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- Volume 7, Issue 3, 2018
Visual Inquiry - Volume 7, Issue 3, 2018
Volume 7, Issue 3, 2018
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You get tenure, what do I get?: Using art to interrogate a researcher’s dilemma
By Gene FellnerAbstractWhite researcher-advocates whose explorations are situated in schools serving predominantly African American students hope that their research will improve the academic possibilities for those students and reverse systemic injustice. While racial oppression continues as a central thread in the fabric of American educational institutions, white scholars continue to benefit from their research. Through arts-based methods, I explore this issue as it relates to my own research identity and question whether, despite my goals, I am complicit with hegemonic practices that oppress communities of colour within educational contexts.
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Art(full) gifts: Material disruptions and conceptual proddings as creative acts of mentoring for early career art teachers
Authors: Brooke Anne Hofsess and Christina HanawaltAbstractSuspicious of the categories, limits and relations of power that typically define both mentoring of early career teachers and perceptions of beginning teacher identities, we set out to experiment with practices, concepts and materials that might afford new understandings and illuminate alternative practices. We explore art(full) gifts as creative acts of mentoring that attuned us to an empathetic and responsive recognition of the more-than-human ecology of teaching in public schools. In this ecology, currents of power, cultural and social norms, spaces and materials, perceptions, affects, memories, certification and training, and relationships ebb, flow, entangle and get stuck. This article, crafted in the epistolary spirit of our arts-based correspondence with early career art teachers, generates new insights and nuances regarding the interplay between mentoring and professional identities by asking: What might become of mentoring as practice and pedagogy when explored ecologically beyond a humanistic framework?
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Beyond words: Academic writing identities and imaginative (artistic) selves
Authors: Cecile Badenhorst, Heather McLeod and Haley TollAbstractExploring the de/construction of our imaginative (artistic) selves in relation to our academic writing, we foreground the notion that imaginative processes are part of the assembly of self/selves even as they are part of that de/construction. These imaginative selves are important for our professional identities and the daily negotiations we undertake in the context of institutional norms and expectations. Significant for our outward identities, these imaginative selves allow us to speak from different positions, possibly ones that resist conformity and compliance and actively contribute towards a personally ethical academic identity. Through narratives, images and a post-structural research lens, we explore our ‘hidden’ imaginative (artistic) selves in relation to our academic (writing) selves. Two themes emerged from the analysis of our narratives: (1) Into the unknown; and (2) Finding ourselves. We suggest that engagement with artistic, expressive and aesthetic activities in our personal time are important for processing – through metaphor and sensory means – our understanding of our professional identities, particularly, our writing selves. These incursions into our subjectivities reveal incongruity and ambiguity but also provide a sense of renaissance and regeneration.
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Construction of the Blackademic: An arts-based tale of identity in and through academia
More LessAbstractThe act of making a doctoral gown is a response and metaphor to describe the construction, reinforcement and intersections of racial and academic identity within a probationary period of employment in academia known as tenure-track. A collective arts-based autoethnographic project inspired my garment-making to examine three salient racializing moments during my transition from a Ph.D. programme and into the first four years of a tenure-track position. I use concepts of garment construction – marking, pinning, measuring, pressing and stitching – as aesthetic interludes to illuminate and organize moments of intersubjective dialogue, which ultimately lead to an ascribed racialized academic identification. The construction of a Blackademic identity emerges, inspiring the creation of academic regalia. This arts-based project describes a hypervisibility of racial experience within academic spaces and acts as a visual representation of systemic and intersectional factors, which have guided my movements in academia.
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Juxtaposing professional identities and (re)telling pedagogical relations through experimental video-based research
Authors: Joanna Empain and Montserrat Rifà-VallsAbstractThis article focuses on art-based methodologies (ABR), particularly on practices based on the moving image such as experimental cinema/video and on how they can contribute to the construction of professional identities in art education and art-based educational research (ABER). As feminists, we locate ourselves in postcolonial visual culture studies and critical film/pedagogical theories. We explore how experimental video-based research, and auto-ethnographic video making, leads to a reflexive space in which to connect the artist–researcher–educator with the other bodies that participate in the research – María Ruido and a group of five fine art students. We focus our attention on the processes of narrating-editing as an autoethnographic and experimental way to produce the video narrative and the text Juxtaposition (2017). Finally, we show how the processes of narrating-editing enable the relocation of the different bodies, spaces and times and the juxtaposition of professional identities.
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Printmaking as metaphor: Foucauldian notions of inscription as representation
More LessAbstractPrintmaking, as a medium, is examined through the Foucauldian notion of inscription for its inherent metaphorical potential to inform and extend professional identities and pedagogical practices. The author examines two printmaking processes to theorize bodies as inscribed matrices latent with accrued histories that impress a composite representation of teacher identity via continued states of development. Personal anecdotes explore the relationship between teaching, making and research and how they can simultaneously be reflected upon and subsequently re-presented visually.
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Lectio Divina and meditation: Exploring identity through contemplative practices
More LessAbstractEngaging in contemplative practices, such as breath and body awareness, meditation, silence and the arts, allows for engagement in the deep work of identity construction to uncover ‘the self who teaches’ (Palmer 1998: 7). Through Lectio Divina, an ancient Benedictine practice, the work of identity construction is deepened through examination of the way in which words and imagery strengthen and support the inner life of the teacher. Researching and engaging in contemplative inquiry and practices, as well as teaching these practices to pre-service teachers, weaves together a tapestry of my identities as an artist–teacher–researcher. These practices support embodied experiences of deep-thought and reflection that includes the cognitive, the affective and the spiritual.
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