Visual-verbal journals, literature, and literacies of well-becoming

Abstract

ABSTRACT Critically-oriented teacher education has been under assault in the United States (U.S.), England, and Australia through policies that have had a chilling effect on teaching critical race theory, gender, and sexuality. We are concerned that these reactionary movements will further distort the histories, lives, and humanity of minoritized groups while reinforcing the single storylines of dominant groups. Our post-qualitative inquiry demonstrates how four literacy teacher education instructors and four preservice literacy teachers from various regions of the U.S. used visual-verbal journals (VVJs) and quality literature in critically-oriented, artful pedagogy to disrupt normative forces in teacher education. Data analyses were informed by the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, particularly the concepts of becoming and health, which have explanatory power over affective encounters across the four different sites. We focus on encounters that produced literacies of well-becoming, which are reading, composing, and thinking processes that multiply the ways learners: 1) encounter self and other; 2) relate to histories and sociopolitical forces; and 3) circulate life-affirming practices. This article provides affirmative examples of how affects can produce health, which for Deleuze involves distributed capacities to break out of well-worn grooves of habit by connecting to the world in new ways.