informing my current topic and research questions. While the pilot
study relates more to self-love than romantic love, I recognize that the same hegemonic
forces can make both types of love difficult to attain.
Conclusion
Though examples of transformative teaching on love are few and far between, the
potential for the development and implementation of a meaningful curriculum on love is
evident. By creating progressive lessons on love and healthy relationships that are
available to young women, I believe that students can gain the tools to begin
deconstructing the dysfunctional and deeply embedded models of relationships put forth
by the media and other cultural sources. To replace those negative models, mentors and
teachers need safe and validating spaces to provide a foundation for healthy relationships
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grounded in equality and the discourse of feminism. Art education can be used to
facilitate these messages by encouraging critical discussions and reflection on the
students’ own desires, fears, and questions about relationships, while reinforcing
important lessons of safe sex and violence prevention. My research will investigate all
these possibilities for the much-needed benefits they provide adolescent girls while at
once questioning the status quo in terms of education and relationships, providing
educators with examples of what is and is not effective in teaching transformative lessons
on love.
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