Current Research

Writing studies has long advocated approaches to instruction that follow a plant-draft-revise writing process, and more recently, scholars have argued for reflection as a recursive activity throughout the writing process to enhance writers' metacognition and promote transfer of writing practices across contexts. Research has found written reflection in the form of reflective journal writing and reflective writing assignments; however, less is known about the use of art as a way to reflect in undergraduate writing classrooms. 

Reflective practice is widely regarded as a way to empower learners as active participants in their learning processes and has become integral in multiple learning theories. In undergraduate clases, reflection has been shown to support students in evaluating successes and challenges, motivating transofmration, and facilitating knowledge transfer across contexts. However, reflection should be carefully structured, guided, and connected with course content to have the greatest impact. The way instructors integrate reflective practices into courses is crucial. Research with undergraduate students has focused primarily on understanding how written reflections in the form of journals, analyses of course projects and writing to learn activities promote student success. While these activities may be structured to provide students opportunities to reflect, they are limited to written modes. 

Creative approaches to reflection that include multimodal meaning making emerge from histories of practice to honor multiple ways of knowing. Artmaking involves "embodiment and emotions as much as {...} invention and skill" (Roswell, 2020, p. 139). The process of working with materials privileges the thinking that comes through doing, and visual representations both intensify and hold still dynamic moments, opening experiences to interpretation Multimodal reflection through image and artmaking encourages a deeper level of expression that may not be available from written modes alone. As such, it is important to ensure students not only have opportunities for structured reflections connected with coursework but also invitations to make sense of writing experiences in a variety of ways. 

To understand the ways art might enhance first year writers' reflective practice, I developed three arts-based lessons for students to reflect on their work and imagine pathways forward with their writing projects. One lesson I repeat throughout the semester invites students to create neurographic art. I selected this method because it is an excellent choice for students who do not consider themselves "artists." According to the Neurographica Academy, the method was developed by a Russian philosopher, Pavel Piskarev, in 2014. It combines visual thinking with patterns. I designed my lessons as meditative moments in my class, in which students reflect (in writing) on their work before participating in a guided, neurographica workshop with me. Students have reported the practice is calming, helping them quiet their minds and gain clarity in their writing process. 

In another lesson, students use donated materials (magazines, newspapers, discarded books, paper) to create a collage related to their research. Students spend time looking through the materials, collecting meaningful images, words, and/or interesting prints. After they find 20-30 samples, they glue or tape the samples to a small poster and use a small viewfinder to locate new compositions within the collage. By slowing down and looking through materials, students find a way in to our public writing assignment. Looking at the collage through the viewfinder helps students locate a perspective. Students write about their creative experience, thinking through the meanings they find in their collage and focalized section, and the insights gained through the creative process. Students have reported the process helps them either find an idea for writing or revise an existing idea. In the courses I have used this activity, students' initial research questions are significantly more narrow than in courses I have not used the activity. 

I have found that integrating arts-based methods into writing courses not only supports students in reflecting on their work but also supports students' engagement in my courses. Students become familiar with multimodal composition strategies organically, and they are more willing to take risks in their writing in an environment in which they feel all of their ways of knowing are honored. I hope to continue this work. 

Author and illustrator Nikkolas Smith recently published The Artivist. Smith says this work is autobiographical -- a retelling of the ways he uses art "to paint the world [he] had always wanted to see." With colorful illustrations and sparse, poetic text, Smith makes visible complex social issues, including racism, injustice, inequality, and hate. In a double, full bleed spread, Smith pictures a child atop a structure, running toward an enormous monster. The child faces toward the page turn while the monster stands in his way. Tendrils of the monster's form wrap around the child's arms and legs, but light brushstrokes indicate the child's momentum. Within the purple mass of the monster, readers see another child behind bars and the words "US vs. THEM" inscribed in his form. Through words and images, The Artivist beautifully captures a growing engagement with activism, protest, and collective struggle in children's literature. 

The Artivist blends realism with fantasy: the words express a child's desire to spark change, and the illustrations vacillate between fantastical monsters and daily political struggles. The combination of fantasy and realism in the book demonstrates the idea that children's literature is, at its core, morally and spiritually instructive. Children's books transmit to readers beliefs and values, making critical analysis of these works imperative for the study and teaching of children's literature. Stories are carried through language qnd contextualized in cultures; therefore, stories carry socially constructed meanings developed through historical and social processes. Children's literature "narrate[s] the nation" (Botelho & Rudman, 2009, p. 136) and tells researchers a great deal about what is or is not important in a society. 

Children's literature is written, produced, distributed, and consumed within a complex web of power relations. Tensions between what children want or need from their literature and what adults want or need from children's literature are re/produced in discourses defining the social positions of children. While literature offers young readers "creative worlds in which to explore and confront" political themes (Todres, 2020), children occupy a social position inferior to adults, and their status is often defined in terms of age, dependence, and/or vulnerability. Questioning the power structures in which children are enmeshed comes primarily from the empowered (i.e., adults). Perhaps ironically, those power structures are mirrored in children's books by and about marginalized communities and have a hold on what is deemed tellable, knowable, and askable. These layers add complexity to the study of power and resistance in children's literature. 

Because children's literature plays a significant role in shaping young children's understandings of social norms, power structures, and institutions, researchers must ask how those complex social issues are distilled into stories for the youngest readers. This perspective positions books as cultural transmitters: stories not only reflect reality but also the possibilities for what could be in the world. Existing scholarship calls for interrogating the ideologies embedded in children's books so that we may gain a deeper understanding of the beliefs and values being passed from one generation to the next. Scholars have questioned the ways power is excercised in children's literature; however, there is limited research on the ways resistance is excercised in children's literature. This dissertation research aims to develop the concept of a children's literature of resistance. To do this work and provide an articulated example of the concept, I have combined an ethnography of literary writing and artmaking to explore resistances in the ongoing water justice movment as it is represented in the children's literature of North America.