ABSTRACT
To disrupt the cruel optimism that rationalism, individualism, meritocracy, and the American Dream can produce, a new story-we-live-by is posited by drawing on research accounts in which preservice teachers’ and middle school students’ art-making and thinking-feeling with literature established new relations with themselves and others, created new connections to histories and sociopolitical forces, and circulated more life-affirming practices. These literacies of well-becoming involve taking the next step, a response-ability that requires the ethics of love and care expanding out in circles everywhere as flows meet other flows.
