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The chapter offers a case-study grounded in a professional development program for middle- and high-school teachers of history and/or social studies. The featured program supported American history teachers integrating the study of Picturing America images into academic subjects. Employing a dynamic Seattle-area academic and teaching partnership with the Seattle Art Museum, the Goodlad Institute for Educational Renewal, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the project elaborated on Picturing America’s democracy theme. This theme, combined with visual thinking methods of exploring artworks, helped teacher link Picturing America’s masterpieces to their history curriculum, content standards, and individual responsibilities to promote informed civic participation. The program made innovative use of the Picturing America images to explore such historical concepts as freedom, equality, and inclusion. The purpose of the initiative was to enhance teaching innovation and curriculum and to help participants become influential teacher-leaders who can advocate for greater curricular emphasis on the combination of art and civic concepts. A signature feature of this effort was the focus on dissent as a lens through which to view key curricular concepts such as liberty, community, and informed citizenship.

Implicating myself in Métis scholar Natalie Clark's question “who are you and why do you care?” (2016, p. 48), this chapter traces the theorization of love in the Human Services, with a focus on the field of Child and Youth Care. I explore love as an ethical, political, and necessary force in times of ongoing colonial and state violence against Indigenous and racialized peoples (Ferguson & Toye, 2017). I go on to highlight my graduate research as a Child and Youth Care Masters student and educator, grappling with my own settler identity as a diasporic, queer, ciswoman of color, and questioning my complicity as a settler body on stolen Indigenous lands. The chapter includes vital knowledge from my research with Sisters Rising, an Indigenous-led, community-based, participatory study that uses arts-and-land-based ways of knowing to honor and uphold stories, art, and knowledge from Indigenous and racialized young peoples and communities. By tracing the reflections on decolonial love shared through Sisters Rising, I consider ways that racialized settler practitioners might engage a decolonial love ethic in praxis. Calling upon critical feminist, Indigenous, and postcolonial scholarship and brilliance, this chapter invites other settler practitioners, specifically those who identify as racialized or people of color to reckon with the intricacies of our collective complicity in notions of settler purity and apolitical practice (Shotwell, 2016). Throughout the chapter, I highlight conceptual approaches for loving politicized praxis rooted in movements toward social justice, Indigenous sovereignty-building, and decolonization.