“The Stories We Tell Ourselves Shape Our Identities”

Abstract

The author—in the role of one teacher observing another—documented a spring 2021 remote introductory art history course during the COVID-19 pandemic when graduate student teaching assistants called a campus-wide strike. Forced to improvise, the professor replaced formal analysis papers and exams with an ungraded journal. Drawing from the content of these journals, notes from the Zoom classes, and email correspondence with the professor, the author explicates how students took this journal assignment as an invitation to respond personally to the course content, and as an opportunity to grapple with their own identities. These journals allowed students to use art to explore similarities and differences freely across culture, space, and time. With the traditional requirement for an academic argument temporarily on pause, the author raises questions that characterize our present day: how to encourage a world that accepts different identities without hostility.