Teaching with Arts-Infused Writing Pedagogies: Freedom Dreaming for Educational Justice

Winner of the 2025 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE) James N. Britton Award

Showcasing original artwork, this book shows readers how to use arts-infused writing pedagogies to create socially transformative educational spaces.

Envisioned as a story, a guide, a resource, and an aesthetic experience, this book features the work of a multigenerational collective of K-12 educators, students, and teaching artists seeking educational justice. This multivocal approach illustrates how bringing together arts-infused writing pedagogies, with the visionary and intellectual force of freedom dreaming, can create more luminous and socially transformative educational spaces.
Through vivid vignettes, compelling first-person narratives, mixed media artwork, and detailed lesson plans, readers will experience schools as places of joy, belonging, and justice. As an act of radical hope during the turmoil and trauma of post-pandemic times, this book invites readers to draw on the principles of freedom dreaming and abolitionist teaching to imagine and enact arts-infused writing pedagogies across a multitude of settings. Authors offer guidance for teachers, teacher educators, and professional development leaders wishing to take up this work in their own contexts.
Book Features:

• Provides detailed guidelines and principles for enacting arts-infused writing pedagogies, adaptable to a range of contexts.
• Showcases original artwork by K-12 students and educators, some in full color.
• Includes insights on teaching writing and engaging in inquiry-based professional learning from a local site of the National Writing Project.
• Highlights the role of teaching artists in enhancing teacher and student learning.
• Illuminates the potential of a/r/tography, affect, and wonder in qualitative inquiry.
• Contains visually arresting and narratively powerful contributions from students as young as 6 years old to teachers nearing retirement, as well as professional artists and novelists.