The Real and the Not Really Real: Staging Artist‐Teacher Identity and Pedagogy in the Classroom

Abstract

This article explores the complexities and tensions of artist‐teacher identity through a performative autoethnographic project centred on the creation and performance of a marionette self‐portrait. The marionette becomes a proxy through which the identities of artist and teacher can be enacted, interrogated and held in dynamic tension. Drawing on a tradition of performative inquiry in art education, the project embraces theatricality as a method for critically engaging with the self and for staging pedagogical reflection where the performed self‐portrait serves as a distancing device between me and my teaching persona. The marionette is an attempt to make the embodied knowledge and experience of these identities visible and symbolically and theatrically malleable. Grounded in contemporary discourse on artist‐teacher practice, this research aligns with the view of classroom teaching as a creative, situated and reflexive act. It responds to the concept of a pedagogy of care, particularly its call for classrooms to function as open‐ended studio environments that prioritise process, risk‐taking and relationality. During the project, the school classroom became a shared making space between artist‐teacher and students, creating a space for reflection and relational practice. In this context, the marionette becomes a reflexive object, a tangible metaphor for the ways identities are constructed, rehearsed and performed in educational spaces. In this shared space, artist‐teacher and student identities are examined with sensitivity, side by side, in order to explore shared experiences of risk‐taking and not knowing.