Words and images in the third space of the classroom

Teaching and learning are complex and obscured assemblages of action, speech, events, intentions, and interpretations. Practitioner research allows me to study my teaching in recursive cycles of reflection and change. For this study, I collected data in an 11th grade American literature class for one year in order to learn about how we (myself and my students) negotiated meaning in the constant presence of differences. I focused my inquiry on the value of artistic thinking, specifically, classroom acts of metaphoric construction. As Eisner (2002) argues, all modes of representation stabilize the idea or image in a material and make possible a dialogue with it. In the metaphoric process, we invent a new concept by building a relationship between two known concepts. In order to study classroom acts of representation, I documented my planning; audiotaped my lectures, instructions, and students\u27 discussions; and copied and photographed their work with poetry, novels, plays, picturebooks, and film. This study demonstrates the power of the arts to reveal student thinking and reaffirms my commitment to the use of arts in the English classroom. Using Hetland et al.\u27s (2007) conceptualization of the studio habits of mind and Muller\u27s (2004) attributes of third space hybridity reveal inadequacies in my curriculum design and instruction. Analyzing inscrutable classroom moments helps me realize how much nuance I miss when leading classroom discussions (Rymes, 2009). Practitioner research emanates from and acts on practice; I end, not with answers, but with more specific questions, goals, and conceptualizations