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I am currently working on a teaching and reseach project that explores the pedagogical power of writing, reading, and image-making in a series of drawings and etchings called Unformations. While it is beyond the scope of this project to evaluate the effectiveness of writing, reading, and images as pedagogical tools, Unformations grows out of my Racial Sense project (see "Research" for more). It explores the occasions in which we teach others and ourselves through image-making as a form of drawing alongside and against writing and reading. Unformations contemplates how image-making and mark-making broadly makes accessible knowledge that is different from that accessed through the practices of writing and reading. 

 

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I began the project by collecting images from myself and others who create images to teach others and themselves. Interestingly, contributors explained that they produced images including drawings, charts, maps, etc. to teach topics that were difficult to grasp via language, i.e. reading and writing. These images were produced to teach, for example, theories of genre and English language acquisition, Paul Gilroy's theory of the Black Atlantic, the narrative structure of Jane Eyre, Freud's theories of sexuality, Etienne Balibar's theory of the nation, and so on. I then re-drew the images freehand to make etchings. Recreating the images proliferated further questions about the spontaneity and improvisation with which the images were made and how the quickness of the drawings represent or inform how we teach and learn. 

 

Unformations transformed again as I experimented with printing the etchings. I learned that a formal approach, rather than a content-focused approach (i.e. being "true" to the meanings of each image's production), made far more interested prints. I collaged distinct images, consequently reinventing the meanings of the images; as a result, in each print, ideas, concepts, and theories that I would never would have thought “go together” now do. Unformations thus allows me to continue questioning the role of image-making for teaching and learning in my work as a university instructor. The series also allows me to reexamine my research on racial literacy through these findings on the relationships among image-making, writing, and reading. 

 

 

 

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