A/r/tography in Visual Art Teacher Training Program Exams
This contribution is based on an article that will be published in the 2020 Mars issue of IMAG International Magazine, an anthology about Swedish visual arts education. The presentation and workshop build on the concept of becoming (Deleuze, 1987/2013) and the methodology of a/r/tography, which entails exploring the becomings as artist, researcher and teacher (Boulton, Grauer & Irwin, 2016). We present the analysis of one student’s visual and textual exam at a Visual Art Teacher Education Programme in Sweden. Here learning through artistic making, research exploration and teaching didactics merges into the becoming of a visual art teacher. Throughout the presentation examination in visual art teacher education in Sweden will be problematised.

In a higher education context, learning subjects tends to get separated. In this research example, the students that are becoming visual arts teachers are studying visual art at one faculty, and didactics as well as research methods and academic writing in another faculty. The examination process is divided into writing three different exam texts, and where also artistic and performative processes are included. Therefore, we find the concept of a/r/tography (Springgay, Irwin, Leggo & Gouzouasis, 2008) useful in order to analyse the student’s exam process. In becoming a visual art teacher, three positionings where knowing, doing and making are entangled, open up for new possibilities of meaning making.

Through working with the entanglements of becoming an artist, a researcher and a teacher (Springgay, Irwin & Wilson Kind, 2005), as depicted in the student’s final exam, we want to highlight and discuss the benefits and limitations of merging these three positions, and what implications it might have for visual art education in general. Throughout her final exam portfolio, the student Lena uses animal metaphors, in visual and textual forms, for becoming artist, researcher and teacher. The animal metaphor is thus carrying ethical and reflective dimensions of becoming a visual art teacher (Miller, 2015).

The proposed workshop will include visualising, making and creating metaphors that entails the force of becoming artist, researcher and teacher. A/r/tography as a methodology will help bring forward the different and complex processes in the visual art teacher professional role in emotional and intellectual making processes – and thus merges through an interweaving of text and visual documenting photographs in the workshop. Importantly, the practical making of metaphors is here regarded as forming new connections and subjectivities, rather than reflecting an identity from past experiences (Boulton, Grauer & Irwin, 2016).


References:
Boulton, A., Grauer, K., & L. Irwin, R. (2016). Becoming Teacher: A/r/tographical Inquiry and Visualising Metaphor. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 36(2), 200–214.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987/2013). A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Miller, A. (2015). Losing Animals; Ethics and Care in a Pedagogy of Recovery. In Snaza, N. & Weaver, J. A. (Eds.). Posthumanism and Educational Research. Routledge International Studies in the Philosophy of Education. New York/London; Routledge.

Springgay, S., Irwin, R. L., Leggo, C. & Gouzouasis, P. (Eds.)(2008). Being with A/r/tography. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Springgay, S., Irwin, R. & Wilson Kind, S. (2005). A/r/tography as Living Inquiry Through Art and Text. Qualitative Inquiry, 11(6), 897-912.