Visual Cartographic Explorations of a High School Art Room Assemblage

This arts-based dissertation explored an art teacher and her students’ interactions and movements through a high school art class using visual maps. Art as research by way of visual mapping methods emerged as a tool teachers can use to reflect and analyze their unique teaching and classroom contexts. Using the conceptual idea the art room assemblage is like an Australian mud map, the art room becomes an ephemeral relational space formed by the in-betweens of the teacher and students and the art room with mappable felt and seen forces: the nuanced coordinates of new materialism, affect theory, and immanence. Visual cartographic content generated around teacher/student conversation and artmaking constructed all aspects of this research project, tuning into . Visual cartography mapped content from informal interviews, observation/video, teacher and students’ artwork, and the researcher/artist journal/sketchbook. Further, the project draws on situational analysis, which provided a way to see various relationships in context. Serving as a mode of analytic thinking, visual mapping takes the focus away from a single subject and places emphasis on the art room assemblage as a whole. Encouraging the reader/viewer to consider the varied social situations within an art room assemblage, this research invites looking at the art room in a different way to move our thoughts in new directions. The implications from this research advocate for the artist teacher to research their own context with the very skills and knowledge they are teaching, herein directing in-service and pre-service art educator professional development towards art-based practitioner research.