Rationale for Lesson Plan and Co-Teaching Workshop: "Toting Comfort"

The "Toting Comfort" workshop was designed to introduce students to fiber arts as a meaningful, accessible, and expressive medium. By combining crochet, embroidery, beadwork, and fabric paint, the lesson plan offers a multidisciplinary approach that fosters creativity, tactile engagement, and emotional reflection. The choice to center the project on tote bags serves both a functional and symbolic purpose: students create a usable item while embedding personal narratives into their designs.

The workshop also highlights contemporary fiber artists Billie Zangewa and Prisma Andrade, whose work explores identity, care, and the domestic sphere through fabric and stitching. These artists serve as both inspiration and cultural context, enabling students to see how fiber art can engage with complex themes such as memory, selfhood, and comfort. In this way, the workshop connects art-making to lived experience, encouraging students to reflect on what brings them comfort in their daily lives.

Co-teaching this workshop allows for rich collaboration, differentiated instruction, and modeling of creative risk-taking. It enables us to meet diverse learner needs by offering multiple modes of engagement and expression. Through shared facilitation, students benefit from varied perspectives, scaffolding, and encouragement as they explore an unfamiliar medium. The lesson aligns with inclusive, student-centered pedagogy that values emotional connection, material exploration, and cultural relevance.