Background

Globally, many education systems are in crisis on a range of fronts including the retention, recruitment and preparation of teachers entering the profession (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2021), with teacher shortages being a pressing issue in many parts of the world, including in Europe (European Commission et al., 2021), England (Long & Danechi, 2022) and Australia (Clare, 2022). Options advanced to address the crisis include improving the status of the profession, teachers having a stronger professional identity and alleviating many of the administrative burdens of teaching (European Commission et al., 2021; OECD, 2020; Thompson, 2021). Familiar questions about the readiness and quality of teacher graduates have also been raised to address the issue, highlighting how the field of teacher education remains under intense scrutiny (Fox et al., 2020; Mayer & Mills, 2021) including by organisations and agencies with vested interests (European Commission, 2020). The continued and increased regulatory environments imposed on initial teacher education programs, such as in Estonia (Pedaste et al., 2019) and in Australia (Paul et al., 2022), highlight the continual policy influence over the field. Consequently, the experiences and voices of those working in teacher education are often silenced or marginalised by discourses of policy, reform, standards and accountability (Cochran-Smith et al., 2018; McLaren & Baltodano, 2000). Despite the intense regulatory, compliance and policy focus on teacher education, there exists a lack of understanding about the nature of teacher educators’ practice (Brennan & Zipin, 2016), or when it is described, the views are simplistic in nature (Loughran & Hamilton, 2016). The dominant meta-narratives about teacher education seem to come from those who are either outside, or occupy a certain part of the field, who speak about and for, rather than with, teacher educators.

Objectives

Our aim with this research project was to explore what it means for those who are working in the highly politicized, contested and entangled field of teacher education in order to uncover understandings about the complex aspects of their work.

Research Questions

The key research question for this project was: How do those who work in the field of teacher education articulate and represent the nature of their work? To assist in exploring this question we also developed the following sub-questions:

1. In what ways do personal and professional dispositions intersect for those who work in the field of teacher education?
2. How do the narratives and representations created by the participants relate to the meta-narratives about teacher education?
3. In what ways do arts-related and narrative methods contribute to understanding experiences of those who work in the field of teacher education? 

In this presentation we will discuss the ways in which we have utilised arts-based methodologies (for instance, Leavy, 2015) to engage with colleagues globally to reflect on the cognitive and affective domains of their work, and to explore dominant discourses framing the conception of working in the field of teacher education.

Theoretical framework

We draw on aspects of Bourdieu’s practice theory (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) that take into account the intersecting relationships between the ‘field’ as a space of social interaction, conflict, and competition (often referred to as a game); ‘habitus’ as the durable dispositions we possess, to make sense of one’s place in the social world (the feel for the game) and how the various ‘capitals’ we accumulate such as economic, social, cultural, and symbolic inform how we act as players in the complex game. To consider the cognitive, intellectual work and the affective and emotional dimensions of working in teacher education, we also draw on the concepts of affect and emotion work (Prosser 2015).

The supercomplexity research paradigm (Ling & Ling 2020) involves embracing the unknown, strangeness, fragility, while disturbing and problematizing existing understandings, provided a means to explore how those working in teacher education describe and navigate their identities and professional experiences. Our phenomenological approach (Cohen et al., 2011) meant that we were able to consider the lived experiences of those working, or who had worked in the last 10 years, in the field of teacher education (not only initial teacher education). After obtaining university ethics approval, participants were drawn from Australia and internationally and recruited via email and through social media platforms. Each participant was invited to respond to a suite of short online surveys sent at approximately 4-week intervals. For each survey, participants were asked to complete a single stem sentence prompt with some text (of no more than 50 words) and provide an associated image (from the web or self-made). The four prompts related to the troublesome, delightful, ambiguous, and hopeful dimensions of working in teacher education. By adopting arts-based methods and inviting participants to share a visual, as well as a written response, we wanted to enable participants to provide an insight into their emotional, lived experiences, in ways that might move beyond linguistic-cognitive approaches. Arts-based and visual research methods have grown in prominence in qualitative research as ways to explore peoples’ experiences and realities. These forms of research counter traditional and linear approaches (Butler-Kisber & Poldma, 2010; Leavy, 2015) and offer researchers the ability to draw from, and develop, multiple ways of generating and analyzing data. In total, 126 responses were received (with responses from each Australian state and territory along with 20 % of responses coming from outside Australia). This is a significant number of people involved in teacher education who wanted to share their perspectives. Coding scripts were used to convert data from online spreadsheets into Instagram-Polaroid style representations that fused text and image for each response. These Polaroids, or individual data points, were transferred to a Miro board (online whiteboard) affording individual and collaborative analysis by the project team. This included making notations and moving the data points on the Miro board related to a particular prompt into ‘clusters’ based on metaphors and ideas present in the images and the text to identify key concepts and themes related to the troublesome, delightful, ambiguous, and hopeful dimensions of working in teacher education.

The data provided by the participants offer rich textual and visual representations. We see and read about the troublesome and ambiguous aspects, with references to control, restriction, compliance, uncertainty and contested expectations, with feelings of fragility and being de-humanized. These ideas were accompanied by images of signposts, people climbing mountains, and symbols such as question marks. These artefacts emulate what Bourdieu refers to as the prevailing ‘doxa’ that has colonized the field, along with the forms of ‘symbolic violence’ that involve subtle forms of hierarchized power that influence human relationships and positions in the field. Juxtaposing these representations, the participants’ responses to the delightful and hopeful dimensions reflect the vibrancy and energy where collegiality and collaboration are valued along with opportunities to explore new possibilities, taking risks and imagining positive futures. Typical images included those of distant horizons, cloud formations and interlocked hands, all of which highlight certain dispositions and a type of habitus, or feel for the game, that draws on particular types of cultural and social capital to stay within the field. The use of images accompanied by text also opened ways to reveal both conscious and unconscious conceptualizations and emotions that are not so easily captured by words alone. Arts-based methods such as we have employed provide powerful and vivid representations of the intensity and level of emotions teacher educators experience in their work. These methods also offer an aesthetic mode of resistance and interruption to the dominant discourse by allowing for both individual and collective voices and images of teacher educators to be heard and the work they do to be more understood by those in other parts of the field and beyond.

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