Art Education as Potential Space: A Conversation About Navigating Divides in the Process of Becoming an Art Teacher

The authors reflect on some challenges, opportunities, and lessons learned in the process of planning and implementing an artistic investigation of physical space in a public high school in Chicago. This article is the result of conversations between a student teacher and a preservice teacher educator working in collaboration. Our definition of ‘divides’ includes both the sense in which divides function as obstacles, barriers, and/or forms of constraint, and also productively as opportunities to navigate and work through tensions between opposites. Working with the psychoanalytic concept of potential space, we suggest how students, art teachers, and teacher educators might make use of the tensions in-between divides as a resource for our conversations, teaching experiments, and school-based art projects. The article combines theory and practice to propose a way of thinking about the subject of art teacher preparation, or the teacher candidate, as learning to navigate the divide between her fantasies of teaching, and the realities of classroom life