Memory Mosaics: Researching Teacher Professional Learning Through Artful Memory-work (Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2019)

This book communicates new voices, insights, and possibilities for working with the arts and memory in researching teacher professional learning.

The book reveals how, through the arts, teacher-researchers can reimagine and reinvigorate moments of the past as embodied and empowering scholarly experiences.

The peer-reviewed chapters were composed from juxtaposing unique “mosaic” pieces written by 21 new and emerging scholars in South Africa and Canada.

Their research explores diverse arts-based practices and resources including collage, film, drawing, narrative, poetry, photography, storytelling and television alongside related ethical issues.

Critically, Memory Mosaics also demonstrates how artful memory-work can engender agency in professional learning with teacher-researchers taking up pressing issues of social justice such as inclusion and decolonisation.

Overall, the book offers a multidimensional, polyvocal exploration of how artful memory-work can bring about future-oriented professional learning enacted as pedagogies of reinvention and productive remembering. Memory Mosaics: Researching Teacher Professional Learning Through Artful Memory-Work, by Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, Daisy Pillay, and Claudia Mitchell, along with teacher-researchers on two continents, is a ground-breaking book.

It models a collaborative approach to arts-based research that melds memory-work, visual and poetic arts, and reflective practice to promote professional learning, personal transformation, decolonisation, and a more just future.

Like colourful pebbles and bits of glass, the authors place teachers’ self-stories in relation to one another in an artful design, creating thematic coherence that evokes a deep sense of knowing.

Judith C. Lapadat, Professor Emeritus, Faculty of Education, University of Lethbridge, CanadaMemory Mosaics: Researching Teacher ProfessionalLearning Through Artful Memory-Workassembles exemplars of professional learning in an intriguing mosaic format.

A topic is introduced, followed by memory-pieces; then: discussion and/or creative response.

This lively juxtaposition generates momentum for highly productive forms of remembering around social justice issues, even as the reader is invited into an intimate circle of shared concern: for these issues, with these (and other) teacher-researchers.  It is a beautiful, original, and practical book. Teresa Strong-Wilson, Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, McGill University, Canada