title: Lines of Flight: Teacher-Artists' Stories About Collaborating
Creators: name: McLean, Judith
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2009
Subjects: subject: Teacher-artists
subject: Theoretical landscapes
subject: Epistemological knowledge
subject: Cultural theory

description: This study followed my journey as well as a group of five other Teacher-Artists as we collaborated on the creation of a performance work for young people entitled Blurred. It investigated the meaning, place and importance of collaboration to Teacher-Artists in their work as Teacher-Artists by looking at their praxis. I wanted to know more about the nature of these collaborations as we undertook our roles and functions. The metaphor adopted for the journey relates to travel with the thesis acting as a map outlining the external and internal landscapes the Teacher- Artists traversed. The lines of flight referred to in the title of the thesis suggests, that just as lines/trails/routes/marks/passage-ways leave trails across flight paths, so too has the research undertaken left marks, both visible and invisible on Teacher-Artists who took part in this study. The metaphor is extended to suggest that Teacher-Artists act as travel guides for each other and those they work with, venturing into previously uncharted territories. The literature reviewed focused on a set of principles which came out of the key findings of an earlier creative work entitled Juice 1997). These included discussion of the following theoretical landscapes: epistemological knowledge and cultural theory, dubbed as external landscapes; and developmental theory, as an internal landscape. The following principles are discussed under these theories: • Knowledge of and engagement in theories of art, arts education and aesthetics. • The ability to interrogate form and content and its relevance in a postmodern context. • Knowledge of political/social/economic factors of one’s praxis. • Praxis grounded in the context of its community/class/audience. • A raised consciousness to understand more fully what it means to be human. And • A belief in the power of artistic collaborations. Key concepts that emerged from the literature review and that are explicated in the thesis include: collaborative communication; learning-within relationship; intersubjectivity; relational template; emotional capitalism; transitional space; ‘out-thereness’ and ‘in-hereness’. These concepts, when taken together, provide conceptual positions for the fieldwork. The fieldwork consisted of two key components: 1) a series of interviews based on an inventory of questions developed by Csikszentmihalyi (1996) into the professional and personal lives of artists; and, 2) extensive fieldwork that discussed a number of key critical incidents that reveal both successful collaborative communications and failed communications by the Teacher- Artists as they created the performance work. In the fieldwork chapter the reader is introduced to fellow travellers: a dramaturge, a musician, a multimedia specialist, a youth arts specialist; a playwright; and a director. The raw data is analysed using Riessman’s (1993) five levels of representation to, “attend, tell, transcribe, analyse and read” (p.10) with a focus on five specific critical incidents and how the participating Teacher-Artists responded collaboratively to the incidents.