Culminating Essay

I did not expect a single gesture to change how I saw making. For much of my life, I approached art cautiously, favoring neat lines, predictable outcomes, and control. But during EDUC 5930, something began to shift. In the simple act of tearing a piece of paper, I felt my grip on control loosen. That rupture opened a space where I could create not more beautifully, but more honestly. And over time, it came to symbolize the broader shift I experienced: a move toward uncertainty, risk-taking, and critical inquiry at the heart of arts-based pedagogy.

This reflection traces the threads of my evolving understanding of arts-based education. Across this essay, I explore how arts-based pedagogy enables three transformations: unfixing knowledge through aesthetic inquiry, disrupting rigid curriculum with imaginative risk, and cultivating relational learning within and beyond school walls.

Unfixing Knowledge: Art as a Site of Knowing

Before this course, I regarded art as a supplement to instruction—an enrichment activity, a reward, a decoration. I now see how that view was entangled with a broader ideology of fixed knowledge: the idea that learning means absorbing what is already known, already validated. Critical arts-based pedagogy, however, challenges this premise. As Leavy (2020) writes, arts-based research is not about illustrating existing knowledge; it is a method of inquiry in its own right. In the classroom, this means art can generate, not just for understanding.

I return often to Goldberg’s (2021) framework of aesthetic experience: perception, concentration, imagination, contemplation, and action. These phases describe how learners come to know through making and sensing. I began to recognize that when students are invited to draw and perform their way through content, they are not simply expressing what they have learned. They are producing knowledge through sensory and affective engagement. A diagram, a tableau, a soundscape—each becomes a text that speaks in ways linear language cannot.

This shift was especially apparent in our discussions of Siegel (1995), who describes how transmediation, the process of translating ideas across modes, activates new cognitive connections. For students marginalized by traditional literacies, this is not simply a pedagogical strategy; it is a matter of justice. When students can sculpt an idea in clay, narrate it in movement, or visualize it in watercolor, they are reclaiming access to learning.

Disrupting Rigidity: Imagination, Risk, and the Tensions of Making

In traditional schooling, imagination is often treated as a luxury—important, perhaps, in early childhood, but progressively pruned as academic demands increase. This course asked me to rethink that hierarchy. What if imagination is not the opposite of rigor, but its deepest expression? What if the capacity to imagine otherwise is itself a form of critical consciousness?

Eisner (2003) insists that uncertainty and flexibility are not threats to learning but vital components of it. His work helped me reframe discomfort as generative rather than disruptive. When students engage in arts-based work, they step into ambiguity: materials resist, intentions shift, outcomes surprise. These moments of unpredictability, whether in the form of a broken collage, an unsatisfying sketch, or a too-literal metaphor become entry points for reflection. They ask, what did I expect? What happened? What now?

That same trust is essential in teaching. Just as artists learn to embrace the unknown on the canvas, teachers must become comfortable with uncertainty in the classroom. I recall reading Broderick (2015) and her invitation to co-construct curriculum in dialogue with students. The idea unsettled me at first. Doesn’t teaching require structure? But I have come to see that co-construction does not mean abandoning frameworks; it means inviting students into the shaping of them. It means accepting that a lesson plan, like a painting, may evolve in response to its makers.

Even the materials matter. In Szekely’s (2013) reflections on thirty years of art teaching, he emphasizes the power of simple tools such aspaper, glue, string as catalysts for profound exploration. Tearing paper became one such moment for me. Though small, the gesture symbolized a willingness to create without knowing, to resist perfection, to relinquish control. It reminded me that the aesthetic process is not always polished. Sometimes it is ripped, layered, taped back together.

Another such moment came when I experimented with shaving foam as a printing medium. The randomness of pigment diffusion made me hesitant. I was afraid the final image would fail. But when I finally lifted the print, I was stunned. One image resembled a mushroom cloud; another, a bouquet bound with drifting ribbons. These sensory surprises—emergent, chaotic, yet coherent—reminded me that art does not always require a premeditated vision. There is power in letting go, in surrendering to unpredictability. The materials themselves were teaching me to trust the process.

Cultivating Relational Learning: Collaboration, Culture, and Community

Throughout the course, one of the most powerful realizations I had was that arts-based teaching is not only interdisciplinary; it is interrelational. That is, it does not merely link subjects but connects people—students with each other, with their histories, with the world around them.

Goldberg (2021) emphasizes the role of the arts in fostering what she calls “critical voice”: the capacity to listen, respond, and co-create meaning in ways that are reflective and respectful. In this model, the classroom becomes not a site of transmission but of transformation. Arts-based pedagogy asks students to bring their whole selves into learning, and in doing so, invites them to witness one another.

This came into sharp focus when we examined examples of community-based artmaking. From Beatty et al.’s (2008) exploration of teaching philosophies as aesthetic documents, to Amelia Hutchison’s prison workshops, I was struck by how artistic practice can restore dignity and agency in places where it has been stripped away. The image of a prisoner painting dreams onto concrete walls remains with me, a testament to how art carves out possibility within confinement.

In K-12 classrooms, this might mean using community murals to address local issues, integrating oral history projects with portraiture, or inviting local artists to co-teach. Whitelaw (2021) suggests that this kind of place-based artmaking not only enriches curriculum but grounds it in lived experience. It affirms that students’ communities are worthy of study and celebration, not just distant cultures or abstract concepts.

The idea of belonging surfaced again in our engagement with The Journal Junkies Workshop (Scott & Modler, 2010), where journaling was framed as a practice of making visible the invisible. In many ways, this is what I now believe the arts do best: they surface what is felt but not yet spoken, seen but not yet named. They make room for students to say,“This is mine.”

Conclusion: An Ongoing Thread

If I had to distill what I have taken from this course, it would be this: teaching through the arts is not a technique, but a stance. It is a commitment to possibility, to process, to plurality. It resists neat outcomes and tidy metrics. It trusts in mess, in emergence.

As I move forward in my teaching practice, I carry with me the voices of our readings and the silences between them. I carry the feel of torn paper and the echo of collective laughter as we puzzled through metaphors. I carry the questions: What can this become? Who is this for? What stories have yet to be told?

And I carry, above all, the belief that education is not the filling of a vessel but the weaving of a tapestry—thread by thread, voice by voice, image by image.

References

Beatty, J. E., Leigh, J. S., & Dean, K. L. (2009). Philosophy rediscovered: Exploring the connections between teaching philosophies, educational philosophies, and philosophy. Journal of Management Education, 33(1), 99-114.

Broderick, D. A. (2015). Art as inquiry: Cultivating critical arts-based practices in an early pre-service teacher education program. University of Pennsylvania.

Eisner, E. W. (2003). The arts and the creation of mind. Language arts, 80(5), 340-344.

Goldberg, M. (2021). Arts integration: Teaching subject matter through the arts in multicultural settings. Routledge.

Leavy, P. (2020). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice. Guilford publications.

Scott, E. M., & Modler, D. R. (2010). The journal junkies workshop: Visual ammunition for the art addict. Penguin.

Siegel, M. (1995). More than words: The generative power of transmediation for learning. Canadian Journal of Education/Revue canadienne de l'éducation, 455-475.

Szekely, G., & Bucknam, J. A. (2013). Art teaching: Elementary through middle school. Routledge.

Whitelaw, J. (2021). Reconsidering arts integration and place-based education. In Goldberg, M. (Ed.), Arts integration (pp. 298–315). Routledge.