Three Moments in Teaching with/in Arts Practices

Vasudevan shares her own arts-based practice, including sensory pictures of creating space for art to emerge, while leaving open an invitation for the conversation to continue in the various spaces of literacy teaching and research in which we work, create, and dream. She was a member of a teaching team for a yearlong seminar called Youth, Media, and Educational Justice, and one of the course goals was to broaden perceptions about court-involved youth beyond the oft-narrow images that circulate without full regard for youths' practices of flourishing, creativity, and imagination. Too often, these portraits are saturated with the language of risk, danger, and instability. What slowly became evident was the extent to which excavating meanings of home, belonging, community, and self that are embedded in texts about young people involved with juvenile justice and foster care would upend these very notions for the graduate students in the course. Confronting someone else's sense of belonging or feelings of displacement that accompany understandings of home can be a wounding experience, and we found that through these encounters, moments of pain and healing emerged that needed attention.