Mosaic-ing Memory in Teacher Education and Professional Learning

Imagining Possibilities for Collective Memory-Work

Abstract

In this scholarly memoir, we use mosaic-ing as a metaphor to retrace research connections between and among memory-work, the arts, and professional teacher learning, charting the course of transcontinental methodological variations and considerations over time and space. We chronologically offer this retracing, looking back to some of our earliest work on memory and teaching in Canada in the early to mid-1990s and then following the movement of our memory-work collaborations across Canada and South Africa up to the present time. The memoir positions imagination, creativity, and the arts at the heart of remembering as an educational project. Throughout, we highlight the value of arts-based tools and methods—such as drawing, photography, filmmaking, creating collages, poetic inquiry, storytelling, and working with objects—in the doing of memory-work. Building on the work of Frigga Haug and others, mosaic-ing memory offers a multifaceted visual, material, and cultural lens to view teacher education and professional learning in a future-oriented way.