Teaching With Arts-Infused Writing Pedagogies

Showcasing original artwork, this book shows readers how to use arts-infused writing pedagogies to create socially transformative educational spaces.

Envisioned as a story, a guide, a resource, and an aesthetic experience, this book features the work of a multigenerational collective of K–12 educators, students, and teaching artists seeking educational justice. This multivocal approach illustrates how bringing together arts-infused writing pedagogies, with the visionary and intellectual force of freedom dreaming, can create more luminous and socially transformative educational spaces.

Through vivid vignettes, compelling first-person narratives, mixed media artwork, and detailed lesson plans, readers will experience schools as places of joy, belonging, and justice. As an act of radical hope during the turmoil and trauma of post-pandemic times, this book invites readers to draw on the principles of freedom dreaming and abolitionist teaching to imagine and enact arts-infused writing pedagogies across a multitude of settings. Authors offer guidance for teachers, teacher educators, and professional development leaders wishing to take up this work in their own contexts.

Book Features:

• Provides detailed guidelines and principles for enacting arts-infused writing pedagogies, adaptable to a range of contexts.
• Showcases original artwork by K–12 students and educators, some in full color.
• Includes insights on teaching writing and engaging in inquiry-based professional learning from a local site of the National Writing Project.
• Highlights the role of teaching artists in enhancing teacher and student learning.
• Illuminates the potential of a/r/tography, affect, and wonder in qualitative inquiry.
• Contains visually arresting and narratively powerful contributions from students as young as 6 years old to teachers nearing retirement, as well as professional artists and novelists.

Kelly K. Wissman is director of the Capital District Writing Project and an associate professor in the Department of Literacy Teaching and Learning within the University at Albany School of Education.

“In a world that too often restricts and squashes dreams, may this book remind us of the power of dreaming and the transformative nature of art in creating a renewed world.”
—From the Foreword by Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, professor of English education, Teachers College, Columbia University

“Occupies a genre of scholarship that weaves together a criticism of the current system with personal memoir and artwork, making the dream of educational justice feel both inevitable and possible.”
—From the Afterword by Linda Christensen, director, Oregon Writing Project, Lewis & Clark College

"Teaching With Arts-Infused Writing Pedagogies could not have come at a more significant time, as writing curriculums around the globe reorient around market-driven, monomodal, and often impersonal and dehumanizing approaches to composition that prioritize output and evaluation over insight and inspiration. Wissman and members of the Freedom Dreaming for Educational Justice Collective remind us that to compose is to dream of better and more just worlds—and in effect, to write them into existence."
—David E. Low, associate professor, California State University, Fresno

“This book illustrates how dreams become reality when the arts are meaningfully integrated into imaginative literacy education. I am grateful to have this guide to enlivening and envisioning participatory democracy.”
—Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Meigs Professor, University of Georgia

“Despite what we see on the news every day, there are educators, mental health professionals, youth, and communities all across the U.S. who keep the fires of love, joy, healing, and justice burning every day, and readers will meet some of them within these pages. If they enter into this aesthetic experience with openness and hope, readers will encounter stories, poems, drawings, collages, and even lesson plans that inspire many new ways to keep the fires burning where they live and work. Kudos to the Capital District Writing Project and this beautiful collaboration for justice!”
—Stephanie Jones, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Professor, University of Georgia

Contents

Foreword Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz  ix

Acknowledgments  xiii

Part I. Sketching Dreamscapes of Possibilities: Creating Art and Community in the Freedom Dreaming for Educational Justice Project

1.  “The Quality of Light”: An Introduction to Freedom Dreaming for Educational Justice  3
Kelly K. Wissman

2.  Freedom Dreaming With Arts-Infused Writing Pedagogies: Ten Engagements  20
Kelly K. Wissman

3.  Seeing Students in Relation to Possibility: Imperatives for Freedom Dreaming in English Language Arts  45
Christina Pepe

4.  Becoming a Beloved Community of Diverse Educators and Mental Health Professionals: Lessons From Freedom Dreaming for Educational Justice in Intergenerational Arts-Based Inquiries  57
Tammy Ellis-Robinson and Cheryl L. Dozier

5.  Visions of Liberation: A Thematic Analysis of the Education Freedom Dreams  72
Kelly K. Wissman, Vanessia Wilkins, and Hanum Tyagita

Part II: Dreaming Together: Visions and Voices of Teachers, Students, and Teaching Artists
Kelly K. Wissman

6.  We Are Dreaming of . . . Manifesting New Educational Worlds in Dialogue Between Students and Teachers  101

7.  We Are Dreaming of . . . Enlivening School Communities With Teaching Artists  127

8.  We Are Dreaming of . . . Creating School Communities of Joy, Care, and Belonging  144

9.  We Are Dreaming of . . . Fostering New Ways of Seeing and Being  156

10.  We Are Dreaming of . . . Honoring the Ancestors  166

Epilogue: Why Freedom Dream?  174
Leah Werther, Amy Salamone, Matt Pinchinat, Christina Pepe, and Kelly K. Wissman

Afterword Linda Christensen  182

Index  184

About the Editor and Contributors  189