Watchfulness: Reflective Folk Art and the Craft of Teaching

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: What Now? Exploring Dilemmas of Teacher Practice (Table 15)

Abstract

We are two teacher educators who have engaged in collaborative self-study for the last five years. Our shared examination has explored critically reflective teacher education and the challenges we face enacting our own critical pedagogies within constraining and hierarchical institutions. During the pandemic, we merged some of our long-term personal creative interests with our critical-reflection processes in order to process living, working, and teaching amidst COVID-19. We found that creative sensemaking provided opportunities for healing as part of our reflective practice and allowed us to better integrate our personal and professional identities. This paper reports on an extension of that work where we co-create folk art and analyze how this creation informs our ongoing development as critical teacher educators.

Authors

• Rebecca Buchanan, University of Maine

• Margaret Clark, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts