THINKING IN TERMS OF MOVEMENT The Arts-Based Research Perspective of Teachers Professional Practice

Educational research, in recent years, in focusing its attention on the different ways of acquiring and transmitting knowledge within educational contexts, has focused special attention on practical-operative experience of teachers. But, what does it means to focus on practical experience of work? The perspective of sociomaterialism has been provided an arena in which we can reflect on the nature and on the role of materiality and its relationship with social phenomenon. In short, what we can learn from the perspective of these theories is the crucial role of the focus on activities and practices in the determination of professional work and learning. The questions now become: what are the elements that constitute professional practice? How we can study and explore these elements? Based on this corpus of literature there are four essential dimensions that an analysis on professional practice must consider: times; spaces; bodies; things (Schatzki, 2001). This paper takes start from this assumption considering (specifically) the body as the metronome and the wheel on the teachers’ professional practice. The study of body and its relationships in the workplace becomes a turning point in the educational research (but not only). What it could mean to be, to practice, and to learn as a professional become significant questions for researchers. Body has often avoided in educational research reducing the term choreography just as metaphor of practice and/or logical connection among steps and things. This is a crucial aspect in these studies if we think about the sociomaterialism perspective of practice and the Schatzian identification of the body as one of the four essential key elements for the study of professional practice. In this study, dance and choreography (Foster, 2011) have been used as concepts to interpret teachers’ work. The aims here are to see what kind of information we can gather using this perspective and to explore a new ways to investigate teachers’ practice. For the first step of a wider project we observed four Vocational Education and Training (VET) teachers during their daily work. The second part of the project includes 25 secondary school teachers. Later, we extended the protocol to a wider sample of secondary teachers in order to identify common teachers profiles. Results synthesize different “choreographic styles” that represent teachers of different disciplines: math; science; lab.; second language; literature; philosophy; art; physical education. Contrarily, with what we expected to observe disciplines do not necessarily entail different movement qualities (such as the use of space). However, different didactic actively are characterised by some specific qualities of movement. The importance of a study on body and its role in a working practice becomes relevant if we consider the meanings that the body might convey in today’s society. The focus on the body awareness could have important implication for the teacher education paths. This kind of studies could change the way in which teacher education is thought and practiced. Theories of movement and analyses of body could open up new understandings of work and practice as they can reveal intimate and unconscious aspect of human thoughts, beliefs, and ways of being.