<p>Visual art teachers, from beginning to veteran, often report experiencing feelings of professional
isolation and a desire for content-specific support and collaborative professional learning
experiences. Mentoring and Induction Programs (IPs) offered by schools and districts continue to
fall short of meeting the needs of beginning visual art teachers in particular. There are a large
number of visual art teachers in the state of California, especially in Los Angeles County, yet
there are no visual art specific support networks for beginning visual art teachers to help them
navigate their first years teaching. Collaborative learning groups, such as communities of
practice (CoP), may offer visual art teachers opportunities to learn together and support one
another in shared learning, yet none have been formally documented in Los Angeles County as a
means of supporting novice art educators.
The Exploratorium in San Francisco, CA has established a community of practice called
the Teacher Induction Program (TIP) to support beginning science teachers with content-specific
pedagogy during their first two years of teaching. Using the TIP as a framework, a visual art
professional growth support community was outlined for this study based on the needs and
concerns of visual art teachers reported throughout the literature. Beginning visual art teachers in
Los Angeles County were interviewed to help the researcher better understand their existing and
desired supports, as well as their individual needs and concerns as new teachers. The visual art
CoP was proposed to them to elicit feedback about its anticipated values (immediate, potential,
applied) based on their lived experiences as first or second year PK-12 public school visual art
teachers in Los Angeles County.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:10816921 |
| Date | 07 June 2018 |
| Creators | Taylor, Kristin Vanderlip |
| Publisher | Pepperdine University |
| Source Sets | ProQuest.com |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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