Portraits of Artist-Teachers in Higher Education: Pedagogy as Creative Practice

In this dissertation study, the researcher explored how pedagogy affects the creative process of visual artists who are also higher education art teachers. In order to understand and conceptualize the relationship between pedagogy and art making through the artist-teacher lens, the method and the methodology of Portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) enabled the re-storying of the participants’ experiences into written portraits, putting an emphasis on the voice of the researcher as well. The experiences of seven artist-teachers were developed into portraits after interviewing, observing, and carefully reflecting on the context and voices of participants. The theoretical framework of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) by Shulman (1986), Community of Practice (CoP) by Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder, (2002), and Creativity by Feldman, Csikszentmihalyi, and Gardner (1994) allowed me to interpret and share the artist-teachers’ context as a hybridized and complex identity by incorporating one of the hallmarks of the Portraiture methodology: to portray success and find goodness in any lived experience. Findings indicate that teaching by intuition rather than teaching by design taps into a variety of creative sources when reflecting upon artist’s practice and process in relationship to pedagogical practices