Teacher as artist / Artist as teacher

Abstract

This chapter investigates my “lived-experience” (Van Manen, 1990) of art-making with children as an artist and teacher. It is an inquiry into the nature of my practice which encompasses children as the participants in, and audience for, the artwork. It encompasses a lived inquiry of making, documenting and writing about the process of the creation of art objects and the experiences of educational contexts. In so doing it captures the condition of functioning in the roles of artist and teacher. The approach taken in this chapter is positioned within the “emergent paradigm” that “engage[s] in and respond[s] to the process of reconstructing childhood in society” (James & Prout, 1997, p. 8). The emergent paradigm challenges the “dominant framework” (James & Prout, 1997, p. 10) of childhood development and socialisation, which views childhood as natural and universal and influences sociological studies and socio-political contexts of childhood. The insights gained in this chapter extend the contributions made within the emergent paradigm and related “reconceptualist” practices in childhood education (Cannella & Kincheloe, 2002; Jipson & Johnson, 2001; Soto & Swadener, 2005) by investigating how teacher-artist ideologies of childhood affect art outcomes for both children and artists.