This book communicates new voices, insights, and possibilities for working with the arts and memory in researching teacher professional learning. The book reveals how, through the arts, teacher-researchers can reimagine and reinvigorate moments of the past as embodied and empowering scholarly experiences. The peer-reviewed chapters were composed from juxtaposing unique “mosaic” pieces written by 21 new and emerging scholars in South Africa and Canada. Their research explores diverse arts-based practices and resources including collage, film, drawing, narrative, poetry, photography, storytelling and television alongside related ethical issues. Critically, Memory Mosaics also demonstrates how artful memory-work can engender agency in professional learning with teacher-researchers taking up pressing issues of social justice such as inclusion and decolonisation. Overall, the book offers a multidimensional, polyvocal exploration of how artful memory-work can bring about future-oriented professional learning enacted as pedagogies of reinvention and productive remembering. Memory Mosaics: Researching Teacher Professional Learning Through Artful Memory-Work, by Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, Daisy Pillay, and Claudia Mitchell, along with teacher-researchers on two continents, is a ground-breaking book. It models a collaborative approach to arts-based research that melds memory-work, visual and poetic arts, and reflective practice to promote professional learning, personal transformation, decolonisation, and a more just future. Like colourful pebbles and bits of glass, the authors place teachers’ self-stories in relation to one another in an artful design, creating thematic coherence that evokes a deep sense of knowing. Judith C. Lapadat, Professor Emeritus, Faculty of Education, University of Lethbridge, Canada Memory Mosaics: Researching Teacher Professional Learning Through Artful Memory-Workassembles exemplars of professional learning in an intriguing mosaic format. A topic is introduced, followed by memory-pieces; then: discussion and/or creative response. This lively juxtaposition generates momentum for highly productive forms of remembering around social justice issues, even as the reader is invited into an intimate circle of shared concern: for these issues, with these (and other) teacher-researchers. It is a beautiful, original, and practical book. Teresa Strong-Wilson, Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, McGill University, Canada

Through critical, qualitative, creative, and arts-integrated approaches, this collection aims to explore the co-curricular capacity of lived experience to re/humanize education.

This collection presents life writing projects that explore or represent the racial dimensions of life writing research in diverse educational spaces using diverse methodologies and inquiry approaches. We believe this collection is long overdue. To quote Melva R. Grant and Signe E. Kastberg’s succinct phrasing (this volume) “racialized inquiry matters.” While some rich texts explore the racial aspects and anti-racist potential of social science research (Blee, 2018; Lopez & Parker, 2003; Sefa Dei & Johal, 2005; Twine & Warren, 2000), and include examples from educational contexts, there are no collections which focus on the intersections of life writing inquiry as educative projects that highlight racial dimensions of the work and lives under study. Drawing from Toni Morrison’s enduring wisdom, a visionary writer whose work has explored the racial dimensions of culture and lived experience, we centralize race in life writing in this collection rather than obscuring it or leaving it as a lurking, absent presence in the craft. Racial Dimensions of Life Writing Research offers a wealth of ideas and perspectives from which scholars, teachers, and students can draw to support their work. The 14 chapters in this collection attend to national, international, and local concerns, include varied theoretical and methodological approaches, and reflect a range of ethnic and racial heritages. Chapters consider practical, theoretical, ethical, and educational issues involved in projects concerning under-represented educational actors important for the terrain of life writing. The authors include established and emerging scholars— university researchers, directors, and professors, academic advisors, graduate and undergraduate students, activists, and former elementary and secondary school teachers. It is our hope that this volume will spark conversation, debate, and reflection and will be a valuable resource that inspires scholarship about how race and its intersections shape the life-writing inquiry process. ENDORSEMENT: "This is an exceptionally important volume interrogating intersections of race, racism and life writing. Authors recenter life narrative as a necessary anchor for studying, teaching about, and learning through complex racial dynamics. This book should be read by any of us serious about studying and advancing knowledge on race and writing." — Richard Milner, Vanderbilt University

Self-study is inherently collaborative. Such collaboration provides transparency, validity, rigor and trustworthiness in conducting self-study. However, the ways in which these collaborations are enacted have not been sufficiently addressed in the self-study literature. This book addresses these gaps in the literature by placing critical friendship, collaborative self-study and community of practice at the forefront of the self-study of teaching. It highlights these forms of collaboration, how the collaboration was developed and enacted, the challenges and tensions that existed in the collaboration, and how practice and identity developed through the use of these forms of collaboration. The chapters serve as exemplars of enacting these forms of collaboration and provide researchers with an additional base of literature to draw upon in their scholarly writing, teaching of self-study, and their enactment of collaborative self-study spaces.

This book focuses on the writing process in the self-study of teaching and teacher education practices. It addresses writing as an area in which teacher educators can develop their skills and represents how to write in ways that are compatible with self-study's orientations towards the inquiry, both personal and on practice. The book examines effective self-study writing with chapters written by experienced self-study practitioners. In addition to considering elements of writing as a method for the self-study of practice, it delves into the cognitive processes of real writers making explicit their writing practices. Practical suggestions are connected to the lived experiences of self-study practitioners making sense of their field through the process of writing. This book will be of interest to doctoral and novice self-study writers, and experienced authors seeking to develop their practice. It demonstrates that writing as a method of inquiry in self-study and beyond can be learned, modeled and taught.

This book explores the connections made in and through arts-based educational research through four themes: socially engaged connections, cultural connections, personal and pedagogical connections, and making connections during the COVID-19 pandemic. It emerges from the 3rd bi-annual 2020 Artful Inquiry Research Group symposium on the theme of “connections”. The symposium brought together artists, community members, teachers, students, and researchers through a virtual platform to examine the way(s) in which the arts can help connect people, ideas, and spaces/places in a pandemic reality. Art plays a predominant role in each chapter as authors weave their research and art-based understandings together. This book is a valuable teaching resource for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in teaching, anthropology, digital ethnography, autoethnography, cultural studies, and communications. It is of interest to higher education students, academic researchers, and teachers exploring arts-based methodologies in the fields of creative practice and creativity studies, communications, critical studies, sociology, sciences, teacher education, and the arts.

Beginning from the notion that self is constructed, contributors in Identity Landscapes: Contemplating Place and the Construction of Self are particularly interested in how relationships with place inform identity development. Locating identity inquiry in methodologies that encourage an explicit examination of self (e.g. autoethnography, self-study, autobiographical inquiry, a/r/tography, and reflexive inquiry), authors situate themselves epistemologically and geographically as they explore where place and identity converge. Through critical, qualitative, creative, and arts-integrated approaches, this collection aims to advance thought regarding the myriad ways that place informs identity development.

Brent Bradford assembled a collective narrative related to the doctoral journey of recent graduates in the field of education.

Art as an Agent for Social Change explores through original research, experiences, and personal narratives the role of the arts in bringing forth social change within three interconnected themes: community building, collaborations, and teaching and pedagogy.