Book Description

Crossing Boundaries: The Journey from Teacher to Teaching Artist is an exhibition curated by Purnima Ruanglertbutr. Crossing Boundaries displays more than sixty works of art by twenty-seven secondary school Visual Art teachers who have recently graduated from the Master of Teaching (Secondary, Art) program at the University of Melbourne. In addition to a wide range of eclectic artworks across multiple mediums, this catalogue comprises succinct and informative commentaries on the role that art making plays in the graduates’ teaching. These are special insights; Visual Art teachers are educators who carry the expectation that to be good in the classroom, they should have a vibrant private practice – that in order to ‘teach it’, they also have to prove that they can ‘do it’. But through their works of art and artist statements, the participants in this exhibition question their practice and expose themselves to continued examination and critique. The commentaries reveal the graduates exhibit professional identities that amalgamate both the roles of an ‘artist’ and a ‘teacher’ through a re-framing of the teacher of art as an ‘artist teacher’ or a ‘teaching artist’. The foreword by Art Education Australia, Art Education Victoria and the introduction by the curator explores the term ‘teaching artist’ within the context of the exhibition - that ‘teaching artists’ boast a hybrid identity fusing the roles of teacher and artist – an identity that conflates two distinct professions and is successful because the artist teacher brings practitioner skills in both professions.