The varied textures of an arts-informed methodology: Exploring teachers' identities through artful expressions

ABSTRACT

Understanding how teachers come to know and make sense of teaching is a challenging endeavor. Uncovering elusive strands of thinking through arts-informed approaches has the potential to transform personal understandings of teacher selves and professional practice across diverse early childhood contexts (Clandinin, Downey, & Huber, 2009). Drawing on an arts-informed methodology combining bricolage, portraiture, and an artist's methods, this article presents a seven-framed model for exploring teachers' identity journeys. Working with six early childhood teachers in community-based Australian Long Day Care settings, teachers use these frames as methodological tools for “developing and constructing” photos, drawings, narrative, and artifacts to make visible intangible perceptions of self-identity and experience (Bown & Sumsion, 2007, p. 30; Langer, 1957). These artistic responses were treated as provocations to explore shared meanings and position arts-informed methods as valuable research spaces (Black & O'Dea, 2015) of learning, connection, and transformation (Black, 2002).

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Contributors

Leanne Lavina worked for several years as an early childhood teacher in prior-to-school settings, and is undertaking her PhD at the Department of Educational Studies (Early Childhood) at Macquarie University. Her research involves an arts-informed approach to understanding the formation of early childhood teacher identities and the influence of the social world in shaping teachers' narratives of identity.

Alma Fleet is an Honorary Associate Professor at Macquarie University, continuing her ongoing work in early childhood teacher education and Postgraduate supervision. She enjoys educational consultancies and publishes widely with colleagues, particularly engaging with educational change, practitioner enquiry, and pedagogical documentation.

Amanda Niland is a lecturer in Early Childhood education in the School of Education and Social Work University of Sydney, Australia. Her arts-informed research in music education explores the musical worlds of children, with particular focus on children under 3 years and children experiencing disability.