Reclaiming relations : embodied practices of visual arts educators knowing, being and doing evaluation

Abstract

The articles in this work address histories of how visual art educators have come to exist within scholarship on teacher evaluation. This study, reconceptualized outside of methodology through a post qualitative framework of inquiry, embodies poststructural feminist theories of ethics, exemplifying living theory and process as 'lifework'. (Re)situating the evaluative experiences of art educators through their own visual stories grounded in feminist ethics where research acts as sacred practice invites an exploration of more relational ways of being as teachers, leaders, makers, and researchers. In turn, this research seeks to open spaces where we ask what becomes possible in evaluative practice when we look to the arts as a model. Opportunities emerge as the resistances of art educators reverberate beyond current systemic boundaries and offer a possibility to think differently about evaluation. Utilizing the practices of quilting, the work charts a new coursnowledge and think and perform research and teacher evaluation differently as a practice of mending, challenging (mis)representations, building relational trust through power shifts and receptive listening, and constructing a true capacity for connectedness.