I am currently participating in a large 32 hour professional development MOOC via Adobe for a Youth Educator Credential. As part of this work, participants are actually practicing the projects that can be used as part of the Adobe Youth Voices curriculum. Although I have been able to finish any of my own pieces of art for awhile (I promise, there are ideas in the works!), I thought I would post some of them on here for you all to see what kind of creative endeavors I am up to over the next few weeks. I hope you enjoy!

The piece I am sharing with you this week is part of a media mash-up assignment. We were tasked with finding an advertisement and then creating a new story.

The original advertisement from Sharpie and my mash-up:

The manipulations that I used are pretty simple in this piece, but I thought the topic was powerful. I’ll share a little of what I posted in reflection with my peers below.

My intention in this mash-up was to provoke reflection on our current punitive systems. I previously taught in a juvenile incarceration facility and have spent a lot of time around youth that have been pushed out of school. I wanted to address the issue of school push-out in my image.

My before image is actually what came before the idea for the mash-up. It evoked thoughts about the above sentiments when I saw it – the idea of your fingerprints being taken and permanently recorded to follow you was very powerful to me.

Unfortunately, “troublemakers” tend to get permanently labeled early and left out of education. I wanted to leverage the great imagery of the original in order to shift viewers to thinking about this school push-out. Best described by Mariame Kaba and Erica Meiners in Arresting the Carceral State, “While the US public education system has historically diverted non-white communities toward under-education, non-living wage work, participation in a permanent war economy, and/or incarceration, the development of the world’s largest prison nation over the last three decades has strengthened policy, practice, and ideological linkages between schools and prisons. Non-white, non-heterosexual, and/or non-gender conforming students are targeted for surveillance, suspended and expelled at higher rates, and are much more likely to be charged, convicted, and removed from their homes, or otherwise to receive longer sentences” (paragraph 4).