Content area
Full Text
I thought about including issues with isolation and with administration. That's in there, but overwhelmingly it's about the fact that emotionally my job is really draining because I'm constantly worrying about my kids and about their lives and about what happens to them when they go home...but the positive outweighs the negative-or you have to make it. So, there's not a lot about art-making in here.
Casey (personal communication, April 25, 2015)
Introduction
Casey expressed these sentiments during a final, workshop I hosted for six first- and second-year art teachers at the end of a study I was conducting during the 2014-15 school, year. She was taLking about a handmade book (Figure 1) she had created as an expression of her experiences during her first year of teaching in a pubLic charter eLementary schooL. Casey was one of two eLementary art teachers (Lauren being the other) in the study who, over the course of the schooL year, repeatedLy expressed a dawning reaLization that their jobs were not so much about teaching art as they were about caring for kids. WhiLe teachers' expressions of care and concern for chiLdren are perhaps not surprising in a broad sense, for me the beginning art teachers' repeated statements that indicated how concerns for care began to eclipse the role of art stood out to me as something both significant and unsettLing within the context of my study.
Based on my experiences visiting the teachers' schooL contexts and the conversations we shared during both my schooL visits and three workshops I hosted on a university campus, I began to see how Casey and Lauren's expressed dedication to caring for their students was tied up in a Larger network of sociaL, cuLturaL, poLiticaL, and materiaL reLations they were negotiating amid K-5 schooL cuLtures. I knew it was LikeLy no coincidence, for exampLe, that Casey and Lauren both taught in Title I schooLs with free or reduced Lunch rates of 65% or higher and that their schooLs had the Largest populations of students of coLor compared to the other teachers in the study. Casey and Lauren both identified as white and femaLe, which is true of approximately 80% of the teacher Labor force (Taie & GoLdring, 2018), and therefore their desire to...