Seeing through apples: An exploration into the ethics and aesthetics of a teacher-educator-researcher's arts-based beginnings

Experienced knowing requires a partial tracing or a staging and shadowing of the contours of experience. This phenomenological inquiry into the experience of self through others involves a complex, non-linear; relational, and layered method of re-searching. As a dynamic form of inquiry, it applies arts-based approaches to the study of teacher-development that relies on its own intrinsic qualities. I thus inquire into the ethics and aesthetics of beginnings in the presence of six co-participants who changed from student-teachers to beginning teachers. By shadowing them, I explore my own beginnings as an arts-based teacher-educator-inquirer. I use our words and metaphors to help form and develop the inner and outer reaches of these experiences. Out of and back into the shadows. These moves are shaped and re-shaped around a familiar symbol of teaching-learning that is also a knowledge-imbued and imaginative construct: The apple. In the co-constructed text, the organic nature of the apple is transformed through a morphing process from its beginnings as a metaphor to its final but fainter outlines as an inquiry portal. I use the traditional medium of batik to illustrate how an inquiry, the very "life work" of an inquirer, is also an evolving and shape-changing work of art. I then reanimate the co-participants' six apple batiks as a shadow play. As the shadow-master/inquirer, I also select existing text segments from the poetic and fictional literature and re-position them as variations upon my own text. I came increasingly to seek to evoke or recapture some of the sensory memories and "epiphanies" that emerged as crucial moments in my personal history of being a faith-based teacher-educator and of becoming an arts-based educational researcher. I share these in-sights in the form of prose poems. These fragments of memory-texts are placed in shadow boxes so that we may re-access/assess them together. As I re-searched experiences in this arts-based self/ther study, I became more appreciative of the contours and shadows in the not-yet/never-quite finished works of an that we are as inquiring teachers, and of the unseen hand that shapes us all.