Reclaiming My Artistic Core: Living Signature Arts-Based Self-Study

In this chapter, I take a retrospective look at my nascent and evolving passion for employing the arts in my teaching and research, and how this expanded my work as a self-study scholar. Collaborative explorations in artistic inquiry pushed me to rethink my ways of knowing and to gravitate towards becoming a more experimental and unscripted researcher. Together with students and self-study colleagues, I reconsidered what data could be and how they could be presented and analysed, making audacious leaps in methodological innovativeness. I asked who besides teacher educators might benefit from arts-based self-study by designing and enacting transdisciplinary polyvocal professional learning communities and I did not, and could not, do that alone. Exemplars of co-creativity and co-facilitation demonstrate the impact of my artistic research endeavours in widening perspectives—especially my own which, in turn, led to innovative conceptualisations. Embracing my artistic core in polyvocal, multiverse, and multiperspective choruses enabled me to be a researcher of consequence together with others. This writing will be useful to novice and veteran academics as they consider living purposeful and lively professional lives, and for colleagues and professional developers working to support them in their efforts.