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Reflexive Inquiry, Artistic Selves, and Epistemological Expansion

As university educators, we are aware of the constant negotiation of selves – home-identities, teaching identities, professional identities – among others. While the systemic conditions in which many of us work provide strong pressures to produce a neo-liberal self that becomes appropriated by others, we believe that being reflexive about the construction and re-construction of selves is an important part of our ethical practice. Reflexive inquiry recognizes our capacity to acknowledge the socialization processes we experience daily and to act with agency to resist these processes if need be. In addition, deepened self-knowledge and critical renegotiation contributes to further reconstructions of self (Lyle, 2013). Reflexivity allows us to view the intertwining of selves, to question how institutional demands shape our pedagogies and often run counter to our values, and to scrutinize ourselves suspiciously for the things we have come to take for granted. At the same time, we recognize the impossibility of the self to be visible and observable to itself and the difficulty of seeing the fleeting, partial parts of ourselves. Identity is inevitably complex, multi-voiced, and always under construction. In this chapter, we would like to explore the de/construction of our imaginative selves. Metta (2011) argues that imagination has a strong relationship to the assembly of self/selves even as it is part of that de/construction. We suggest that imaginative processes of identity construction create the pathways for the possibilities of future selves while, at the same time, they re-constitute our past selves. These imaginative selves are important for our outward identities as teacher educators because they allow us to speak from different positions: imaginatively, creatively, and artistically. These multiple selves are in a state of interdependence that not only blurs the lines between the professional and the personal, but also actively contributes towards an ethical teaching identity (Allen, 2011). Through narratives, images, and a post-structural research lens (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016), we explore our hidden art hobbies – home as art and