Melbourne Graduate School of Education
2015 Reciprocity ~ Learning from, giving back
2016 Resolutions ~ Creating liminal spaces
2017 Ebb & flow
2018 Community ~ Becoming with
2019 Spacetime
The teacher as artmaker project (TAP) is a significant research initiative conducted at the Melbourne Graduate School f Education (MGSE). Visual art teachers are somewhat unique amongst the teaching fraternity in that they not only teach, but they must also practice what they preach. Many wish to maintain a private art practice in partnership with quality teaching. In fact, a lot of art teachers believe that their own art making is critical to ‘quality teaching’. However, we all know that this is not an easy task.
TAP is an international first for visual art education, providing for the first time, longitudinal data on teacher’s participation in art production, perceptions of quality teaching, and expectations of retention in the profession. This information will inform better teacher training and professional development for future generations of art educators.
TAP participants come from successive cohorts of MGSE’s Master of Teaching (Secondary) program. All participants complete an annual survey once they graduate, regardless of their career pathway. A number of volunteers from that group also agree to participate in an annual art exhibition that provides participants with the goals, motivation, and support group to maintain an active art practice during the early years of their teaching career.
Lead researcher ~ Associate Professor Wesley Imms
Teacher artmaker project
Artworks
2015 ~ Reciprocity
Learning from, giving back
2016 ~ Resolutions: Creating liminal spaces
Throughout my undergraduate degree of Fine Arts at the Victoria College of the Arts, I developed artworks which responded to my interest in public and private spaces. Specifically, I was always attempting to work through ideas related to the uncanny juxtapositions developed between these types of spaces that I would find through everyday experiences. This artwork continues to develop this fascination I have in these liminal spaces, while attempting moments of resolve. By using compositional elements and rules, I am beginning to draw together the chaos that this divide often initiates. Empowering women is one of the most crucial parts of education currently. In a world where presidential candidates believe that they need not apologise for crude and disgusting language that they use to describe women, when 16% of girls over 15 have experienced sexual or physical violence and when causal sexism is deemed as just being apart of the Australian culture, we must have strong voices and hearts.
2017 ~ Ebb & flow
Over the past 3 years I have been personally transforming; balancing teaching and daily life, living rurally and spending a lot of time in Melbourne and overseas, relationship beginnings and endings and strengthening my connections with intersectional feminism. This Ebb & Flow consistently plays an enormous part of my artistic practice and has influenced a range of projects in 2017. I have included some of the portraits of the boss women that I work, socialise and live with for this exhibition as a small display of a larger project.
2018 ~ Community: Becoming with
Over the past four years I have been living and working as a teacher in my hometown, Stawell. When I first returned, I did not have any intention on staying longer than the 6-month long service leave contract that I had signed. This was because I had always wanted to leave, to explore and travel when I grew up in the town, and at that time, did not have any great love for the community. However, quickly I learnt to love the area, connecting with my students and feeling rewarded in contributing back to the community that raised me. Although my relationship with home has been forever in flux, the one factor which has always remained steady, is my response to my environment through art making. This work continues to build on my interpretation of my environment.
2019 ~ Spacetime
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