Becoming Pedagogical: Sustaining Hearts With Living Credos

• In Event: Relationality and Pedagogy in A/r/tography

Abstract

1. Objectives
The purpose of this paper is to explore research that invited teacher candidates to ruminate on the experiences that fired their credos as beginning teachers and to research their daily experiences by writing creatively about their lived experiences and perspectives to pursue creative processes of transformation
2. Theoretical Framework
To be engaged in the practice of a/r/tography means to inquire in the world through a process of art making and writing while acknowledging one’s identity as artist (a), researcher (r), and teacher (t). The theoretical perspective that a/r/tography embodies is living inquiry and as an embodied encounter, it is constituted through visual/performative and textual understandings rather than mere visual/performative and textual representations.
3. Methods
The teacher candidates were invited to think about how they were becoming pedagogical, and how they could sustain their hearts in the dynamic and complex process of becoming pedagogical. At the beginning of the course, the researchers explained to the teacher candidates that the word credo means I believe, but that it also more accurately signifies what I have given my heart to. The researchers explained that every educator, both beginning and experienced, needs to ask, What have I given my heart to? Teacher candidates were invited to engage in writing exercises exploring their beliefs and values about pedagogy.
4. Data
Five secondary teacher candidates from the course, English Language Arts: Secondary Curriculum and Instruction, participated. They each wrote three statements in which they reflected on what they believed about teaching in general, and English teaching in particular. They wrote a brief statement at the beginning of the course, and longer statements in the middle and at the end of the course followed by an opportunity to expand on and revise their initial statements. These works became snapshot images of the process of becoming pedagogical.
5. Results
Teacher candidates identified teaching as transformative, creative, and passionate. They understood the process of becoming pedagogical as like journeying on a Möbius strip where there is no binary opposition between the inside and the outside, no division between the past and the present, no separation of the personal and the professional.
6. Significance
In Teaching in the knowledge society: Education in the age of insecurity Hargreaves (2003) proposes that we need to address with forthright courage and thoughtful creativity “how we should live our lives, and for what kind of life we should be educating young people” (p. 48). After ruminating on teacher qualities and dispositions such as flexibility, problem-solving, risk-taking, continuous improvement, cosmopolitan identity, and personal and professional maturity (p. 29; pp. 65-66), Hargreaves concludes that “engaging with the knowledge society and its human consequences calls on us to make teaching into a social mission and a creative, passionate profession once again” (p. 203). By attending to teaching as what I have given my heart to, as an embodiment of our credo, we may fulfill an artographer’s commitment to creativity and inquiry and teaching as transformative and hopeful.

Authors

• Rita L. Irwin, The University of British Columbia

• Carl Leggo, The University of British Columbia