Making Art, Unmaking Practices: Creativity Justice with Artistic Materials and Culturally Sustaining Early Literacies for Young Multilingual Learners
Dr. Harini Rajagopal, Assistant Professor Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia
Nov 18, 12:00-1.30 EST/9:00-10.30 PST, Zoom Event
Marginalized children and families have historically faced exclusion and invisibility in schools, where their ways of being and learning often go unrecognized, and artistic practices can function not merely as inclusive tools but as forms of critical and creative languaging, inquiry, and resistance—an aesthetic move toward reimagining whose knowledge counts, how it is expressed, and what education makes possible. Drawing from orientations of culturally sustaining practices, communicative repertoires, and arts-based work with materials—perspectives that challenge monocultural and monolingual pedagogies—this presentation considers how arts-based practices can make culturally sustaining pedagogy materially and relationally possible, and powerful, in multilingual elementary classrooms.
Inspired by participatory action research and education design research, the study involved 10 early elementary (K–3) teachers from Western Canada working with clay, loose parts, and paints in a district-organized professional development initiative. Collaborating with this group, I inquired: How can arts-based methods and materials create pedagogical spaces for transformative learning that attends to the languages, literacies, and lives of young multilingual learners? Data included observational notes, conversations with children, material creations, classroom documents, and focus-group interviews with teachers. Iterative data analysis involved collaborative thematic and visual analysis to generate rich, storied understandings.
Braiding pedagogical learning through three material encounters in classrooms with teachers’ reflections, this work offered four threads: (a) composing with clay facilitated multilingual conversations; (b) playing with open-ended materials invited multilingual storying; (c) printmaking with paint supported emotional expression; and (d) reflecting through the arts invited teacher reflexivity. More broadly, I offer that playing with the arts amplified multidimensional learning, artistic materials supported decolonizing pedagogies, and creative agency enhanced culturally sustaining practices. I suggest that working creatively and critically with the arts invited teachers to disrupt deficit narratives about multilingual learners and instead foreground their creativity, knowledge, agency, and critical awareness. These children became designers and cultural producers, negotiating cultural ways of being in languages historically associated with “the Other,” using their languages, literacies, spaces, modes, bodies, and materials. I emphasize attending carefully to children’s artistic practices, cultivating slower and decolonized ways of noticing, and recognizing collaboration and creativity as loving and liberatory conditions for language and literacy pedagogies. Replacing narrow literacy routines with practices that play with time, ambiguity, and relationships creates openings for attentiveness. Ultimately, such work honours creativity justice and narrative sovereignty: protecting and nourishing culturally artistic ways of expression as critical and transformative practices.
About the speaker:
Dr. Harini Rajagopal (she/her) is a listener of stories and enjoys working on collaborative and creative pedagogical designs. She is an Assistant Professor in Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, on the traditional, unceded, ancestral territories of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm. Rooted in antiracist perspectives and decolonizing methodologies, her work focuses on relationally collaborating with children, families, and educators to welcome their artistic, multimodal, and multilingual communicative repertoires and stories as powerful resources in educational spaces, while paying attention to systemic inequities. She uses participant-friendly methods that value multiliterate and imaginative practices as resources for co-creating justice-oriented pedagogies and spaces of critical love, creativity, reflexivity, and hope for humans and more-than-humans.
