Acknowledgements.- New Voices, Insights, Possibilities for Working with the Arts and Memory in Researching Teacher Professional Learning by Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, Daisy Pillay, and Claudia Mitchell.- “To Seek Out Something More”: Knowing the Teacher-Researcher Self Differently Through Self-Narrative Writing and Found Photographs by Daisy Pillay, Sagie Naicker, and Wendy Rawlinson.- Working with Photographs: Seeing, Looking, and Visual Representation as Professional Learning by Claudia Mitchell, Katie MacEntee, Mary Cullinan, and Patti Allison.- Picturing a More Hopeful Future: Teacher-Researchers Drawing Early Memories of School by Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, Hlengiwe (Mawi) Makhanya, Graham Downing, and Nontuthuko Phewa.- Collaging Memories: Reimagining Teacher-Researcher Identities and Perspectives by Daisy Pillay, Reena Ramkelewan, and Anita Hiralaal.- Seeing Through Television and Film: The Teacher’s Gaze in Professional Learning by Claudia Mitchell, Bridget Campbell, Stephanie Pizzuto, and Brian Andrew Benoit.- Creative Nonfiction Narratives and Memory-Work: Pathways for Women Teacher-Researchers’ Scholarship of Ambiguity and Openings by Daisy Pillay, Mary Cullinan, and Leighandri Moodley.- The Promise of Poetry Belongs to Us All: Poetic Professional Learning in Teacher-Researchers’ Memory-Work by Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, S’phiwe Madondo, and Edwina Grossi.- Stories Blending, Flowing Out: Connecting Teacher Professional Learning, Re-Membering, and Storytelling by Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, Sandra Owén:nakon Deer-Standup, and Thokozani Ndaleni.- Ethically Significant Moments in Stirring Up Memories by Claudia Mitchell, Sifiso Magubane, Casey Burkholder, and Sheeren Saloojee
This bookcommunicates 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-Work assembles 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