Conclusion
Failing well as a teacher, gave me a better picture of my position as a researcher to inform the curriculum and leaving the research floor to the unexpected to the role of the artist. My artist's heart accompanies a heartbeat caused by curiosity, need, nature, and force. I learned to see that mistakes are discovery opportunities. Perhaps because of that, when we teach we want that curiosity to tickle our student's minds too. I acknowledged that the three roles I enact as an artist, researcher, and teacher can not be split. In that sense, I had an inner battleground between rationality, the colonial way of looking at research, and creativity. My thoughts scribbled ideas while trying to make sense in theory and practice but got trapped in a huge hairball of data. As an artist, I often find myself restricted by the expectations of being a teacher while at school. But when I saw my students thinking creatively, I could not help to involve myself as a teaching artist. I used my intuition to spot the creative and critical thinking moments to encourage the students to capture them by drawing. As a teacher, teaching about difficult themes required me to lead the inquiry with strong classroom management aspects to deliver the class lessons. As a researcher, I supported my teaching in connection to the curriculum design and the analysis of the drawings. These three entangled roles work simultaneously as a cyclic process that is not always moving clockwise.
Through this project, shiny big eyes, a-ha moments, and ink characters disguising the inner-self of teenagers turn Pandora’s box into a treasure chest. Performing the research collaboratively meant that all forms of non-verbal communication were considered in addition to drawing. Working as an artographer at school meant to me that I can use this methodology in the arts at school to better understand how to advocate for social and climate change. I would like to think that is like planting a seed of activism in the student’s hearts. Perhaps not for the now, but for the future, they will use critical thinking skills regarding these global issues and be better prepared to face challenges from an empathetic position.
Drawing as a performative act broke the idea of time and space and pushed the fixed mindset of some students regarding the use of art at school.
The transformation of the space happened through thinking with the community of young students. Their life experiences shared through discussions in class and drawings worked as diffractions changing the research territory. The art room was at the time of the inquiry, a transformative space, an ecosystem of becoming, affections, and deterritorialization.
Overall, conducting research and performing it implicates an unfolding inquiry that extends beyond the school walls too. There is a community, a ‘community of practice’ (Irwin & Springgay, 2008: 168) where my teaching can impact the students’ actions when they are back from school at home. I am the author of the experience but they also are co-creators of changes in their lives after discussing intersectional discrimination. There is probably, hopefully, an ongoing dialogue with their families and friends which I aim can create awareness of how to tackle and deconstruct all forms of discrimination.