'There's not much room for anything to go amiss' : narrative and arts-based inquiry in teacher education

• Published in: Issues in educational research 2011-01, Vol.21 (2), p.130-144
• Main Author: Glass, Christine
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Art Products; Australia; Data collection; Educational Practices; Educational Research; Foreign Countries; Freehand Drawing; Grade 2; Graphs; Learning Processes; Narratives; Postsecondary education; Preservice Teacher Education; Preservice Teachers; Research Methodology; Researchers; Student experience; Student teachers; Studies; Teacher education; Teacher identity; Teaching; Teaching Methods; Teaching profession
• ISSN: 1837-6290; 0313-7155; 1837-6290

Drawings offer new possibilities to develop understandings about how pre-service teachers experience becoming a teacher. It is in drawings that often 'those elusive hard-to-put-into-words' aspects of the self appear to add to the developing story of what it is to become a teacher. Using a triangulated approach to the research process of narrative, drawings and graphing, a Graduate Diploma of Education Primary pre-service teacher from a Western Australian university was asked to envision himself as a teacher, and to draw that vision. This vision tells us much about 'the multiple contexts' in which the teacher self is being formed and how the pre-service teacher envisioned, reflected, related to, and felt about the journey he undertook. Drawings and other arts based methodologies were employed understand whether his understandings of his developing teacher self were matched with his experience, to develop insights into the teacher he was becoming. [Author abstract, ed]