Visual Journals in Preservice Teacher Education

• In Event: Arts-Based Research as Pedagogy

Abstract

I work primarily with elementary generalist licensure candidates at the end of their time as candidates. Usually, I am one of the last classes students take before graduating. Students come ready to fill in the box and give me the answers I desire. I look for a way to expand the idea of how the arts can be taken up and used a place for each student to come with their answers that can be valid and empowering and how they might employ these visual arts techniques with their students and across the curriculum.
My research comes in the space of praxis embodying the areas of artist-educator-researcher as constant lived experience. Living as practicing artist and educator, the research process has become something tied into the work as it happens phenomenologically arising in the situation, and context with an through the work, theoretically and physically, that students and I do together.
Within my arts integration classroom with Elementary Licensure Candidates, I have had students use Visual Journal as a place to document drawing techniques and content from Syllabus (Barry, Lynda, 2015).We use the daily two-minute self-portrait, daily diary, and drawing jam as a way to have students discuss where they are and where their curiosities lie as the class moves through a semester. Each day that we meet students sit down and as their first activity and get started in this way. As a routine exercise, I notice increased articulation in drawings of themselves as they work through the day and build a compendium of the diaries and the self-portraits. Describing different aspects of themselves and their drawing practices as they work.
The visual journal acts as a space for elementary generalists to dialogue with their artistic practice which has often laid dormant since middle school and can be a scary place to enter. Within the classroom we discuss creating a place for ourselves and each other that lacks critique (Barry, 2015). Through the activities, students have a place to do a daily check-in through the Daily Diary and the two minute minimum self-portrait. These tools help to create a document, demonstrates the learning students are receiving from allowing themselves to build an identity as artists over time. Barry discusses a technique for drawing gleaned from the work of Ivan Brunetti, (Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, 2007) as a way to help students add to and expand their vocabulary beyond the simple stick figure technique. These drawing exercises are tools to be expanded upon when students move into the drawing jam. This collaborative drawing game gives students the ability to work with each other playfully, to invent and imagine characters that embody a job, mood, way of being, or a mixture of all three. These game can be be extended to outside of the classroom itself and allow students to play in the space of making a drawing with each other and the community outside of the classroom.
References
Barry, L. (2015). Syllabus. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly.
Brunetti, I. (2011). Cartooning: Philosophy and practice. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Author

• Samuel Herreshoff Peck, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities