I just received my copy of Culturally Relevant Art Education: A way out of no way, which includes a chapter I wrote on how we name social justice art education. In “Narrowing in on the Answers: Dissecting social justice art education” I look back at the literature on activist art and how it aligns with the scholarship on social justice education.  This great compilation includes articles by bell hooks and Dipti Desai about teaching art from a justice standpoint.

 This collaboratively authored article highlights the unique kinds of learning that emerge from a culturally relevant art practice.  I had the great honor of working with several Hawaiian scholars to co-author this piece which was published in the Harvard Educational Review in their recent special issue on Art Education.  This piece is particularly meaningful to me since it gave me a chance to acknowledge how much I have learned from my kumu as I’ve practiced weaving lauhala papale myself (note the image of my first papale here!).

 I had the pleasure of writing a review of Art and Social Justice Education: Culture as Commons by Therese Quinn, John Ploof, and Lisa Hochtritt for Studies in Art Education in a short piece titled “Walking the Talk of Art and Social Justice Education.”  This fantastic book offers profiels on artists, reflections on teaching art, and narratives about student projects.  It’s definitely a keeper.  They also have a facebook page and an online resource for extended conversations about art and social justice education.

A month of non-stop writing: one collaborative essay with a group of Hawaiian Lauhala weavers on the pedagogy of learning to weave and one cross-generational and collaborative essay (with Marsha MacDowell–my mother and Ingrid Romero–a former student of mine) on the evolution of community arts.