Abstract of

The Full Circling Process: Leaping Into the Ethics of History Using Critical Visual Literacy and Arts-Based Activism

Trisha Wies Long

In a time when adolescents are continually inundated by provocative multimedia campaigns that coax them to buy more, think less, and do so in a passive environment that provides little to no opportunities for them to reflect on who they are in the world, the author of this article offers one way to engage adolescents and their teachers with a process she calls full circling. Working with a variety of urban adolescents, university interns, and middle school teachers in urban settings, the author describes her four-part process of connecting critical visual media—historically authentic photographs, paintings, drawings, and other visual documents—with more traditional fiction and non-fiction texts, as she incorporates inquiry, reading, writing, educational drama, and “arts-based activism.” The author explores a variety of ways to change current classroom paradigms as she reframes and repositions student learning using the tenets of her process.

Abstract from Long, T. (2008, March). The Full Circling Process: Leaping Into the Ethics of History Using Critical Visual Literacy and Arts-Based Activism. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 51(6), 498–508. doi: 10.1598/JAAL.51.6.6