Art as inquiry: Cultivating critical arts-based practices in an early pre-service teacher education program

This practitioner research is situated within the current US educational and political context of increased standardization and accountability measures. Despite decades of research, which broaden conceptions of literacy as a culturally situated social practice, and as a complex network of multimodal experiences, literacy continues to be narrowly defined as a discrete set of skills to be mastered for a state or national test. Policies like NCLB (2001) and its successor, Race to the Top (2009), which privilege decontextualized print literacy at the expense of all other modes of meaning making, have led countless schools to cut arts education programs, but many researchers and educators argue that the arts and the imagination are essential to literacy education and have an important role to play in educational reform efforts. This research addresses the call for such reform. In this work, I offer a new pedagogical approach, which I call Critical-Complex Arts Integrated Pedagogy (CCAIP), which foregrounds the critical and intellectual work of arts-based practices across content areas. I examine my own teaching practice implementing CCAIP in an early pre-service teacher education program, a one-year dual-enrollment program for high school seniors interested in education careers. During the study, I employed an arts-partnership model, where teaching artists joined my class as collaborative partners. In this work, which is grounded in the practitioner inquiry paradigm, I examine how my students used the arts as a critical method of inquiry; how they represented their emerging teaching philosophies via the arts; and I also examine my own practice engaging in arts experiences with my students. Findings demonstrate that CCAIP affords students opportunities to develop reflective arts-based practices, which broaden understandings of literacy, teaching, and learning. Through engaging in arts-based work, students\u27 inquiries shifted from an instrumental focus on best practices to an intellectual examination of the self. Through this process, students developed an understanding of teaching as an intellectual and dialogic act, one built on meaningful relationships between students and teachers. This study has scholarly and pedagogical implications, not only in terms of the value of arts integration, but also in terms of rethinking teacher education