Staying alive to teaching [videorecording]

Prepared for preservice and inservice teachers to support reflection and provoke discussion about what it means to teach, this program features comments from five teachers who tell how they stay alive to teaching and what has sustained them. Ch. 1. Developing professional identities -- ch. 2. Interpreting real world challenges -- ch. 3. Making meaning with others -- ch. 4. Seeing possibilities

Making sense of what it means to teach : artful representations as meaning-making tools

Making sense of what it means to teach is an increasingly challenging task as teachers’ work becomes progressively more ambiguous and demanding. This is a problem for both the person who teaches and the people who teach about teaching. This paper draws on a teacher’s story to illustrate how creative, non-linear forms of representation such as visual imagery and writing, together with narrative reporting, can be catalysts for revealing meanings for actions, and for eliciting self-awareness and the products and processes of reflection. Artful representations can make visible the way conceptions of teaching and self-as-teacher are constructed and re-constructed. Attending to these ways of knowing can focus reflection on what meanings have been internalised and how these enter practice. Artful representations can also help the field more generally, nourishing efforts to convey a sense of what it means to teach and providing supportive scaffolding for making connections with the knowledge that guides action

Forming knowledge with new shapes : what arts-based research methods can offer

There is an increasing recognition that the future requires a ‘conceptual and creative workforce’ where ‘artistic and aesthetic ways of knowing’ are highly valued and where creativity, innovation, design and meaning are cherished aptitudes. As a result, many industry leaders, organisations and researchers are also starting to recognise the potential and significance of the arts and creative forms of knowledge. Especially as they seek to fully understand and address the complex realities and dilemmas that constitute educational, business and everyday worlds, and that face individuals and communities. There is a growing awareness that knowledge can be developed and formed in new shapes, and that these new shapes allow us to think and therefore see in new ways. Arts-based inquiry (research inquiry which embraces the language, practices and forms commonly employed in the arts) is offering new shapes and innovative opportunities for learning and meaning-making, and for shedding light on the particular experiences, dilemmas and situations we care about. Arts-based research methods and practices are increasingly being recognised for their transformational and unique ability to both ‘access and represent’ knowledge and multiple personal and professional meanings. As well as encouraging a creative inquiry process, arts-based methods can make visible the way knowledge and meaning is constructed while simultaneously offering representational shapes, forms and products for reflection and action. They can be used during ‘all phases’ of the research endeavour from data collection to analysis as well as continuing to serve as a subject of inquiry and a pedagogical tool. Arts-based methods have enormous potential for engaging and transforming the lives and work of both individuals and communities and for opening up public discourse. For individuals, arts-based practices support inquiry into personal and professional meaning-making with products of reflection capturing aesthetic responses, revealing previously held tacit knowledge, communicating stories of experience and offering new possibilities for action and agency. For researchers, arts-based methods are proving to be a legitimate and robust research methodology that transcends the limitations of traditional approaches to investigate and explore educational and social questions in personal, engaging and connected ways - ways that reach, and are accessible to, wider, diverse and non-academic audiences. For communities, arts-based methods support research that cares about who people are, what they know, how they experience their world and how they make meaning. Arts-based methods support the telling and understanding of human stories - stories of identity, knowledge, context, place, experience and relationships

Certain uncertainty and the importance of teacher meanings

Teaching is an uncertain, dilemma ridden endeavour. Attending to the significance of these characteristics of teaching for teachers involves taking their meanings and meaning construction seriously. This paper does this, focusing on one teacher’s meaning making in relation to her expectations, tolerance of uncertainty, changing roles and shifting identities/images of teaching. In doing so it calls attention to how the professional development of teachers can be based on the meanings they themselves develop and examine, and how cognitive and affective sense-making reveal personal orientations toward uncertainty, influence teaching practice and expectations for the future

I am Keith Wright’s daughter: Writing things I ‘almost’ cannot say

I am Keith Wright’s daughter: Writing Things I ‘Almost’ Cannot Say is a personal and provocative perspective. Using creative writing and storying I piece/peace together my relationship to/with my father. Always a strong and unsettling presence in my life, his unexpected death forces me toward reconciliation of tensions, identities, wounds and memories. Writing/Wrighting/Righting my stories into being, my particular points of view at points in time, and examining this conflicted yet foundational relationship, helps me remember what I have learned and helps me reclaim what matters to me. Writing the things I ‘almost’ cannot say—and have not been able to say for most of my life—is a storying in and through the dark, a storying in and through the wounding, and a storying in and to healing. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Grou

Empowering teachers: using teaching images to understand self.

During a professional development program, teachers working in child care centres reflected on their images of teaching and their images of self as teacher. Teachers explored their images by engaging in conversation, drawing, metaphor and journal writing. Insights provided by these reflective strategies enabled teachers to experience greater self-understanding, awareness and knowledge and reduced feelings of isolation common to teachers who work in child care centres. This renewed awareness was empowering leading teachers to feel more certain and confident about their complex teaching roles and their teaching decisions. Feeling better equipped to deal with ongoing complexity, the teachers were able to imagine new possibilities for their work and felt liberated to progress in new directions

Picturing experience : metaphor as method, data and pedagogical resource

Whilst the majority of chapters in this book use metaphor to explore perspectives on education research, this chapter focuses on metaphor as a research method. Metaphor is a viable and important resource for making educational worlds visible and for supporting understanding of, and connection with, experience and knowledge. The attraction of metaphor as a methodological resource is its capacity to render and connect knowledge and life experiences in relevant and meaningful ways. As a researcher interested in narrative and arts-based inquiry, metaphor has been an important resource for understanding lived experience and for engaging both makers and viewers in meaning-making encounters. In my research with early childhood teachers, metaphor has been central to inquiry and reflection and has operated as method, data and pedagogical tool. As a result of this ability to serve as both research method and representational resource, metaphor has incredible meaning-making and pedagogical capabilities. Metaphors propel meaning generation in education research by enabling the meanings educators bring to and use in educational contexts to be simultaneously accessed and represented. Representations then offer a backdrop for in-depth exploration of the realities and complexities of workplaces and experience. This chapter presents data collected during a research inquiry where early childhood educators used story, metaphor and drawing to examine and represent their experiences as they engaged in a personal and a collaborative inquiry into what their work was like. To illustrate the potential of arts-based representations for makers and viewers, examples of teachers’ experimentation with metaphor and drawing are offered. In these examples the affective, emotional, moral and embodied dimensions of teachers’ knowing are made apparent and a window into their experience is opened. The metaphors and drawings encourage connection making and act as catalysts for discourse, awareness and insight –— for teachers themselves, for myself as the researcher, and for viewers and readers

Creativity, creative arts and arts-based research : enriching lives in regional communities

What is the significance of creativity and the arts for social cohesion, meaning making and quality of life

Making meaning with narrative shapes : what arts-based research methods offer educational practitioners and researchers

Arts-based inquiry which emphasises the language, practices and forms commonly employed in the arts is offering rich opportunities for exploring knowledge, meaning, and learning beyond creative arts education. Educational researchers and practitioners across a range of educational settings and sectors are recognising the potential of arts-based inquiry for explicating the complex realities, changing issues, emotions and dilemmas that constitute educational worlds. And for revealing the complexity underpinning critical educational questions such as ‘what does it mean to teach?’ This paper illustrates the remarkable meaning-making and pedagogical capabilities of arts-based research methods. It offers a sonata-styled narrative that tracks the journey of an early childhood educator as she engages in a personal and collaborative inquiry into what it means to teach. It follows her experimentation with arts-based shapes—story, drawing, and metaphor—artistic and literary shapes that worked to access her knowledge. Shapes that became visible products of reflection, and acted as catalysts for awareness, knowledge construction and transformation. Shapes that like torches, shed light on the particular educational dilemmas and situations that mattered to her, and helped her see, think and respond differently to her work. For researchers and others interested in educational matters, this paper demonstrates how arts-based methods support the investigation of educational questions in personal, social, engaging and connected ways. Ways that invite meaning, story, and empathy, and that reach and are accessible to diverse audiences

Grappling with the realities of teaching : artful representations as sense-making, meaning-making tools

The work of the teacher is becoming progressively more ambiguous and demanding; and making sense of what it means to teach is an increasingly challenging task. This chapter presents a teacher’s story to illustrate how creative, non-linear forms of representation such as visual imagery and writing, together with narrative reporting, were catalysts for revealing meanings for actions, and for eliciting the products and processes of reflection and self-awareness. These artful representations made visible the way conceptions of teaching and self-as-teacher were constructed and re-constructed. Attending to these ways of knowing highlighted possible strategies for dealing more intentionally with work demands. Such representations can be valuable resources for teachers, nourishing efforts to better understand what it means to teach and providing supportive scaffolding for making connections with the knowledge which guides action