Remembering, Reflecting, Returning: A Return to Professional Practice Journey Through Poetry, Music and Images:A Return to Professional Practice Journey Through Poetry, Music and Images

<p>Our composition brings together poetry, music, images and personal narratives based around the experiences of an occupational therapist, Karen, who following a family career break, returned to her profession. Our work demonstrates collaborative research practices and illuminates our experiences and journeying as practitioner-artists/researchers/teachers.</p> <p>This autoethnographic inquiry employs bricolage, drawing on theory and hybridized methods, inspired by the notion of ‘returning to practice’. The conversations of Karen and Katherine (mentee and mentor) as qualitative data, analyzed, interpreted and made accessible through poetry and images – along with Peter’s musical and autobiographical compositions – explore possibilities to re-examine and share alternative avenues of scholarship and theoretical understanding, not least in redefining what contribution to knowledge that artistic processes and ‘artwork’ makes methodologically, pedagogically, aesthetically, and therapeutically. Our intention is to engage the reader-viewer-listener to (re)think, take notice, disrupt, re-examine and extend personal meanings about return to practice journeys, enabling each of us to benefit and be (re)inspired.</p> <p>We recast aspects of ‘knowing and experience’ metaphorically, to consider and express our sense of being and becoming in the world. Importantly, we seek to explore how arts informed ways of knowing and learning about the self and other can serve to enhance our students/researchers/practitioners learning experiences.</p

A/R/Tography as an Ethics of Embodiment: Visual Journals in Pre-service Education

A/r/tography is an arts-based research methodology that inquires into educational phenomenon through artistic and aesthetic means. A/r/tographical research engages in pedagogical inquiry where the distinctions between researcher and researched become complicated, responsive, and undone. A/r/tography, the authors argue, develops the relationship between embodiment and ethics as a being-with. In this manner, ethics does not refer to the rationalist acquisition of knowledge or moral codes that advocate particular bodily behaviors but instead suggests that participating in a network of relations lends itself to gestures of non-violence. This article extends previous writings on a/r/tographical inquiry through a particular examination of the use of visual journals in a preservice teacher education course. Through the intertextuality of image and word, visual journals enable teachers and students to make meaning and inquire creatively into educational issues in a space that respects self and other