Charting the Ecumene: Cultivating Critical Geographies in Teacher Education

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: Reimagining Public Education: Critical Geographies and Border Pedagogies

Abstract

Just as geographers and explorers survey new zones, new teachers and pre-service teachers have territories to explore, chart, and configure. These territories are the physical, mental, and social landscapes of their new teaching placements—where communities, schools, classrooms, and students may also feel like the unknown. Teacher education programs can prepare pre-service teachers through engaging them in experiential explorations of their larger teaching contexts. Arts-based education research (ABER), with its experiential, performative, pluralistic orientation (Rolling, 2010) holds promise for these investigations. This second iteration of a dual-layered, arts-based educational research (ABER) study engaged interns in developing critical geographies through firsthand, sensory investigations into place, the spaces of their larger teaching contexts, and considered implications for the practice of teacher education.

Author

• Joy Gaulden Bertling, The University of Tennessee - Knoxville