Research Affiliate
Assistant Professor, Department of Art Education, Concordia University
Dr. Anita Sinner‘s research interests include pre-service and in-service teacher education, community-based art education, arts-based methods, relational aesthetics, life and light writing and digital media. As an artist, researcher and teacher, she brings interdisciplinary perspectives to research involving qualitative approaches and many forms of arts research in relation to curriculum studies and social and cultural issues in education.
Portrayals of Teacher’s Lives: Investigating teacher education through popular cultureAnita Sinner (Concordia), Carl Leggo (University of British Columbia) and Erika Hasebe-Ludt (University of Lethbridge)
This SSHRC sponsored study investigates how contemporary and historic portrayals of teachers’ lives are rendered in popular culture through integrative methods of creative nonfiction and digital media as life writing. We are undertaking three interrelated projects: an examination of creative life writing about teachers in popular culture; an investigation into the history of teacher education; and an inquiry with groups of in-service teachers engaged in life writing as part of a multiple-literacies pedagogy and curriculum. These projects demonstrate how life writing as research facilitates knowledge construction in teacher education, and how this approach has the potential to change structures of learning and teaching, and in the process, provide a suitable method to write and reclaim historical and contemporary teacher stories.
