Autoethnographical Research on the Experience of Identity Change as an Artist, Teacher and Teaching Artist

Abstract

An autoethnographic exploration of identity formation raises the question of how individuals inhabit, negotiate, accommodate and resist the social groups to which they belong, continually coming to terms with who and what they are. This paper discusses, through this researcher's autobiographical exploration, the ways in which pedagogical discourse and practice produce identities that are constructed within the broader sociocultural context of arts education. As an art educator who has been learning and teaching in the Korean sociocultural context since the 1970s, I have experienced the struggle between my identity as an artist and my identity as a teacher amidst the changes in educational ideology reflected in the Korean national curriculum, which is a set of pedagogical discourses and practices that are constructed within a particular sociocultural context. It can be said that my autobiographical narration has important implications for the practice of art education in connecting individuals and society in an ambiguous and complex future society by enhancing theoretical understanding of wider social phenomena. In this paper, the narrative interpretation of my changing identity as an artist, an art teacher and a teaching artist provides a timely insight into identity shifts in how the artwork we encounter and our perceptions of art are shaped and transformed by our own cultural experiences and recollections of our own personal experiences within the interconnectedness of art and education across time.