The Map of True Places: Moving Onward in Artist-Teacher Preparation

How might we move onward in art teacher education toward a more fluid sense of possibility in preparing teachers for careers in schools, community arts settings, and beyond—into livelihoods and vocations we have yet to imagine? This paper contemplates such a question by dwelling in the pages of a visual verbal journal kept by a pre-service artistteacher during an introductory art education methods course. The author, an art teacher educator, follows a curatorial impulse, thus creating a series of rhizomatic maps. Through this arts-based methodological approach, these maps generate an assemblage of true places, or lines of resonance and connection educators create between themselves and their anticipated vocation. These mappings seek to invite others to wonder how the journal keeper’s insights and reflections might offer new directions and possibilities for art teacher preparation.