Collaborative visual mapping as performance: Visual Arts pre-service teachers’ reflections on practicum

This poetic, visual essay describes a collaborative, visual performance enacted by a cohort of Visual Arts pre-service teachers. The students mapped memories and experiences of their first teaching experience from practicum, motivated by discussion, stimuli and feedback. The mapping process had several loops where the students worked collectively to map their visual reflections onto large-scale canvases. These performance paintings became palimpsests, portraying layers of collaborative practice and learning. The networks of interactions, dialogue, relationships and group dynamics were exposed in the material practice of the participants. As an a/r/tographical rendering, the process simultaneously documented the group’s subjective expressions as well as their emergent teacher identities. The collaborative model was at once both powerful and provocative as the dynamics of collective art-making evolved into reflections of developing pedagogy. This representation is a multivocal portrayal of the research; the voices of the researchers, students and artworks compete with and complement the other.