Memory Mosaics: Researching Teacher Professional Learning Through Artful Memory-work

This book communicates new voices, insights, and possibilities for working with the arts and memory in researching teacher professional learning. The book reveals how, through the arts, teacher-researchers can reimagine and reinvigorate moments of the past as embodied and empowering scholarly experiences. The peer-reviewed chapters were composed from juxtaposing unique “mosaic” pieces written by 21 new and emerging scholars in South Africa and Canada. Their research explores diverse arts-based practices and resources including collage, film, drawing, narrative, poetry, photography, storytelling and television alongside related ethical issues. Critically, Memory Mosaics also demonstrates how artful memory-work can engender agency in professional learning with teacher-researchers taking up pressing issues of social justice such as inclusion and decolonisation. Overall, the book offers a multidimensional, polyvocal exploration of how artful memory-work can bring about future-oriented professional learning enacted as pedagogies of reinvention and productive remembering. Memory Mosaics: Researching Teacher Professional Learning Through Artful Memory-Work, by Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, Daisy Pillay, and Claudia Mitchell, along with teacher-researchers on two continents, is a ground-breaking book. It models a collaborative approach to arts-based research that melds memory-work, visual and poetic arts, and reflective practice to promote professional learning, personal transformation, decolonisation, and a more just future. Like colourful pebbles and bits of glass, the authors place teachers’ self-stories in relation to one another in an artful design, creating thematic coherence that evokes a deep sense of knowing. Judith C. Lapadat, Professor Emeritus, Faculty of Education, University of Lethbridge, CanadaMemory Mosaics: Researching Teacher ProfessionalLearning Through Artful Memory-Workassembles exemplars of professional learning in an intriguing mosaic format. A topic is introduced, followed by memory-pieces; then: discussion and/or creative response. This lively juxtaposition generates momentum for highly productive forms of remembering around social justice issues, even as the reader is invited into an intimate circle of shared concern: for these issues, with these (and other) teacher-researchers.  It is a beautiful, original, and practical book. Teresa Strong-Wilson, Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, McGill University, Canada