I found this week’s readings to be validating to me about how I think about education. I work as an educator at a non profit doing community organizing. I run our fellowship program on community organizing and much of my work is to think about how we become politicized through our lived experiences and what it means for lived experiences to be the starting point of curriculum. Eisner helped me see how art can help us understand the world around us with many of the same tools that make our experiences meaningful; I found it interesting how he talked about knowledge that comes from senses, emotions, and nuances. Art is a way for us to portray something about our experiences that traditional research can’t.

For many years I’ve been interested in the ideas of Paulo Freire. Freire was a critical educator that did a lot of work around literacy. One of the tools he used to spark conversation, critical thinking and eventually literacy was art and images. He worked with a team of researchers and community members in rural Brazil to talk with people about their lives and what was important to them. Then their team developed these experiences and the themes they represented into images. The literacy classes started with community members discussing the images that reflected back to them what they had told the research team about.

In my education work, I’m curious how I can use images in our curriculum to cultivate critical thinking that grows out of our lived experiences. In this class, I hope to explore some of my own experiences dealing with illness and family through thinking about roots and struggle. What can we learn from images about how roots are strengthened and sustained through death, through displacement, through distance? What grounds us and allows us to survive and perhaps thrive even through the most difficult things we face both through the nature of being mortal and because of systems of oppression that wrench people from place? I’ve attached an image by Melanie Cervantes of the artists’ collective, Dignidad Rebelde. As it says on their website, “Dignidad Rebelde is a graphic arts collaboration between Oakland-based artists Jesus Barraza and Melanie Cervantes.” I chose this image because it makes me ask myself the question: in the hardest times, what nourishes us? In struggle, what do we learn about our roots? How do we find them and redefine them?