Reintegration as Border Pedagogy: A Female Text

Abstract

Adult literacy learners often survive on the periphery while holding burdens of invisible barriers. In this article, I explore the border between those in the mainstream and those seeking reintegration and community. Finding resonance with artography, I resist methodological enclosure just as the individuals I work with resist the boundaries that attempt to define them. Emboldened by critical arts-based research, I employ artography to examine my experiences as an adult literacy facilitator supporting formerly incarcerated women. Through metaphorical, poetic, and artful inquiry, I explore a border pedagogy, reaching for a shift in consciousness. Understanding borders as the barrier that separates formerly incarcerated learners from mainstream community, I have attempted a pulling of threads to unravel and then re-stitch an understanding (of) the lines that (no longer) blindly hem us in.