Art as a “Thing That Does”: Creative Assemblages, Expressive Lines of Flight, and Becoming Cosmic-Artisan in Teacher Education

Abstract

Further Education in England today is over-regulated, over-inspected, and has suffered from an increasingly interventionist government agenda. Trainee teachers entering the sector are required to undertake regular reflective work, traditionally in the form of a written journal. However, where trainees use creative methods for reflection, such as stories, films, drawings, photography, and models, greater “reflexivity” and connection of theory to practice become apparent. This led me, as a teacher-educator, to inquire further into our practice, examining the impact that creative reflective expression might have on the teachers themselves, their resilience, and their ability to subvert the oppressions of the current education system. Drawing on a collaborative inquiry between myself as teacher-educator, and student/colleague David Ball, this chapter recounts the story of a year of experimentation through the coming together of a student-teacher artistic assemblage which pushed the boundaries of our teacher training curriculum and formal notions of “research”. We found that we moved in new configurations of “teacher-artist”, “student-curator”, and “audience-class” towards a notion of ourselves of “cosmic artisans” (Delueuze and Guattari, 1987) to share with the world our painful, emergent and embodied experiences of “becoming teacher”.

Citation

Sidebottom, K. and Ball, D. (2018), "Art as a “Thing That Does”: Creative Assemblages, Expressive Lines of Flight, and Becoming Cosmic-Artisan in Teacher Education", Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship (Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 31), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 153-165. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-368720180000031012