Watercolors Awash in Crayoned Responses: Teaching Narrative in Arts-based Praxis

I work in literacy education, encouraging teacher candidates to experiment with the arts to make a novel come alive for adolescent readers. Part of my research agenda, which is intertwined with my teaching, seeks to make sense of the question: What are the effects of arts-based learning on the teacher candidates’ theoretical and classroom practices? To first consider the above research question from my own pedagogical perspective, I draw on my earlier recollections (Adler, 1958) of arts and classroom living using the methodology of narrative inquiry—the study of the ways humans experience the world via the construction and reconstruction of their own stories (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). Informed by my teaching narrative, crafted in the backdrop of remembered times, I venture forth to address

a metaphorical composition of personal meaning patterned from the interpretive selections of living perceptions-"an encoded narrative of the present" (Hestor, 2004, p. 340). Schneider and Stone (1998) emphasize that Adler's notion of early recollections, particularly in relation to lifestyle, finds a natural harmony with narrative practice. Furthermore, Maniacci, Shulman, Griffith, Powers, Sutherland, Dushman and Schneider (1998) comment that early recollections offer insight and change in the construction of narratives as agents of life style assessment. In essence, early recollections reflect present attitudes, beliefs, and actions-the story of my life now (Ansbacher, 1947;Verger & Camp, 1970). Presently, I turn an Adlerian lens on my narrative to better prepare me to work collaboratively with teacher candidates on their narratives in our multi-layered journeys of arts-based praxis.

Recollecting narrative present
In Adlerian practice, specific theoretical and practical supports exist for the collection and understanding of early recollections (Eckstein & Baruth, 1996;Sweeney, 1981), which play a primary role in narrative inquiry. Recollections, often retrieved in sets of three, center on the physical and emotional contents of specific events, as opposed to general statements. Adler (1932) maintains, "One…recollection is sometimes not clear enough. You must draw on further recollections…to find what they have in common" (p. 198). Moreover, Adler (1927) asserts, "There are no indifferent…recollections" (p. 50). That is, contained Language  within the selected recollections is the resonance of an individual's style of life. As Pearson and Wilborn (1995) so aptly convey, early recollections are subjective starting points, the beginning of one's autobiography. Although, the memories I select today, may not necessarily represent where I will be in eight months or eight years, it is the potential that the selected texts have for reflective work in the recurring present that is most significant.
Retold in the following pages are the recollected stories of three school experiences that I have cast to represent pieces of my teaching narrative. In particular, I take into account the part that the stories assume in the construction and implementation of my language arts methods classes, particularly in relation to arts-based learning. The first recollection, which occurs in the second grade, concentrates on my aesthetic response to a picture book reading. The second one, taking place in the same classroom, revolves around the teacher's disapproval of the color of my dream house. Fast forwarding to high school, the third recollection comes alive in an art class, where I take up pen and India ink to render the color of language resonating from the strings of many guitars. Not intending, as Abbs (2003) states "to prescribe settled…meaning" (p. 14), I acknowledge the subjective nature of memory work, while I retrieve from the past to recreate my arts-based teaching narrative in the present. As Kirby (1991) expresses, "memorial experience (recollection) is not simply of the past; it is, as we had said, the past for me now, and this qualification makes a considerable difference" (p. 24). the instructions allows us to play with the possibilities of tissue paper, color, ink and form. I am sixteen years old.
I walk up two flights of stairs, turn toward the west, and sit down in a crowded art room.
As the class settles down in the aftermath of a dozen overlapping conversations, we are introduced to the next assignment-a tissue paper collage of mixed media capturing a representation of personal interest. I begin by pulling three pieces of paper from a pile heaped with colors of variegated hues. While arranging and gluing the torn edges of red, green and rose, I hear the reverberations of twenty acoustic guitars. Folk music plays the sounds of commitment, revolution, concern, unison and refrain.
Summoned by Ravi Shankar's sitar, I work the nib that delineates the shapes of many guitars stringed in the black ink of a raga's hum. I am in a Csikszentmihalyi (1991) flow.
I concentrate fully on my work before me. Suddenly, without warning, I reenter the reality of the classroom as my teacher encourages me to continue. In the end, I receive a first prize in the annual school art show.
Recollecting narrative of arts-based teaching Short, Kaufman, and Kahn (2000) tell how "readers understand the new by searching past experiences with…life to find connections that will bring meaning to the current text" (p. 165 connections into the inquiry of my present arts-based practice. Without hesitation, I settle on the three school events, while embracing Alexander's (1971) comments "Here are the materials that have been meaningful to me, here I am, share us…" (p. xi). Acting on Adler's idiographic approach to signifying early recollections (Ansbacher, 1947), I now respond to my teaching narrative of arts-based learning, where I pry open my praxis with a palette of paint, broken chalk, brown paper, crayons, fabrics, and a crateful of glue. Immersed in these materials, the teacher candidates work with me to stretch the language arts curriculum with artful formats of lived inquiry (Eisner, 1992). For part of our time together, our methods classroom becomes a community portfolio, a bohemian playing field of curricular possibilities, as we struggle to disrupt and deconstruct language arts education via graffiti walls, body biographies, resolutions scrapbooks, and whirligig installations. Embracing Adler's (1958) belief that the individual is both the picture and the artist, I presently review my three recollected texts. First, one at a time, I place them on the ledge of my easel, located in the midst of my teaching narrative. Then, as a gallery arrangement, I consider their meaning collectively.

Response to recollection one: a watercolor depiction of McElligott's Pool. Maxine
Greene (1991) challenges us that "the arts offer opportunities for perspective, for perceiving alternate ways of transcending and being in the world" (p. 32). Although I have always carried within me the sights and sounds of my first memory, it was not until now that I have recognized its actual connection to the theoretical and practical formation of my teaching narrative. Warren (1982) contends, recollections, which contain indications of current views, beliefs, and practices, "are not due to chance, but reflect the selective memory process of the

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Volume 10 Issue 1 Spring 2008 10 individuals" (p. 224). While the majority of my second-grade learning experiences proceeded along a more conventional path of subject separation, I did chose one that featured the application of the arts to a content area-language arts. In the immediate moments after rereading my experience of a second grade response to Dr. Seuss, I am struck by a bolt of "aha" (Mosak, 1995, p. 75). Encapsulated in memory right before me is my first school encounter with the integration of the arts and literature.
Upon reflection, I realize that this remembered event illustrates what Short, Kauffman, and Kahn (2000) describe "as in the process of taking our ideas public through a sign system, we create new ideas that go From an Adlerian perspective, the first recollection can be the most significant, providing valuable insight into the individuals' views of life tasks and their participation in them (Ansbacher, 1947;Clark, 2002;Pearson & Wilborn, 1995). As I consider my text, I am  To reconsider the journey of retribution that Brent, the protagonist in Whirligig, must follow after killing a teenage girl in an alcohol-related car accident, I supply the class with the basic mechanisms and materials to reconstruct a whirling structure. Each group of five rebuilds symbolically one of the segments of Brent's trip in which he designs and erects a whirligig to celebrate the deceased girl's life. Maps, hearts, pictures, signs, directions, and other expressions define each structured text, which then becomes the centerpiece of a reader's theatre. For these three works and more, we immersed ourselves in recurring effects of an arts-based pedagogy, "the form through which insight and feeling can emerge in the public world" (Eisner, 1992, p. 595) of novel study for adolescents.
Response to recollection 2: reprimand of the purple house. Verger and Camp (1970) claim, "while the earliest recollection is often the single most useful recollection…the three The impression as a whole, Adler (1956) contends, "includes much more than the experience, which has been clothed in words" (p. 214). As Fredericksen (2000)  real color now" (Riley, 1995, p. 170). "That was my only low-toned dismal-colored painting" (p. 33) said O' Keeffe (1976), who affirmed that "The meaning of a word-to me-is not as exact as the meaning of a color" (p. 1). This independent artist inspires me as I strive to apply the arts to expand teacher candidates' capacity to conceptualize and construct meaning in the today's classrooms, fraught with an exclusionary agenda of standardization and testing (International Reading Association, 1999a;1999b). Pulling from such theoretical spaces as reader response (Rosenblatt, 1978) and creative process (Amabile, 1989), I invite teacher candidates to take advantage of the entire spectrum of curricular possibilities of learning for all students, in concert with critical reflection and action. After all, purple is a color of mingled red and blue.
Feeling like a co-conspirator of the teacher autobiographer Hayden (1995), who, at the age of nine, recalled how a teacher's confiscation of a written piece of her work, For a portion of our arts-based novel study, I guide the teacher candidates in critically responding to pertinent issues, such as adolescent identity and familial influence, in journals constructed from recycled cardboard bound together with kite string and tapestry needles.
Words, symbols, and images become our means of communication as we debrief in groups and whole-class conversations. We study and design post cards, which emerge as containers for the various messages and locations of characters' coming-of-age journeys. Within our original and collaborative scripts of reader's theatre performances, we address pertinent issues in adolescent life, ranging from teen suicide to sibling competition, in relation to selected scenes of our novels' settings. abounds-there is more than one way to express and represent the aesthetic-the fusing of "cognitive and affective elements of consciousness" (Rosenblatt, 1980, p. 388 appear in the varying silhouettes of inked guitars, defined by tissued textures of reds and greens and rose. Reflecting on this incident in the here and now, I instantly recognize my artwork as an example of transmediation-movement between and among sign systems (Leland & Harste, 1994, p. 340). A collective retrospective. Aligning with Adler, Kirby (1991) proposes, "the material of recollection is analogous to archaeological finds that still require interpretation for their precise temporal location and sense" (p. 23). A watercolor awash in a crayoned response to Concurring with Eisner (1992) who affirms, "the arts provide the conditions for awakening to the world around us" (p. 10), I integrate the arts-based experiences of my past into the teacher education curriculum of my present. Using our pre-service class as a laboratory of aesthetic opportunities for arts-based learning, I encourage teacher candidates to make novel study more accessible to all adolescent learners. To ground our practices in a foundation of "expansion and revision" (Greene, 1991), I braid our sessions together with such relevant theories as transactional literary analysis (Rosenblatt, 1978), pluralities of persons (Greene, 1991) and multiple intelligences (Gardner, 1999). Each of these theoretical workings opens up education to multiple means of content and form, from role-playing to painting to dance. Leland and Harste (1994) state that " a good language arts program is one that expands the communication potential of all learners through the orchestration and use of multiple ways of knowing for the purposes of ongoing interpretation and inquiry into the world" (p. 339). In the preceding pages, I have incorporated references to the recognized work of many arts-based advocates such as Rosenblatt (1980), Greene (1995), and Short, Kauffman and Kahn (2000). Numerous others, who also promote the generous use of the arts in all areas of the curriculum, including language arts, continue to influence my praxis. Murata (1997)  According to Short, Kaufman, and Kahn (2000), "many adults are uncomfortable with some…sign systems, but that is the result of a lack of exposure to, and use of, those systems in school" (p. 169). In the arts-based study of adolescent novels, where teacher candidates' responses to artistic sign systems can range from resistance to reception, selfreflection is a critical element. Harner & Romer (1992) emphasize that "our vulnerability in breaking new ground and developing new ways of teaching and learning makes us pause and reflect back on earlier moments of discovery and connection" (p. 23). Querying former times, while learning language arts anew, furnishes opportunities for future teachers to interrogate and move beyond the way they were taught (Britzman, 1986), toward the way they can teach (Thorpe, 1987). An integral piece of this process is the recurring study of self that teacher educators bring to their methods classrooms. Dinkelman (2003)  including those associated with the arts. For example, using Milgrom's (1992) practice of responding metaphorically to a text with "rough, untutored shapes" (p. 10) of colored paper, we tear events from our pedagogical past to color and shape our teaching narratives of the present and future. A small red speck expresses a teacher candidate's nonexistent part in elementary school art. Scraps of blue paper ripped into a set of flowing tears, captures another teacher candidate's fear of drawing in her high school years. A cache of cascading coils in green, represents a third teacher candidate's early painting for the backdrop of a oneact award-winning scene. According to Milgrom (1992), the significance of the forms reside, not in their geometric, figural, or abstract shapes, but in the meaning that the maker ascribes to them.

Response to recollection
To ponder former teachers who have influenced our current practice, we sketch, doodle, draft, and react to the significance of remembered events (Colvin, 1994). A gradenine tutor's passion for performance, emerged in a teacher candidate's recent interest in reader's theatre. A different teacher candidate's fascination with visuals, stemmed from a fifth grade instructor's studies in storied mural screens. Another teacher candidate's reluctance to move from print to paint, originated from an elementary art teacher's assignment of the grade of "C". The above two exercises, as well as the many others that I include in the reflective component, begin with a journal entry that then moves into sites of both small group and whole class discussion. The main goal is always to query the past of where we are now to the possibilities of where we can be. Although, in this paper, I locate our work in relation to the reflective component in arts-based novel study for adolescent readers, the process of narration via early recollections holds potential for examining our teaching lives in relation to other modes of expression found in such areas as math, technology, and physical education. But that is the substance of another paper.

In Conclusion
As Connelly and Clandinin (1999) state, "The memory now, of the event then, is intimately tied to the narrative paths we have followed" (p. 95). In the quarrying of my three recollections, I have been both the artist and the picture (Adler, 1958) individual…is to offer guidance for action in the present and future (Clark, 2002). Informed by my teaching narrative, crafted in the backdrop of remembered times, I venture forth to address the effects of arts-based learning on the teacher candidates' theoretical and classroom practices. Working together, we will have numerous opportunities to recast and reintegrate the many pieces of our narratives into an arts-based praxis. A more informed construction of our recurring narratives, kindled by the illumination of early recollections, will play an integral role.

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