Navigating Liminal Spaces in Challenging Times

This qualitative self-study explores how creative inquiry supports educators in navigating liminal spaces—those threshold experiences of uncertainty, transition, and identity reconstruction that arise during significant life change. Drawing on the anthropological concept of liminality first articulated by Arnold van Gennep and expanded through contemporary spiritual and psychological perspectives, this study examines how three teacher-scholars—based in North Carolina, Norway, and Nebraska—engage creative and reflective practices to move through personal and professional transitions, including health crises, divorce, relocation, institutional instability, grief, and retirement. Integrating self-study methodology and autoethnography, the research positions the authors as both participants and analysts of their lived experience. Data sources include visual journaling, somatic journaling, mindfulness meditation, written reflections, and dialogic engagement within a Critical Friends Group (Louie et al., 2003; Miraglia, 2017). Thematic and multimodal analysis reveals how creative practice functions not merely as expression, but as a generative pathway for identity reconstruction. Findings indicate that liminality, when engaged through intentional creative practice, becomes a fertile threshold for reflective self-reconstruction rather than a state of fragmentation. Across narratives, six cross-disciplinary themes emerged: creative practice as navigation, spirituality as meaning-making, radical acceptance of “what is,” ongoing identity reconstruction, relational interconnectedness, and liminality as generative threshold. Personal liminality was found to directly inform professional identity, deepening empathy, curiosity, pedagogical risk-taking, and authenticity in teaching. Ultimately, this study positions creative inquiry as both method and metaphor for becoming—transforming vulnerability into agency and uncertainty into purposeful evolution of the self.