Anita Sinner

Transitioning to teacher: uncertainty as a game of dramatic hats

Nathalie’s experience of becoming a teacher demonstrates how a counter-narrative contributes to negotiating dominant discourses that propagate stories of uniformity and reinforce the status quo within the teaching profession. By offering an alternate perspective of teacher culture as a liminal space, uncertainty symbolizes Nathalie’s transition to teacher, moving between inquiry notions of teacher education and apprenticeship traditions that continue to define field experiences, in this case, as the antithesis of a progressive practicum experience, highlighting interruptions and instances of regress. Based on Nathalie’s story, existing practices in teacher education may be reconceptualized in terms of identity formation, emotions and surveillance in teacher education to raise awareness about the stresses of the teaching occupation and to establish within teacher culture alternate perspectives about the profession.

Chronic Pain and Returning to Learning: Exploring the Lived Experiences of Three Women

An in-depth analysis of the post-secondary learning experiences of three women revealed that their decisions to participate in college and university courses in Canada were interconnected with lived experiences of chronic pain. A causal link between chronic pain and returning to learning was an unexpected outcome of a study focusing on women’s learning experiences in post-secondary institutions. Each woman in this study learned to cope with and adapt to her chronic pain, and over time, returned to learning to undertake new areas of study to accommodate a redefinition of self based on chronic pain. Eventually chronic pain became a conduit to more positive experiences of learning and reflection. The role and meaning of chronic pain in the learning equation represents a blind spot in the existing educational literature and it is through such indepth, descriptive stories of participants that we learn how this invisible barrier may influence the learning decisions of women.

These Tensioned Places of Teaching: Life Writing in Precarious Cosmopolitan Times

This article features the creative collaborative research of university researchers and practicing teachers who are engaged in an ongoing inquiry concerned with rewriting literacy and pedagogy in Canadian cosmopolitan educational contexts. Individual life writing texts are juxtaposed to create print-based and digital stories that embody and resonate with narrative and poetic expressions of pedagogical experiences of living and teaching in tensioned and often precarious places and times. In this research, the authors strive to create dialogues between and across different educational sites and discourses about issues of identity, language and literacy, and the teaching life, with the aim to become more knowledgeable and more empathetic about each others words and worlds.

Sewing Seams of Stories: Becoming a Teacher during the First World War.

In this article the author shares a partial biography of Elizabeth Evans, who became a domestic science teacher in Britain during the First World War. This story begins with a small collection of artefacts—professional letters and personal photographs—which infuse our understanding of teaching and learning and Elizabeth’s everyday life nearly a century ago. This inquiry is an entry point to an interpretive process that explores questions of teaching during war and the interrelationships that defined Elizabeth’s lived experiences.

The Visual Journal as an Image Sphere: Interpreting Artworks with an Anamorphic Perspective.

During a 1-year study, the visual journal of a preservice teacher was explored as an image sphere, or bildraum, in relation to teacher culture. Artworks created in the visual journal offered an anamorphic perspective on the materiality of teacher culture, tracing the lived experiences of a student of art in the process of becoming an art teacher during her university program and field experiences. Such visual expressions increase transparency of learning experiences and awareness of evolving teacher identities, communicating through art the social practices of teacher culture and how artworks are pedagogic encounters that inform teacher education in particular ways.

A History of Community Art Education at Concordia University: Educating the Artist-Teacher Through Practice and Collaboration

With art education at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) celebrating 50 years of program delivery, this article offers a self-study history of the university’s community art education program for undergraduate artist-teachers. Drawing on case study, archival, and oral history methods, this research situates key program events within their university and Montreal contexts and addresses three questions: How did community art education emerge as a teaching direction at Concordia University? What key moments, projects, and themes emerge from a historical review of the past 50 years of curriculum development and teaching activities? What does a review of the history of the teaching of community art education at Concordia University suggest for its future and for the work of other historical researchers? The article identifies practice and collaboration as two enduring themes, and ends with guiding questions to encourage future research.

You have to judge on the spot: Just-in-time community art education

ABSTRACT This proposition concerning “just-in-time” teaching was initiated in the field where the practices of two student-teachers have inspired ongoing and continued study into community art education as a site of creative and innovative teaching and learning that contributes to forms of public pedagogy. Informed by the year-long practicum assignment of Georgina and Makini at the Young Womens Christian Association, or as it is commonly known, the YWCA, and as part of a larger ethnographically-informed study, this article is a conversation about specific aspects of their teaching experience that were unique—that is, how they learned to operate in ways akin to just-in-time models of curriculum and instruction, but with an unexpected and unintended twist in teaching practice. In turn, research considerations began to shift during the course of the study to reflective practice as a source of information in which subjective understandings tentatively advance and add to wider professional development of students becoming teachers, and to how such practice might initiate more iterative, fluid, and interactive methods of sharing capacity building in non-formal learning sites like community art education.

Cultivating researchful dispositions: a review of a/r/tographic scholarship

ABSTRACT In this review, articles and visual interludes included in three special issues of peer-reviewed journals form a body of scholarship that provide indicators of the movement and maturation of a/r/tography in educational research involving the visual arts. The special issues represent contributions to the vision of a/r/tography around core processes, such as living inquiry and metaphor, as well as emerging concepts of events, gestures and advocacy, which guide approaches today and serve to mark topics of interest to educators who are engaged in applying the arts to pedagogic questions. The goal of ‘tracking discourse’ in this way is to gauge changes within a/r/tography and to map relationships that reside in how a/r/tography is perceived and articulated at this juncture. Shifts in the orientation of a/r/tography are indicators of the progressive development from how it was originally conceived to a mode of inquiry that is being redefined by scholars with material, spatial and relational dimensions as potential future pathways. In this conversation, I offer a number of propositions to cultivate researchful dispositions to assess the evolution of a/r/tographic theory and practice since its inception, and to present openings to further deliberation through this collection.

Learning in the third age: drawing wisdom from reflective stories in community art education

ABSTRACT Third-age learning is a subset of lifelong learning enjoyed by individuals in the stage of retirement, and often 60 years or older. Community art education (CAE) for learners in the third age commonly occurs in recreational settings, nursing homes, museums, libraries and places of worship. In addition to these informal learning sites, there are CAE programmes developed within postsecondary institutions that provide opportunities for artistic inquiry and instruction. In the following article, we share a case study involving third-age learners conducted in the 2014/2015 academic year. We begin by briefly describing an innovative CAE programme at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and then discuss a specific initiative undertaken in cooperation with the University’s alumnae extended education programme. Our study explored large questions about motivation, curriculum and pedagogy, but also focused on major themes in lifelong learning and the individual stories of the participants. One participant, named Reto, is featured in this article, and with his collaboration we offer a co-constructed narrative alongside an analysis of themes including personal development and social inclusion. The insights gained through our study have potential broad applicability for the general area of university–community partnerships and for CAE for the growing third-age population.

Against the Grain: An intervention of mastery learning and intellectual emancipation in art education

Abstract In a case study of an undergraduate course in art education, modes of mastery learning and propositions of intellectual emancipation were explored as interventions in curriculum design. By adopting Rancière’s framework of a ‘will to will’ relationship between instructor and students, the core assignment—a visual journal—became a site of student positionality through mastery methods, rather than information gathering. The visual journal provided a record of the event of knowledge and served as a forum to verify that acts of student thinking were done with attention, congruent with Rancière’s perspective that learning generates greater consciousness, feeling and action. Requiring both qualitative and quantitative criteria within the parameters of the visual journal functioned as a means to experiment with the potential convergences of mastery and emancipatory approaches. The visual journal then operated as a third space where ongoing, consistent engagement demonstrated the capacity of students to encounter more equitable relations with the instructor and with the content in ways that have implications for knowledge creation in teaching and learning.