In this presentation I share the first stage of the fieldwork of my doctoral research.
The main objective of the research is to understand the lived experience of four Chilean women art teachers, from their transits between their artistic and teaching practice.
From this central problem the investigation focuses in four specific aims.
1. Understand how the act of narrating their experiences reveals how they perceive themselves as women art teachers.
2. Explore the critical positions of female role in the fields of arts education and the arts.
3. Understand how their art practice (art knowledge) contributes or not to the development of their teaching profession and how their teaching practice (teaching knowledge) contributes to the development of their art practice.
4. Reconstruct the process of forming their teaching knowledge from life histories, for understanding the relationship between their diverse knowledge and their professional development.
Reveal how these women move between the arts and education implies
approach the various knowledge among they move, to understand these subjectivities as spaces of possibilities and emancipation. So, from this point, I note that the transits between artistic and teaching practice are paths of experience and knowledge that articulate mutually and leads me to understand the formation of their identities as a dynamic path and constantly re-construction.
The virtual space "MujeresArtistasDocentes" (WomenArtTeachers), created for the first stage of the research, allowed them reflect altogether (during three months), how they constantly shape their identities, from the transit between their roles as artists and teachers. The notion of identity is approached from the narrative process of being counted and how from this reflexive act we are shaping our personal identity (Somers, 1994; Clandinin, 2006).
From this virtual platform, I have focused on understanding their experiences and how they perceive themselves as artists and teachers, from the sense of being women. From these three dimensions (women, artists and teacher), in this virtual space they have shared various questions regarding their training and formations as artists and art teachers. Also they have shared their different art practices, their conceptions of the arts and arts education. Furthermore they have reflected the place of others in their artistic and educational practice, etc. All these questions have helped to understand, from their voices and experiences, how they perceived as women in their transits between arts and education.
Due to the importance and the meaning that woman's dimension has in this study, this research is built primarily from a feminist theoretical framework. Postmodern and diffrerence feminist approach has served to articulate the notion of experience, as an ontological and epistemological basis of this research. On the other hand, to understand their teaching practice I have positioned from feminist pedagogy through Weiner, (1999), Belausteguigoitia and Mingo (1999), Luke and Gore (1992), Gore (1996), among others. In this sense, feminist researchers are first-order guides in my research. First because of how they have oriented their research on the experience of other female teachers, and second by the way they have developed methodological aspects, from narrative inquiry and life histories (Weiler, 1988; Casey, 1993; Acker, 1995; Munro, 1998; Smith, 2012).
Finally, the notion of art teacher professional development is the main theme of this research. So, this research not only implies an understanding of their professional careers, It goes beyond. This research seeks to promote their knowledge and professional development. From the above, a key aspect from the virtual space was to get close to the different knowledges that conform daily their teaching practice. Reflection was the primary aspect fostered from the virtual space as a constant way to reconstruct their professional knowledge.This was reviewed from Dewey (1989), Schön D. (1998, 1992) and Valli (1993).
