Reframing New Art Teacher Support: From Failure to Freedom

In order to support new art teachers and encourage them as leaders of contemporary art education curricula, those invested in the preparation and development of beginning art teachers must examine the forces at play in new teachers’ professional lives, as well as the problems with existing support structures. In this article, I present seven perspectives on the new art teacher experience, ranging from feelings of failure, to problems inherent in preparation and induction practices, to issues of teacher identity and socialization, to the pursuit of professional agency within school cultures. I suggest readers view these perspectives as seven artworks hanging in an art studio, considering how one informs the other to create a space where new ideas and possibilities might be imagined

Encounters with Care: Mentoring Beginning Art Teachers amid the Pre[CARE]ious Conditions of Neoliberalism

Arguing that significant encounters with care often go unnoticed in a United States’ educational system largely defined by a neoliberal agenda, in this article I undertake a deep investigation of encounters with care that emerged in my experiences mentoring beginning art teachers. I approach these encounters as provocative disturbances that might reveal the nuances and intricacies of the entanglements at work. Through this exploration, I aim to show that these caring entanglements are, in consequential ways, run through with precarity—not only as an existential condition of life, but as a specific set of social, cultural, political, and material relations that produce an unequal distribution of both precarity and care, especially along the lines of gender and race. I conclude by offering provocations for how those who support beginning art teachers might, given the earth-wide and school-specific conditions of precarity, prepare them to navigate the complexities of caring relations in schools