{"id":9119,"date":"2026-04-18T13:55:43","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T18:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ic4ml.org\/?post_type=journal-article&p=9119"},"modified":"2026-04-22T07:39:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T12:39:17","slug":"talking-with-fish-an-arts-based-retrospective-of-media-literacy-in-teacher-identity-and-pedagogy","status":"publish","type":"journal-article","link":"https:\/\/ic4ml.org\/es\/journal-article\/talking-with-fish-an-arts-based-retrospective-of-media-literacy-in-teacher-identity-and-pedagogy\/","title":{"rendered":"Talking with Fish: An Arts-based Retrospective of Media Literacy in Teacher Identity and Pedagogy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Abstract<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t a fish.\u201d This adage, long attributed to media scholar Marshall McLuhan, invites us to consider worlds shaped by media as invisible environments. Fully immersed from dawn to dusk, we may struggle to identify or clarify the boundaries between the physical and the digital. In media literacy, we employ McLuhan’s adage to invite learners to see media as constructed environments and to engage in ecological thinking about the messages we consume, create, and share. With the fish as an animal guide, my article offers an arts-based research retrospective composed of original visual works, or a\/r\/tography, that chronicles my investigation into the multiple and complex dimensions of media literacy teacher identity and pedagogy. My work has implications for those interested in media literacy educator identity, media literacy pedagogy, and arts-based research methods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keywords <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Media Literacy, Teacher Identity, Arts-Based Research, Visual Journaling, A-r-tography<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Introduction: Talking with Fish<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

My purpose in preparing this retrospective was to represent the process of one media literacy educator grappling with her experiences of teacher identity and pedagogy across twenty years. To narrate my journey, I employ the fish as an animal companion or guide along with related symbols, such as water and swimming. Each section provides art imagery with a brief academic explanation punctuated by fish-related phrases or language. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In harmony with the fish as a symbolic or metaphoric animal guide, I use arts-based research (ABR) methods, specifically visual journaling through found poetry and blackout poetry. Found poetry and blackout poetry are related methods of recombining words from existing source materials in order to create something new. Found poetry generally involves highlighting, shuffling, and reordering words or phrases to create a fresh piece of prose, while blackout poetry typically involves redacting words from an original source text\u2013 using a black pen, marker, or paint\u2013 so that the words left behind and visible create new meaning. Both methods are popular in visual journaling and expressive arts (Redmond, 2024). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As source material, I used published works I have authored about my research examining media literacy in curriculum and pedagogy. Figure 1 shows the physical process of cutting up printed copies of my articles in order to create images that comprise the new data generated for this article.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Figure 1
Blackout Poetry as Arts-based Research<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Through the creation of found and blackout poems, I distilled my understanding of what it means to be a media educator. I talk with fish.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Painting Fish<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

My experiences in public education span teaching visual arts and media studies across early elementary school, middle school, high school, and college\/university. Throughout each phase of my career, I have used visual journaling as a method in order to brainstorm, plan, develop, process, and reflect on curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment decisions aimed at advancing teaching and learning experiences for my students. In this way, I engaged in arts-based research (ABR) long before I knew it was a methodology.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arts-based research (ABR) is a field of qualitative methods that integrates visual arts and artistic practice into research, thus expanding both research process and representations (Leavy, 2015). While traditional forms of research may limit the nature of inquiry, interpretation, and representation, ABR cultivates \u201cways of knowing that directly involve the student, researcher, group, or person in some form of direct artmaking as the primary mode of systematic inquiry\u201d (McNiff, 2011, p. 385). As both an educator and an artist, I have found that ABR allows my research to be expressed through non-alphabetic language, enabling deeper construction of understanding and meaningful, nuanced engagement with audiences. \u201cTo appreciate how artistic experience can inform educational research requires an understanding of how making art is both a process of inquiry and a process of creating meaningful forms\u201d (Leavy, 2015, p. 253). This article features the interconnected processes of inquiry and creation of visual works. In this way, the work also exemplifies a\/r\/tography, \u201ca form of practice-based research within the arts and education\u2026 a research methodology, a creative practice, and a performative pedagogy that lives in the rhizomatic practices of the liminal in-between\u201d (Irwin, 2013, p. 199). Unlike traditional research pieces that strive to establish static meanings, this article exemplifies a \u201cliving inquiry\u201d about, with, and through practice (Leavy, 2012, p. 8).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Visual journaling is both an arts-based research and a\/r\/tography practice that uses a sketchbook, art journal, or other diary as a creative space where one may blend and combine combinations of images and words from a variety of sources\u2013 paintings, drawings, doodling, magazines, newspaper clippings, articles, found materials, and more\u2013 to create imagery. Visual journaling is a strategy for recording, documenting, processing, and interpreting experience (Redmond, 2024). I use visual journaling as my primary method of art-making and think about my journal as a reflective, generative space for active meaning-making. It produces a graphic personal and professional record that facilitates my scholarly teaching. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Figure 2
Visual Journaling Spread Featuring McLuhan Quote<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Figure 2 is an example of a visual journaling spread that I created using torn photocopies of pages from Fiore and McLuhan\u2019s (1967) book, The Medium is the Massage, <\/em>and Patricia Leavy\u2019s (2015) book, Method Meets Art: Arts-based Research Practice. <\/em>I also included collage elements and painted into the spread, adding imagery such as a fish, planet earth, a smartphone, and a question within a speech bubble. <\/em>Selected text from McLuhan describes \u201cthe poet, the artist, the sleuth\u201d as those who \u201csharpen our perception\u201d and \u201cconfront environments.\u201d This spread hints at the primary role of the media literacy educator as one who illuminates media and technology as invisible environments, as one who swims against currents of passive consumption in order to cultivate active, critical thinking, inquiry, engagement, and creative expression about, with, and through media. The idea of the media studies teacher as swimming against something\u2013 curriculum, pedagogy, institutional context, professional training, popular culture, or some other invisible current\u2013 is noted in Buckingham\u2019s (2014) work investigating the identities of media educators and is an important component of understanding media literacy and media literacy teacher identity. I paint fish.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Fish Out of Water<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Buckingham (2014) documented that media teachers have been relatively marginalized within their professional work environments. He defines three dimensions that impact their professional identity: personal, institutional, and subject-related. These categories offer a useful lens for understanding the forms of dissociation I experienced as a media literacy educator. The multifaceted and hybrid nature of my identity is further compounded by my artist identity. Figure 3 provides a found poem from a chapter in which I delve into this complexity, investigating both the professional value and abundance of interconnected expertise alongside the discordant experience that has unfolded throughout my career, including the tension of simultaneously belonging and not belonging (Redmond, 2024). <\/p>\n\n\n

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Figure 3
Sorting Out My Multifaceted or Hybrid Academic Identity<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

To elaborate, I began my teaching career as a middle and high school art teacher where I integrated media literacy as part of the standards-based visual arts curriculum. Unlike most media educators, I had received formal training in media literacy (Buckingham, 2014) and my media literacy program is chronicled in Considine (2004), which examines the question of who studies media literacy and why. Yet as an art teacher trained in media literacy education, my success was mixed due to questions of subject-related context. When engaged in media literacy learning, I felt like students were not getting enough art curriculum. When fully focused on the arts, I knew media literacy was unlikely to show up elsewhere in their schooling. Although the two fields are interconnected, the silo-ed nature of K-12 curriculum created a situation in which neither subject area received full attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later, upon moving into a university faculty role, I was responsible for a standalone media literacy course and experienced a new kind of dislocation. Within my Department of Curriculum and Instruction, media literacy had little presence in programs, coursework, or faculty expertise. While there was a single educational technology course requirement for pre-service teachers, the prevailing philosophy emphasized technical skills (i.e., computer literacy) rather than the critical, theoretical questions that define media literacy\u2013 specifically, questions about constructedness, representation, audiences, power and profit. This left me without a clear scholarly community and reflected both a subject-related and institutional separation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My sense of isolation deepened as my teaching load shifted to media studies and communications courses populated almost entirely by communications majors rather than pre-service education students. My communications students\u2014studying Advertising, Public Relations, Journalism, and related fields\u2014were housed in the Communications Department. This was not only a different department, but also an entirely different college, reinforcing another layer of institutional distance. At the same time, although I continued to identify as an artist, I had no affiliation with the Art Department and limited opportunities to teach or collaborate with art faculty. This added a dimension of personal separation. In these ways, I\u2019ve embodied a hybrid academic identity as a media educator and experienced marginalization in all three areas identified by Buckingham (2012). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Returning to ABR, I came to employ visual journaling not only as a research method, but also as an identity management strategy with the potential to bring harmony to the multiple and intricate positionalities and identities in my professional work. The video provided in Figure 4 features a timelapse video of a journaling spread where I explore identity further.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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