Images, Speech Balloons, and Artful Representation: Comics as Visual Narratives of Early Career Teachers

The ways in which teachers adjust to challenges in the process of becoming professionals are complicated. Teacher mentorship, however, is an important step to creating and sustaining a strong professional career. This article discusses new understandings from a Canadian research project: Pedagogical Assemblage: Building and Sustaining Teacher Capacity through Mentoring Programs in British Columbia. Through our use of an a/r/tography informed methodology in teacher mentorship, we have come to understand how the use of comics permits an unfolding of visual narratives as a unique way of contextualizing the complex stories of teaching and learning. Our motivation in employing comics as research outputs is built upon the creation of a product that is reflective of practice and collaboration, and which forms a communicative whole with the broader education community. In this article we provide a macro analysis of the teachers’ sequential narratives by exploring the possibility of merging comics and curricular languages in light of our mentorship comics; then continue with a micro analysis showcasing the collaborative research process of a teacher’s story. We also discuss audience response regarding how comics can be utilized to support and strengthen teachers’ professional growth. We aim to provoke new possibilities of comics through our research in teacher mentorship, as well as create new spaces for arts-based educational research in a broader educational arena.