| This interpretive study inquires into the insights to be gained about teaching and learning through the ways of knowing and representing experience that inhere in the production and interpretation of artworks. Working from a conception of the arts as ways of knowing, the study examines how the formations of different arts disciplines provide structures for thinking about, producing and expressing knowledge about teaching and learning. It seeks to establish how aesthetic practices of working within these formations and structures are forms of research and reflective practice that generate pedagogical understandings, producing new knowledge significant to the development of a professional knowledge base for teachers.; The case central to this study describes the work of a professor teaching in a faculty of education, who inquired into the integration of visual arts into a pre-service course on teaching as reflective practice. Three research methodologies are represented: the researcher's inquiry as participant observer, the professor's action research project, and the arts-based inquiries completed by teacher candidates. In supporting reflexive inquiry and artistically crafted research, each research perspective investigates emergent processes for producing knowledge about teaching and learning that arise from experiences of making and responding to artworks.; Examined are three examples of visual artmaking: individual panels produced by two teacher candidates and an installation produced by four teacher candidates. What emerged from each of the artworks was an excess of meaning that held the promise of rich, contextual understandings about the work of teaching and learning. Within these conditions for learning, knowledge emerged from aesthetic processes made possible by the qualities of disruption and displacement that characterise the aesthetic supplement. The dialectical nature of meaning-making mobilised through the signifying function of the supplement creates aesthetic conditions for learning that enable learners to move beyond the limits of their knowing to encounter the new. Examined are possibilities presented by the structures of the aesthetic supplement for articulating more fully relations between the intuitive apprehension of insight and everyday practice. Significant are ways in which teacher educators might elaborate relations among theory and practice through the aesthetic supplement in an emergent curriculum of teacher education. |
