Do Your Lessons Love Your Students?: Creative Education for Social Change

Strengthen your culturally responsive teaching by designing curricula that leads to equitable, humanized outcomes. In this powerful new book, Jessa Brie Moreno and Mariah Rankine-Landers reveal how artistic research and creative inquiry across subject areas and grades can help you access your learners’ collective wisdom and potential. Moreno and Rankine-Landers describe the SPIRAL framework for centering culturally responsive teaching and learning through the arts, showing how and why these iterative processes lead to liberatory outcomes.

You’ll learn how to use creative inquiry to address power dynamics in teaching and learning, and how to critically reflect on your curriculum, including investigating whose narratives are centered, whose have been erased, and which marginalized stories can be brought forward. You’ll also find out how to alter the learning space to set a container for creative practice, which is key to navigating cultural shifts, building trust, and setting a collaborative and collective mindset.

The book offers a variety of practical activities you can implement right away, such as using visual art making, writing, and storytelling as prompts to activate meaning making and to disrupt unconscious biases, as well as using creative dialogue and character development for embodied learning, introspection, and identification. With the addition of this book to your professional library, you’ll have new tools for building belonging and justice, and engaging all students through artistic research, dialogue, and deep listening.

Mariah Rankine-Landers (she/her), M.Ed., and Jessa Brie Moreno (she/her), MFA, founders and co-executive directors of Studio Pathways, have each been liberatory educators and artists for over twenty years, having collectively taught at the pre-K through post-graduate levels. They are sought after professional facilitators who work with educational and executive leaders, and teachers leading for social change. They are co-creators of Rise Up: An American Curriculum and have co-designed creative pedagogy for The Othering and Belonging Institute out of UC Berkeley, The Center for Cultural Power, and the WKKF Foundation (Racial Healing). They are former co-directors of the School Transformation Through the Arts and Integrated Learning Specialist Program out of the Alameda County Office of Education. Partners include NAEA, The Kennedy Center, Stanford University, Museum of the African Diaspora, and many county offices of education, school districts, individual schools, arts organizations, and philanthropic and social change institutions. Follow them on social media platforms at @StudioPathways and at studiopathways.org.