What a baptism of fire into the PgCert! The first reading I was assigned – “An a/r/tographic metissage: Storying the self as pedagogic practice” (Oster, et.al., 2019) contained so many phrases and terms that I had never heard before. This really created a boundary in my ability to understand the text, and even after discussing with other colleagues who read the same text, I’m still not sure where I stand with it.
To begin, I needed to understand the title – what is a/r/tography? Irwin (2025) defines a/r/tography as “art making in any artform and writing not separate or illustrative of each other but interconnected” and that crucially, “a/r/tography is inherently about self as artist/researcher/teacher.” To me, this means that your lived experience is influencing your art and by extension is influencing your writing and research. I’m not sure if this is correct, but after re-reading Oster, et.al. (2019) I feel a little more confident in that there are many ways to describe a/r/tography, and that as “the researcher is at once both the subject and object”, there is little rigidity in it’s definition.
I think I am so used to set definitions that sometimes I struggle with open and malleable terms, and I’m hoping that in my time on the PgCert, I will come to be able to process them easier. It’s clear that when combining a traditionally more rigid methodology of narrative research with a lived experience and it’s impact on an artist and their making, we cannot be held to the same black and white standards of outcomes.
Oster, T. et al. (2019) ‘An a/r/tographic metissage: Storying the self as pedagogic practice’, Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, Volume 12 Numbers 1 & 2, pp. 109-129.
Irwin, R.L. (2025) A/r/tography: An invitation to think through art making, researching, teaching and learning. Available at: https://artography.edcp.educ.ubc.ca/ (Accessed: 8 January 2025).