I work on a Primary PGCE course, and our trainees undertake an assignment in the first few months of their training called Understanding Children. It is a study of a focus child in their placement class, culminating in a professional presentation of the child.

This assignment is critical in shaping the ways in which these trainee teachers think, about education, about children. But how does the assignment do that? What transforms in their thinking as a result of the study? How does it happen?

Lavina, Fleet and Niland (2017) refer to “many textures of teachers’ thinking”. This study aims to explore:

Phase 1: What are those textures of teacherly thinking and being?

Phase 2: How can they be shaped and nurtured in trainee teachers?

Phase 3: What might they look like in action?

The primary data consists of answers to questionnaires given to course tutors and professional guest partners of the course who know the assignment well. Further content of that same course, that reflects a broad variety of approaches and tasks to develop teacherly thinking, were also considered a part of the wider data set. Personal reflective approaches were also, undoubtedly, important.

A purposefully slow build-up of understanding around key themes will be arrived at through arts-based approaches, comparable to an artist’s exploratory approach to creating a body of work around a theme or interest. These use the ‘crystallisation’ qualitative methodology articulated by Richardson (1994) and a/r/tography, a process of actively engaging in inquiry through writing and artmaking (Springgay, Irwin, Kind, 2005) as their framework. A myriad of different approaches for collecting, analysing, and representing data and findings were utilised:

• artist-teacher networking events, used as a platform for discussing the data and responding using artistic approaches

• a personal sketchbook

• tutorials with a community artist/book art/illustrator - used to discuss the visual formation of data and dissemination possibilities.

• this online blog and sharing website