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An arts-based methodology of intuition : secondary visual art teacher becomings and encounters with schooling

University of British Columbia

In this dissertation, I seek to understand how pedagogy and arts-based research might provoke the conditions for creative thought by drawing on experience as a sensory and affective event to disrupt perceptions and memory of teacher practice. I examine two secondary visual art teachers’ experiences of: (1) returning to their high schools and (2) filming their returns. Christen and Kelsie each returned twice, responding to prompts that I had provided: to explore the pedagogical value of school space, and to imagine the school as an installation designed to teach. The films, and the subsequent group dialogue sessions pointed the types of experiences that research and pedagogy might enact with teacher candidates to destabilize their tacit understandings of teacher practice. Through their filmmaking as art practice, Christen and Kelsie performed as nomads (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) in the school space, which triggered unique memories in and of place. My research suggests that rather than filming events of significance— described by Dewey (1934) as an experience—which form the basis of teaching narratives (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990), both participants filmed the lesser events formed in the everyday mundane spaces of schooling, such as halls and stairways. In doing so, each participant developed an individuated aesthetic of becoming in their films, which, during the dialogue sessions, provoked a consideration of their perceptions of teacher practices in novel ways. A significant implication of this research includes the emergence of an arts-based methodology of intuition to provoke alterity as a way of being in and of the world. Artistic practice and embodied experience offer new conceptualizations of time and experience that create the conditions for memory and perception to become amenable to change, and for intuition, as a disposition, to problematize, differentiate and temporalize experience. The methodology of intuition (Deleuze, 1991) develops intuition as an individual disposition to destabilize understandings gained through experience even as understanding of that experience is sought. I argue that the arts-based methodology of intuition holds significant potential for the ways in which both research and pedagogy might create opportunities for new perceptions of and capacities for visual art teacher practice.

Text

2015-08-24

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/54604

Curriculum Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/