Becoming and Film: Visual Art Teacher Candidates and Encounters With School

• In Event: Deleuze, Guattari, and Art Education

Abstract

Objectives
This paper presents research that examined an arts-based encounter (O’Sullivan, 2006) with secondary visual art teacher candidates (participants) for its potential to create what Deleuze refers to as the conditions for the creation of the new. The Deleuzian encounter Semetsky (2010) argues, posits “there exist forces constraining experience and imposing impulses that compel one to think: it is learning from a singular experience, which is not representative but affective, that brings forth a shock to thought” (p. 450). To explore this, participants were invited to return to their high school, to explore the pedagogical and the aesthetic values of the space and to film this return. This paper explores their return and their memories, recollections, and affective responses to place as well as the use of film to pursue affective inquiry for their potential for asignifying ruptures in participants’’ perceptions of visual art teacher practice.

Theoretical Framework
Research suggests that teacher candidates enter post-secondary teacher education programs with perceptions of what constitutes good teacher practice formed during their own K-12 education, and that these understandings tend to manifest themselves in future practice. This session examines Deleuze’s (1991) work with Bergson’s methodology of intuition and explores the ways in which new knowledge may be activated in the encounter, drawing on affect, percept and concept alongside visual prosthetic (Garoian, 2013) as means to articulate the theoretical framework and methodological design of this research.

Methods
Two participants were invited to return twice to their high school (grade 8-12) and to film these returns. For the first return, they were provided a prompt, which asked them to explore the pedagogical value of their school space. Following this, we met as a group to view the film and discuss their responses to the return. In the second return, they were prompted to explore the school space as an art installation and to film this as well. We met a second time to explore this film and their experience.

Data
Film of dialogue sessions, session transcripts, and participants’ films.

Results

The results indicate three broad understandings related to teacher education, affective inquiry, the encounter, research and pedagogy:

i. The prompts shifted participants’ inquiry away forcibly recalling memories and drew on an affective form of inquiry.

ii. The films created entry points during dialogue session where participants were able to reterritorialize their perceptions of teacher practice stemming from their return and affective inquiry.

iii. Participant interactions with the space indicated deep and significant meaning attached to the space, activated by memories provoked with an affective engagement with the school space.


Significance:
This paper argues that by engaging in an encounter, new potentialities for teacher candidates’ becoming were created. Through the triadic relationship of affect, percept, and concept (Semetsky, 2010) this research provided significant indications for the potentiality of affective inquiry in creating asignifying ruptures to tacitly held perceptions of teacher practice. These understandings are significant in informing research that employ arts-based methods and a research design that aims to provoke rather than represent knowledge.

Author

• Adrienne Boulton-Funke, The University of British Columbia