Care-Filled Classrooms: Heart(Art)Full Life Writing Pedagogy

Abstract

When located at the nexus of life writing scholarship and social justice education (SJE), auto|biographical portraiture is a critical and creative mode of inquiry that allows students to integrate personal experience with course subject matter. Thereby, providing an opening through which students can examine their own identity and various social locations, as well as their own embeddedness in structures of power, privilege, oppression, and injustice—the space where the personal and political meet. Indeed, at its core, life writing scholarship theorizes “the self, the subject, the body, memory, agency and identity as well as operations of trauma, belatedness, and witnessing,” as Sidonie Smith writes.1 Life writing scholarship teaches us about human suffering—but it also teaches us about human resiliency and resistance. The purpose of teaching difficult or traumatic subject matter is to help students learn how power and privilege operate in specific cultural, social, political, and historical contexts; and to understand its ongoing effects. As a pedagogical strategy, auto|biographical portraiture can be a meaningful (and intimate) medium to help students understand and to apply an intersectional analysis to issues of oppression, inequality, and injustice; which can be a catalyst for social justice transformation. I conceptualize auto|biographical portraiture as a mixed-method of inquiry that blends life writing praxis and arts-based visual methodologies in a form of visual life storytelling, thereby creating an evocative opening to theorize and express personhood using symbolism, metaphoric expression, iconography and visual narratives. According to Leavy visual images access parts of the subconscious differently than written text.2 Thus, when applied to life storytelling visual imagery adds an extra dimension to what can be known about a subject, including the self as the subject of inquiry. Moreover, in visual storytelling meaning is made both by the artist and in the audiences’ encounter with the art.3 In this way, auto|biographical portraiture is way of knowing that is in continual process. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2022.2154444