Readings:
- Looking Through the Learning Disability lens: inclusive education and the learning disability embodiment by Athena Goodfellow
- (Re) Visualizing women who use drugs by Jade Boyd
The two readings provided this week was eye opening. What I got from the Boyd (2017) reading was the process of the community participatory research is just as important as the artistic and research product or outcome. I think about the visual work that I do with my students, and I have to really take a step back and really enjoy the actual process, not just what they produce after the timer goes off. When I do my final collaborative collage project with my students, I am going to live in the moment with them, be present with the joy of collaborative art making, document the process, be human with them, be me while they be them. bell hooks was quoted in this article saying, “That joy needs to be documented. For if we only focus on the pain, the difficulties which are surely real in any process of transformation, we only show a partial picture.” Best quote from the article, “Visual sociologists and other social researchers have argued that ‘art is capable of something which academic work is not’.
Goodfellow (2012) article had my neurons firing in different ways. This quote really resonated with me in thinking about my art project on freedom dreams and hope with my students is, “It important to recognize here is that the participant’s imaginary world is centered upon the enhancement of physical attributes such as being ‘huge’ possibly as a means to redefine him outside of his perceived intellectual attributes.” Imagining is beautiful, it’s freeing, it’s liberating, it’s something that no one can take away from anyone. When we imagine, we are finally in a space where we are free to think and free to live a world without domination and colonization. This reading made me think of the non-binary inclusion and exclusion of Black and Brown children within education. Which brown/black children are accepted and affirmed, and which ones are not, and why? Inclusion and exclusion is not always as obvious and clear as day as gifted classes vs. special education 12 to 1 classes. I wonder in ways which my students feel labeled both negatively and positively, and if that is expressed in any of the art work they’ve drawn so far.
Side post: Natural History Museum #TeamBlueWhales
Attached you will see an affirmation of my transgenderism that I found in the Ocean Life meditation walk we did at the museum and also a picture of my sketches that we did for our visual thinking activity.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
