Visualizing the Betweens: Drawing Intersectional Discrimination Dialogues with Teenagers by letbal

This article shows how drawing can be used to discuss intersectional discrimination in a multicultural middle school. It reflects on the rhizomatic entanglements of conducting research through arts methodologies and applying design processes to develop an anti-racist art curriculum for middle school. To do this, I used a/r/tography to navigate a research diagram in which drawings from my students are used as valuable data to reflect and analyze the curriculum, my praxis, and multiple roles. I praised the importance of using drawing with seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth-grade students as a visual thinking process in multicultural school environments to discuss and address all forms of discrimination. Applying principles of a/rt/ography, I documented their process journals while weaving them with the research diagram and theory. I also reflect on the international-mindedness mission statement from the International Baccalaureate in connection to the neo-liberalization and misconception of what global education is and how it is being practiced. I suggest that drawing as a performative research tool can produce non-verbal expressions leading to other ways of knowing relevant information for the artographer and students. This knowledge production is relevant to students’ live experiences regarding the intersections between social and political issues. However, more pedagogical approaches have to be developed to continue reinforcing the connections between social issues and climate change.

A Wider Look

When I juxtaposed the drawings with the research diagram to see how the inquiry was unfolding, the composition turned into a storyboard of these conversations. Irwing suggests that in a/r/tography, the visualized research “...can be altered, reversed, or modified across time and space” (Irwing, 2017: 211). A collective composition of students’ digested ideas and voices from their lived experiences on intersectional discrimination turned an ice-cracked theoretical diagram into a living landscape.

Arabic	Hebrew	Polish
Bulgarian	Hindi	Portuguese
Catalan	Hmong Daw	Romanian
Chinese Simplified	Hungarian	Russian
Chinese Traditional	Indonesian	Slovak
Czech	Italian	Slovenian
Danish	Japanese	Spanish
Dutch	Klingon	Swedish
English	Korean	Thai
Estonian	Latvian	Turkish
Finnish	Lithuanian	Ukrainian
French	Malay	Urdu
German	Maltese	Vietnamese
Greek	Norwegian	Welsh
Haitian Creole	Persian

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