The varied textures of an arts-informed methodology: Exploring teachers' identities through artful expressions

Understanding how teachers come to know and make sense of teaching is a challenging endeavor. Uncovering elusive strands of thinking through arts-informed approaches has the potential to transform personal understandings of teacher selves and professional practice across diverse early childhood contexts (Clandinin, Downey, & Huber, 2009). Drawing on an arts-informed methodology combining bricolage, portraiture, and an artist's methods, this article presents a seven-framed model for exploring teachers' identity journeys. Working with six early childhood teachers in community-based Australian Long Day Care settings, teachers use these frames as methodological tools for “developing and constructing” photos, drawings, narrative, and artifacts to make visible intangible perceptions of self-identity and experience (Bown & Sumsion, 2007, p. 30; Langer, 1957). These artistic responses were treated as provocations to explore shared meanings and position arts-informed methods as valuable research spaces (Black & O'Dea, 2015) of learning, connection, and transformation (Black, 2002).