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The field of teacher education is subject to intense scrutiny and policy reform and within this context, the voices of those working within the field are often marginalised. Drawing on our larger study of teacher educators, we addressed the key research question: "How do those who work in the field of teacher education articulate and represent the nature of their work?." Using a fusion of arts-based and data science research methods and the theory of practice architectures, we examined the ways that teacher educators' work is mediated within cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political domains. We argue that while ambiguous dimensions exist in teacher educators' practices, they remain hopeful about their work and find spaces to create alternative sayings, doings and relatings as they prepare teachers for the profession. We contend that using both text-based and visual images facilitates the generation of enhanced meanings to highlight the complexity of teacher educators' work to those within and outside the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amongst the rapid and continual changes occurring in higher education is a heightened emphasis on teaching and the emergence of a quality teaching discourse. In tandem, we are living through a time where not only circumstances, but also new, more complex technologies continue to disrupt and challenge the ways teaching occurs. Despite various initiatives and compliance mechanisms, trust in notions of quality, accountability and scholarship related to teaching in higher education has been questioned. Tensions emerge between the consistency required by institutions and the creativity academics may want to employ in their teaching. Similarly, opportunities for academics to interrogate, discuss and reflect on their teaching can be problematic. In this article, we examine the perspectives of those working amidst these challenges to explore how learning and teaching approaches are changing in the current higher education climate. We draw on data from academic staff working in a faculty of education who shared their understandings through both text and visual responses about their prior, current and imagined future approaches to learning and teaching. We show how academics affectively and reflexively respond to uncertainty and disruption in ways that contribute to understanding and adapting to the challenges of our increasingly digital world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mandated introduction of a teaching performance assessment (TPA) into initial teacher education programs in Australia is one of the numerous and continual reforms that have impacted those who work in the field. The Assessment for Graduate Teaching (AfGT) is an approved TPA developed by a national consortium of higher education institutions to determine the 'classroom readiness' of graduating teachers. Surveys and focus group discussions were conducted with stakeholder groups to explore their experiences of trialling and implementing the AfGT. Initial teacher educators identified several aspects related to implementation that had impacted the ways they work, which included experiencing an increased workload. A semi-fictionalised narrative in the form of a readers' theatre script was developed to weave initial teacher educators' accounts together in an anonymised yet believable fashion for presentation at a research conference. The resultant script provides illustrations of the changing and complex nature of teacher educators' work because of the introduction of the AfGT, and when considered through the theory of practice architectures, it becomes evident that practice traditions are also interrupted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opportunities to interrogate praxis through professional learning and reflection is common for school teachers but is not straightforward or as frequently practised by tertiary educators, particularly from across different universities. In this article, the authors who are arts educators from various universities explore a framework that focuses on 'quality' visual art education. The aim was to ascertain if an ontology could be enacted to inform our collective knowledges about quality in arts education across our different contexts. Through collaborative self-study and the application of practice architectures common issues in higher education teaching are discussed. Cases are shared from critical examinations of our practices, that also foreground, interrogate and enrich our collective understandings in the practice field. A proposed model is provided illustrating how the intersection of dialogic discourse with art educational ontology, can promote insightful praxis, which is applicable to not only art education, but a range of disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Criticisms have been levelled at academics at a time when funding of universities is increasingly tied to private and corporate purposes and when academics are held accountable through a hierarchy of functions. Claims are also made that academics work within narrow specializations and are removed from real-world experience and problems. Boyer's model of scholarship offers four categories of scholarship that remain relevant to understanding and guiding the work of academics, including how they engage with communities. To explore the nature of academics' work, we draw on data provided by a group of academics who participated in a research project using both sociological elicitation and visual arts-based research methodologies. The participants were asked to explore what various aspects of current academic work mean for them by providing an image and text, akin to creating a postcard. In this article, we focus on responses they provided to the prompt 'Community engagement is ... ' The postcards show how community engagement can be interpreted in diverse ways and that, along with teaching and research, community engagement are all integrated, mutually reinforcing drivers and outcomes of academic work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Creativity is often cited as one of the capacities that needs to be actively encouraged in all aspects of schooling. However, what creativity is and how it may be promoted through formal teaching and learning approaches remain contested. There are also differences between educators in terms of how they understand, discuss and conceptualise this complex concept. Purpose: This paper focuses on the difficulties associated with talking about creativity in education. It considers the ways in which schoolteachers who are involved in the area of arts education understand, describe and discuss the concept of creativity and how it interacts with their classroom practice. Sample: Twenty-three educators who taught Arts (either as generalist primary classroom teachers or as specialist teachers), and the leadership team from a Kindergarten to Year 9 (pupil ages 5-15) school in the suburbs of a city in the Australian state of Victoria participated in the project. Design and methods: In this phenomenological study, data were gathered from participants through questionnaires, discussion groups, email prompts and reflective journals. The material was analysed qualitatively. Findings: By examining the teachers’ dialogic and discursive responses about creativity, it was possible to capture some broad ways in which the participants spoke about creativity. Data were analysed thematically and grouped into categories that represented the connected ‘creative orientations’: thinking orientations, action orientations, emotion orientations and skill/outcome orientations. Conclusion: There is a need for educators in and across a range of discipline areas to share, map and think about creativity. The approach adopted in this exploratory study offers a way that could be used to focus discussions and help facilitate educators’ talk about creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates the construction of a visual and sound installation that juxtaposes contemporary material with historical artefacts regarding academic work to offer an aesthetic mode of interruption in explorations of academic voice in university histories and in the contemporary university. Drawing upon Foucauldian histories of the present (particularly genealogy), this installation combines text, images and sound to take audiences on an emotive journey of the university. As historical research increasingly takes on an aesthetic and sensual turn, moving beyond content and context to consider other forms of representation, the article draws on theories concerning the functions of art and the semiotics involved when we engage with art to explore the emotional dimensions of academic work. Art in story and story in art methodologies are used to situate attempts at engaging in aural and visual ways of knowing time and place to (re)consider academics’ silenced historical and contemporary narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While educators in many parts of the world grapple with what creativity means in practice, discussions about creative pedagogy usually include the elements of creative teaching, teaching for creativity and creative learning. This article stems from a research project that occurred at a Preparatory to Year 9 school in Australia where we worked with staff to explore their understandings of creativity and creative learning in the Arts. We found that while students’ creative learning is a fundamental element in a creative pedagogy framework, the notion of creative learning of teachers is largely overlooked in discourses of teachers’ professional learning. Given the important role teachers play in student learning, we argue that teachers need to be informed not only about how to teach creatively and for creativity, but also how to consider possibilities and understand things in new ways, thereby making a case that a teacher’s own creative learning is crucial. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Measurement of academic work has become more significant than the intellectual, pedagogical, cultural, political and social practices in which academics and students engage. This shifting emphasis creates paradoxes for academics. They experience a growing sense of disconnection between their desires to develop students into engaged, disciplined and critical citizens and the activities that appear to count in the enterprise university. As measurement discourses preclude the possibilities of human emotion and hinder intellectual labour, we embarked on an arts-informed research project that established new creative spaces for our colleagues to illustrate the pleasures and paradoxes of their academic work. In the research project, we developed critical pedagogies through art and poetry that enabled academics to speak back to university management – and each other – about how they experience their work. In this paper, we draw upon poststructural ‘micro-physics’ of power, the poststructuralist ‘politics of reinscription’, and art, poetry and drama as critical pedagogies to interrogate the potential of arts-informed research to speak back to the measured university. The key contribution of this article is to recommend arts-informed methodologies as a forum for dissent and resistance at a time when the spaces of collegiality, pleasure and democracy in the measured university are under attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities are built upon the collaborative work of academic staff and students, yet the nature of this work has been undergoing profound and rapid change. Pressures within Australia’s higher education sector have led to a fracturing of traditional academic roles and growing feelings of disconnection. While there have been many narrative, ethnographic and autoethnographic explorations of academic work, few studies have employed visual arts-informed methodologies to interrogate the ways in which academics represent their teaching, research and community engagement work. In this article we outline findings about academics’ views of their teaching work. These findings surfaced from an arts-informed participatory research project, that sought to open up a space for (re)presentations of academic work. With a focus on teaching, three through lines emerged during the analysis:voicing absences and resistances; initiating layers of reflexive momentsandexpressing complexity through collage. We argue that the academics’ responses allow us to trace the emotional terrain of contemporary academic work. They also open up ways to unpack, express and make visible academics’ complex thoughts, feelings and ideas about teaching practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is an inherent expectation that educators will work towards continuously improving their practice and quality of teaching. Underpinning this expectation is an assumption that educators also engage in the process of reflection. In this article, we begin by outlining the current tensions in the field of education that relate to managerialist concerns of the measurement and monitoring of quality teaching and effectiveness. We then contextualise our particular circumstances and provide an account of a collaborative action research project we initiated to examine our team-teaching practices in a graduate entry pre-service teacher education programme. In the project, we initially focused on how we might provide for pre-service teachers’ learning while they were undertaking an internship in the final semester of their programme. Factors that required consideration included the use of face-to-face and synchronous online forms of interaction. Having experienced the powerful influence of using protocols to structure professional learning conversations with the pre-service teachers with whom we were working, we also decided to extend the conversations we were having with each other to conversations with our colleagues. Taken together, the action research framework and the processes afforded by protocols provided a structured approach for our inquiry. Conversing with the pre-service teachers involved in the programme, with each other and with our peers at a faculty-level seminar and an international conference were the main sources of data gathered during the research project. The collegial conversations that occurred when using protocols also provided a way to move to the level of critical reflection. Rather than discuss the outcomes of our project in the remainder of the article, we elected to scrutinise and theorise the significant elements that were germane to our project – the three Cs: collegiality, conversation and critical reflection. We conclude by realising that to learn about ourselves as teachers and as learners, we need to move beyond routine and technical aspects of reflection, to a level that is critical and transformative, and that this can be achieved through the use of protocols in purposeful and collaborative conversations with others. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During a recent research project, it became apparent that the conventional taxonomic, textual and linguistic devices used to develop the narrative of a manuscript would not allow me to make sense, or tell the complex story, of my inquiry. I needed to employ multimodal approaches to grapple with the project related to artists who work in educational settings. One of the multimodal devices I engaged with during the inquiry involved making sculptures, and these visual forms emerged concurrently with the text. Adopting the notion of bricolage allowed me to weave a range of theoretical perspectives and various elements of arts-related research practices into my inquiry. In this article, I explore the methodological approach of constructing sculptures, along with constructing text as a dialogical mechanism, to clarify the in-betweens, multiplicities and inter-relational connections that emerged during the inquiry. In making the sculptures, they became plateaus to assist my thinking and dealing with the messiness that is involved in research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Enhancing creativity skills and dispositions is one of the many student capabilities academics in higher education are required to promote. Although there are several issues that can hamper academics’ engagement with creativity including demands of performance indicators and limited freedom to experiment with teaching. In this article, we consider the findings from a research project with a group of tertiary academics who explored the complexities and opportunities related to teaching for creativity, creative learning, and teaching creatively. From the academics’ dynamic interaction with and between creativity and their traditional and academic cultures, we were able to extend on an existing framework to give a more nuanced understanding about how creativity can be incorporated into teaching in higher education. We present a mandala of creative pedagogies as an analysis framework and a teaching tool that can accelerate a range of skills acquisition for graduates, including connecting with global and local knowledges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community-based arts projects can act as powerful learning opportunities in a variety of lifelong and life wide contexts. Many of these projects involve artists, who usually undertake a leading role to ensure that some type of transformation takes place for those involved. The impact on the leaders—in this case the artists—is difficult to identify, even if they have been involved in several community-based arts projects. In this paper I provide insights drawn from my doctoral thesis. There I explored the cumulative impact on artists who work on community-based arts projects, what transformations and learning occurred for them as a result of working on these projects, and how those experiences contributed to their identities. My study involved hermeneutic phenomenological/narrative research approaches based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with 12 visual artists. Data were analysed using a recursive and spiralling process and were subsequently presented thematically as a neonarrative. The findings discussed in this article relate to the artists’ attempts at reconciling aspects of their individual, social and cultural identities by challenging their own as well as the community’s perceptions of artists. The cumulative effect of being involved in community-based arts practice also provided the artists with ongoing identity capital in that they came to realize that they learnt about themselves by connecting with others. The findings contribute to the emerging debate that challenges the narrow view of measuring the value of community-based art projects based on instrumental and public worth, and invites exploration of the private and intrinsic impact on individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]