1st Edition
Do Your Lessons Love Your Students? Creative Education for Social Change
Strengthen your culturally responsive teaching by designing curricula that leads to equitable, humanized outcomes. In this powerful new book, Jessa Brie Moreno and Mariah Rankine-Landers reveal how artistic research and creative inquiry across subject areas and grades can help you access your learners’ collective wisdom and potential. Moreno and Rankine-Landers describe the SPIRAL framework for centering culturally responsive teaching and learning through the arts, showing how and why these iterative processes lead to liberatory outcomes.
You’ll learn how to use creative inquiry to address power dynamics in teaching and learning, and how to critically reflect on your curriculum, including investigating whose narratives are centered, whose have been erased, and which marginalized stories can be brought forward. You’ll also find out how to alter the learning space to set a container for creative practice, which is key to navigating cultural shifts, building trust, and setting a collaborative and collective mindset.
The book offers a variety of practical activities you can implement right away, such as using visual art making, writing, and storytelling as prompts to activate meaning making and to disrupt unconscious biases, as well as using creative dialogue and character development for embodied learning, introspection, and identification. With the addition of this book to your professional library, you’ll have new tools for building belonging and justice, and engaging all students through artistic research, dialogue, and deep listening.
Foreword Acknowledgements: Lineage of Love Indigenous Land Acknowledgement Origin Story I. Art as Love 1. A Pedagogy of Love 2. Creative Process for Social Change II. The SPIRAL Framework 3. The SPIRAL Framework: A Practical Frame for Liberatory Learning 4. The Studio Pathway: Cultivating a Studio Mindset 5. Creative Inquiry: Learning Through a Creative Pursuit 6. Reconciliation and Reckoning: Teaching for Social Change 7. Artistic Research: Essential Methodologies for Knowledge Acquisition 8. Liberation: Art, Love, and Freedom III. The Core Four 9. The Core Four: Foundational Concepts 10. Transformative Power: Addressing Social Power Dynamics 11. Narrative: Examining Core Narratives in Education 12. Lineage: Expanding Understanding of Identity 13. Embodiment: Knowledge Made Visible IV. An Arc of Learning 14. The Art of Praxis: Theory in Practice 15. Breaking Patterns: Breaking with Established Norms in Education 16. Culture, Cognition and the Arts: Using Creativity to Think Expansively 17. Grayscale: Deepening Wisdom Around Racialized Experiences 18. Heirlooms and Accessories: Facing Historical Truths and Practicing Repair 19. Queering the Curriculum: More Than the Confines of a Social Structure 20. From Implicit Bias to Explicit Belonging: Reshaping Thinking to Create Cultures of Care 21. The Radiant Child: Beyond Standardized Assessments Epilogue: Nahuales and the Artist Within
Biography
Mariah Rankine-Landers (she/her), M.Ed., and Jessa Brie Moreno (she/her), MFA, founders and co-executive directors of Studio Pathways, have each been liberatory educators and artists for over twenty years, having collectively taught at the pre-K through post-graduate levels. They are sought after professional facilitators who work with educational and executive leaders, and teachers leading for social change. They are co-creators of Rise Up: An American Curriculum and have co-designed creative pedagogy for The Othering and Belonging Institute out of UC Berkeley, The Center for Cultural Power, and the WKKF Foundation (Racial Healing). They are former co-directors of the School Transformation Through the Arts and Integrated Learning Specialist Program out of the Alameda County Office of Education. Partners include NAEA, The Kennedy Center, Stanford University, Museum of the African Diaspora, and many county offices of education, school districts, individual schools, arts organizations, and philanthropic and social change institutions. Follow them on social media platforms at @StudioPathways and at studiopathways.org.
"Do Your Lessons Love Your Students? shows what it means to let the arts lead us to unexpected healing places - the place learners deserve to explore."
Susie Wise, Author of Design for Belonging: How to Build Inclusion and Collaboration in Your Communities
"Steeped in educational theory, years of experience in classroom settings, and a proven track record in professional development, Mariah Rankine Landers and Jessa Brie Moreno are showing us how to humanize the dehumanizing spaces of education and research.
Their book aims to build opportunities for students to build relationships with each other and their educators. Through a culturally and linguistically responsive approach they urge educators to go beyond oppression analysis to create pedagogies that lean toward self-actualization, using creative inquiry, healthy risk taking, and healing-informed work that centers artistic practice at its nexus.
After reading, reacting, and reflecting on this book, a core assessment moving forward for us all will be 'Do your students love your lessons?'”
Dr. Derek Fenner, Assistant Professor, Art Education
University of South Carolina Upstate
