Teaching Lives: An Arts-Informed Exploration of Teacher Experience

Abstract

With this article we connect the knowledge and experiences of two retired schoolteachers to present-day paradigms of learning and teaching in schools through narrative and arts-informed research processes. By extracting meaning from narratives of teacher experience and representing those meanings using musical and visual art media and methods, we hope to engage percipients in a form of “empathetic participation” that may lead to new and/or revitalized conceptions of teaching and learning, inform current pedagogical practices, and enhance teachers’ sense of belonging to an intergenerational community of educators.

Keywords

• Arts-informed research
• narrative inquiry
• arts-based research
• teacher experience
• emergent curriculum