Reconceptualizing Early Career Teacher Mentoring as Reggio-Inspired

Reconceptualizing Early Career Teacher Mentoring as Reggio-Inspired presents an innovative approach to early career art teacher mentoring informed by both the philosophy of Reggio Emilia and an ontology of immanence while simultaneously illuminating the experiences of the teacher-participants as co-inquirers within the contemporary milieu of public education in the United States.
Readers are invited to travel with a group of teacher educators and early career PK-12 art teachers across a four-year journey to experience the evolving nature of a collaborative inquiry through mentoring-as-research, the Teacher Inquiry Group (TIG). The authors share significant insights regarding what it means to be an early career art teacher––especially in an educational climate steeped in neoliberal agendas, standardization, and accountability––and make potent suggestions for re-visioning entrenched approaches to mentoring and professional learning that better account for the inherent complexities of teaching in schools. Advocating for more complex understandings regarding teacher subjectivity and the contextual forces at work in schools, the authors provoke an expanded vision of how mentoring can be imagined, practiced, and lived in current educational contexts. The authors employ key orientations grounded in the Reggio Emilia philosophy to reimagine an under-researched and undertheorized area of study in art education-––early career teacher mentoring––that has implications for teachers at all levels and across all disciplines.
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