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“To Seek Out Something More”: Knowing the Teacher-Researcher Self Differently Through Self-narrative Writing and Found Photographs

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Book cover Memory Mosaics: Researching Teacher Professional Learning Through Artful Memory-work

Part of the book series: Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research ((SABER,volume 2))

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Abstract

“‘To Seek Out Something More’: Knowing the Teacher-Researcher Self Differently Through Self-narrative Writing and Found Photographs” by Daisy Pillay, Sagie Naicker, and Wendy Rawlinson showcases the power of found photographs for evoking, constructing, and reconstructing memory in written self-narratives. The exemplars are drawn from Sagie Naicker’s and Wendy Rawlinson’s doctoral research in South Africa. Sagie drew on selected photographs to examine how his disability identity influenced his leadership practice, and his journey as an activist seeking social justice for people with disabilities. Wendy’s found photograph evoked a bodily experience of being transported to a more imaginative space that triggered her curiosity for aesthetic pedagogical adventuring in her racially diverse classroom. Taken as a whole, the chapter demonstrates how, drawing multi-methodologically on self-narratives and the visual meaning making perspective of found photographs, the scholarship of self-awareness of teachers’ ways of being, knowing, and doing can make significant contributions to teacher professional learning.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “Technikons were South African institutions oriented to occupationally directed higher education. The intention was to teach high-level skills and knowledge to add on to the more practical training offered in technical colleges” (Harrison 2009, p. 259).

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Acknowledgements

We are thankful to our peer reviewer, Joan Lucy Conolly (Durban University of Technology, South Africa), for her encouraging and insightful feedback on this chapter.

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Correspondence to Daisy Pillay .

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Pillay, D., Naicker, S., Rawlinson, W. (2019). “To Seek Out Something More”: Knowing the Teacher-Researcher Self Differently Through Self-narrative Writing and Found Photographs. In: Pithouse-Morgan, K., Pillay, D., Mitchell, C. (eds) Memory Mosaics: Researching Teacher Professional Learning Through Artful Memory-work. Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97106-3_2

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