Looking back through my process journal, I found a quote I copied from the Eisner article The Arts and the Creation of the Mind which profoundly resonated with me. He said, “a culture populated by a people whose imagination is impoverished has a static future.” I wrote this down at the beginning of the course before my first class session. I used to think of concepts like knowledge and skill and learning and identity as things that could be mastered and ultimately understood. And while I am always trying to know more, be more skilled, and understand myself better, I now think there is a lot more fluidity and complexity to these concepts. Conceiving of an end goal can be motivating, but I also think it can be limiting to set a goal at a fixed point. If I want to understand my identity, I have to first comprehend how my identity is fluid, as is the world around me, and therefore my understanding will have to shift, deepen, sharpen, broaden, and transform with me. Critical consciousness is not an achievement but a state of being. If I already think of myself as creative, I have to push myself to enhance my sense of creativity and imagination. This conception of criticality makes me want to reconsider my past sense of self to better understand myself now, and nurture a vision for the future that is unconstrained and always growing. 

Previously I perceived art and non-arts classes as separate disciplines because of the way they were distinguished in school. This in itself was a limitation of my own imagination. The Moving towards authentic arts integration chart from Week 1 confronted my subconscious assumptions about what a classroom has to feel and look like. I call myself an artist but I did not consider modeling an arts integrated class in my discipline as a real option. Now I am conceiving of new ways of being an artist, a learner, a teacher, and a human being all at once. The Artzine and Embodied History projects were incredibly insightful into how arts integration demands rigor from students, promotes communication, and embodies horizontal learning. It is a challenge to create something personal and share it with others. Finding comfort in vulnerability is still something I am working on, and both these projects were rewarding because I pushed myself to be honest and expressive. I want to make a classroom that is also a studio, a place of imagination where student works and ideas are created and shared, and peer feedback is respected and actively sought out. 

My personal and creative identity is centered around joy. For me, joy is more complicated than happiness. It contains beautiful contradictions. Joy is both momentary and lasting, it can be easy to come by or difficult to find, it is personal and it is collective. And joy also happens to be my middle name. Like joy, my personal identity is complicated, contradictory, flexible and endless, prone to hybridity and multiplicity, plurality and otherness, and many overlapping truths. My identity is informed by a family history of immigration that does not treat people fairly based on their ethnicity or country of origin, and my own lived history that is relatively isolated to California. History is not always kind or forgiving, and the history of this country is particularly abhorrent. I will be co-teaching American History in a few weeks time, and I have the responsibility to tell the truth of this country and still center joy in the classroom. I want to teach students to find joy in themselves and their histories, to learn about the rich tradition of resistance, to ask sharp questions, to find catharsis in solidarity, to go into the world with hope for the future. Art is the root of who I am and who I want to be as an educator. I am an artist, but I am also a beginner with a long journey ahead of me. My identity is my own, distinct from others who came before me, it is something entirely new. My identity is a metamorphosis that is constantly transforming.

/ˌmedəˈmôrfəsəs/

Metamorphosis has many truths. Metamorphosis is transformation. It is growth, it is the shifting of forms, it is the slipperiness of ideas Eisner talked about, it is the Ovidian tradition of changing from one state of being to another, it is scientific evolution, it is literary theme and artistic muse. In education, authentic arts integration is a space for truly transformative education.