The Teacher’s Multimedia Reflection Notebook, Art & Pedagogy Hand-In-Hand
Danielle Nagel-O’Rourke is an English teacher in her fourth year of teaching, and serves as the Department Chair of English at Moore High School in Moore, Oklahoma. She is a recent Masters graduate from the University of Oklahoma’s Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum program.
So much of my identity as a teacher has been about constant growth. I’ve worked my way through new positions, grade level content, and graduate school to ensure I have a paving stone to go forward to, always. But in recent years, I’ve begun to stagnate without someone to push me as an educator. Professional development is a passive tossing out of ideas without real time to reflect on implementation, and educator communities online can be overwhelming to parse through. I’ve always done best with talking about, reflecting on, and soundboarding ideas with a professor, colleague, or mentor.
In recent months, I’ve come to a stand still on knowing where to go next as a teacher. I feel stuck, ineffective, and overwhelmed with the circumstances of teaching in a pandemic and in a new content area. I feel alone since our lunches were cut short and we aren’t allowed to hold in-person meetings. My dialogue about teaching has stalled, which means my growth has stalled.
A few years ago, I took a graduate class which asked us to represent our teacher identity in a creative way. I chose to use a multimedia notebook, painting over the pages of a damaged book I found in our department closet and giving it new life with the ideas swirling around in my brain. It was a project, a moment in time, that allowed me that dialogue I needed to process what I was learning on a daily basis, but internally and artistically. I’ve had experience with multimedia art sketchbooks before, but this was a new way to messily process my own ideas about being a teacher.
Because of recent events, I began the process again. I began painting pages in class, letting them dry while I taught, turning the pages to create blank canvases, or leaving some pages for blackout poetry. Students started asking for their own books to paint during lunch or during downtime in class, creating their own multimedia notebook. I spent days just painting page after page, too scared to begin the reflective process of filling the book with my own ideas and identity as a teacher.
Then, one night, I sat down with a couple magazines, printed quotes and pieces of information, my favorite instructional theory notes and articles, stickers and markers, and my computer. I let the thoughts come to me. I let the art manifest. I let the poems out. I made space for Whitehead, and MacKenzie, and Kingsley, and Bishop. I wrote about my goals for teaching critical theory, and about social justice and mental health in the classroom. And page upon page was filled in one night, ideas that had been knocking at the door of my subconscious, waiting to be let out and given a space to exist.
Art is the practice of communication, and of meaning-making regarding what we see, hear, and think about the world we exist in. We know how much art provides to our students as an outlet. Arts integration into core subjects has been a recent endeavor, with paint-writes, mind mapping, one pagers, and multi-genre research projects becoming common practice. Symbolic art representations and collages bleed into novel reading and journal writing regularly. As English teachers, we especially know the power of art and writing.
So frequently though, we deprive ourselves of that space to process and reflect on our practice and our role as teachers. The difficultly of teaching is that we have little time to engage in reflection, based on a one-hour plan that is spent on preparing for future lessons and grading past assignments. That is a separate conversation altogether, regarding the impossible amount of asks for teachers. However, the problem of time lends itself to the problem at hand here, which is an inability to process our needs as teachers and how to improve our practice through reflection.
The necessity of reflection for teachers is underrated in its importance, as it is the practice that refills the cup and drives us forward. In my student teaching experience, it was the most essential piece of time spent with my mentor each day. In my teaching career, it has been what developed an ability to pivot, adapt, and problem-solve in the classroom and after each school day. Reflection is the key piece of instruction that allows us to focus not on what went wrong, but on where we can go from here. In many ways, Day said it best, that “Without routinely engaging in reflective practice, it is unlikely that we will be able to understand the effects of our motivations, prejudices, and aspirations upon the ways in which we create, manage, receive, sift, and evaluate knowledge; and as importantly, the ways in which we are influencing the lives, directions, and achievements of those whom we nurture and teach” (Day, 229). The job is all about doing better for our students, and reflection is the road to that improvement.
If you haven’t engaged in reflective practices and are curious about their impact on effective teaching, a great article to wrestle with is “How does Reflection Help Teachers to Become Effective Teachers?”. One way to incorporate low-stakes reflection into your routine as a teacher is to utilize journaling. My suggestion is to utilize a multimedia reflective notebook, to allow for artistic representation, creativity, and an informal outlet for your thoughts, research, inquiry, and goals.
- Begin with a book. You can use a sketchbook, or any notebook. Some people use lined pages, graph paper, or blank paper. I personally prefer a book, as there is something symbolic about literally creating space for your own ideas and the pressure to make things perfect or fully complete is lessened by the space never having been pristine in the first place.
- Pull from inspiration.
- What pushed you to begin teaching?
- What have you read recently that is still on your mind?
- What are your weekly wins as a teacher?
- What are your fears as a teacher?
- What is your purpose that drives you to continue in the field?
- What researchers or research inspire you?
- What instructional cornerstones are your focus?
- What are your goals for yourself and your students?
- What current events are on your mind regarding how they impact your classroom?
- What words come to mind about teaching? Write poetry and flow on the page.
- What art inspires you to keep going? What quotes?
- Know that spaces don’t have to be “complete”. They can be left empty, or incomplete for future bouts of reflection on the same topic. You can tape pages in, print, hand-write, paste, or paint. Know too that this shouldn’t be a chore. You can make it a weekly process but stop when it isn’t enjoyable anymore. This should be a space of discovery and inquiry, and it should excite you to pick it up with a new idea to think about and put on the page.
Here is a great article to help you with diversifying your representation of ideas by incorporating more unique art mediums. It also has some beginner notes if this is your first time branching out into a multimedia notebook.: Day, C. Researching teaching through reflective practice. In J. Loughran (ed.) 1999. Researching Teaching: Methodologies and Practices for Understanding Pedagogy, London, Falmer Press: 215-232.