The Why of Arts-Based Pedagogies: Yohana Junker
Dialogue on Teaching, Wabash Center’s podcast series, is hosted by Nancy Lynne Westfield, Ph.D., Director of the Wabash Center. Amplifying the Wabash Center’s mission, the podcasts focus upon issues of teaching and learning in theology and religion within colleges, university, seminaries, as well as the publics impacted by these schools. Dialogues with faculty and administrators working in the wide range of institutional contexts illumine the complexity of teaching and the teaching life.
Yohana A. Junker, PhD is Assistant Professor of Art, Religion, and Culture and Associate Dean for Strategic Planning at Claremont School of Theology.
Employing arts-based pedagogies allows students' analysis and curiosity to get inside the systems which oppress, wound, and hobble in order to dismantle, rethink, or jettison. Designing classroom experiences which takes seriously a story-centered approach asks students to use their imaginations to learn and grow for the good of community. Experience-praxis methods invite students to seek healing, remedies, and reclaim the passions which brought them to the classroom in the first place. Using creative practices, engaging all the senses in learning activities, beckons students move to new kinds of meaning making and learning. The aim of these classrooms is for student and teacher, together, to walk into potential, possibility, and hope.