Arts-based pedagogies hold incredible promise for education. Arts-based pedagogies provide unique, compelling pathways for teaching and learning that can permit entry to and support the success of all students regardless of gender, race, sexuality, religion, linguistic diversity, ability level, socioeconomic status, and other identity categories. Arts-based pedagogies can form the foundation of a transdisciplinary educational approach that centers contemporary understandings of multiple and multimodal literacies and meaning-making strategies useful to teachers across disciplines and in more integrated teaching and learning contexts. Crucially, when implemented through a critical framework, arts-based pedagogies can be equity-based pedagogies, allowing for the translation of research, teaching, and learning into awareness, understanding, creation, and activism.
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Arts-Based Pedagogy and Gender Equity
Mindi Rhoades
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Refugee Girlhood and Visual Storied Curriculum
Michelle Bae-Dimitriadis
Decolonizing girlhood illuminates an attempt to refuse and recover the pathological representation of Indigenous refugee girls by going beyond the discourse of the Western construction of girlhood. It takes an anticolonial, critical race feminist approach to the understanding of girlhood that challenges the intersectional, racialized exclusion and the deficit representations of Indigenous refugee girls, which are often reinforced by humanitarian schemes of embodied vulnerability. The digital visual fiction stories created by Karen tribe refugee girls in a media arts summer workshop reposition their presence by creating spaces in which they can speak their own desires, share their imaginings, and portray their struggles. Through this experience, these girls challenge colonial social realities and the fantasies of democracy. Ultimately, their futuristic visual fiction acts as a form of counter-storytelling that illustrates an alternative curriculum space and flips the hegemonic script for empowerment.
