Samantha Nolte-Yupari

Movement, maps, and classroom places all inform my interest in sensory ethnography, and qualitative methodologies of place.  My research works to interact with a small but growing dialogue on beginning art teachers and teacher induction, an under-researched area in the field of art education.  My work converses with Cohen-Evron's (2002) work on teacher identity fitting with teaching contexts and Bain, Kuster, Newton, and Milbrandt's (2010) work on how beginning teachers navigate the first year and implement meaningful curriculum. 

 

My dissertation “The Teacher as a Wayfaring Learner: Considering Art Teacher Induction Experiences Through Ethnographic Maps of Place and Movement,”  considered how teacher induction research and programming has long worked to unpack the complex challenges facing teachers transitioning from pre-service training into the field.  I found that the literature on teacher induction does not address the needs of teachers in specific content areas and the literature within art education is sparse.  Cohen-Evron (2002) argues that qualified, passionate art teachers often leave the field because of dissonance between their teaching identities and the expectations their school environments held for the arts. And Kuster, Bain, Newton, and Milbrandt (2010) confirm that the complex variety of teaching tasks facing beginning teachers affects their ability to balance time and energy.  This research points to the need for continued research on how, when, and why learning happens for beginning art teachers.  My work examines how beginning art teachers make meaning during their induction period with special attention to how movement generates learning.  Specifically in this longitudinal, qualitative study, I consider how sensory ethnographic maps of place and movement can be used by teachers as a reflective tool to unpack and story their teaching day in order to understand how and why well-trained, enthusiastic beginning teachers experience challenges during their first years on the job. I argue that art teachers are becoming wayfaring learners—responsive wanderers constantly and mindfully reacting to their teaching environment and the chorus of elements that constantly contribute to their meaning making. Closely examining beginning art teachers' own accounts of their teaching experiences sheds more light on the neglected issue of content specific teacher induction mentoring and programming in K-12 public school teaching.

 

I have presented my methodology as part of a sensuous cartography panel at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry and have submitted to present at the 2014 National Art Education Conference in San Diego.  I am also co-authoring an article on auto-cartography. Additionally, this work on movement and learning has also informed my manuscript 30 Kids, 1 Sink: Classroom Management for Art Teachers, currently under review at Davis Publications.

 

Next, I plan to examine the various ways one teacher and her/his students experience their classroom space and place.  I will continue to employ the notion of emplacement that informs sensory ethnography while building on maps as a prompt for talk-and-draw interviews.  I would like to work with the students and their teacher to create an “atlas” of their various maps of their classroom to explore the multiple ways classroom spaces are experience and utilized.  I am also interested in moments when experienced teachers say, “I feel like a first year teacher again.” I would like to accumulate interviews and stories of teachers who express this sentiment and consider the implications of these stories for both teacher induction programming and teacher’s ongoing professional development.

 

My interest in movement, embodied learning, visual methodologies and emplacement can continue to inform the development of beginning art teacher’s pedagogy.  This research can also be applied to conversations on mulit-modal learning, conversations about teacher-student interactions and school environments.  We learn in a variety of ways--the interchange between formal and informal places of learning create powerful opportunities for meaning making through experience and break down traditional barriers of who is the teacher and who is the learner.