Wandering with a shepherd's hut: fragments of a vagabond methodology

Abstract

This work makes use of a methodological vehicle to investigate how informal gestures of hospitality can be integrated into formal educational settings. The arts-based inquiry explores this with a cohort of student teachers in Scotland. Research participants are invited to enter a shepherd´s hut on a regular basis. All they are asked to do is to take time off in an unusual location. They sit down and welcome storytelling and wonder to make sense of their busy lives between university and school placements. As the wood fire crackles, relational stillness helps to explore paths towards self-care, identify the mountains of too many struggles, breathe, rant, laugh and dream. Nothing tangible appears to occur, but a lot is happening on the intrinsic roads of those who take seat. The use of subjective mapping encourages playful life story arts. Student teachers imaginatively spatialise their own trajectories. The shepherd’s hut as a host holds open a temporary ‘safe space’ for existential time and helps to draw the contours of formalised, introspective peer care.

Structured as a festival of encounters and detours, the thesis proposes to wander away from the ‘gap trap’ which frames educational attainment debates in an exclusive focus on instrumental progression according to a measurable norm. The provocation is to provisionally suspend the linearity of outcomes to facilitate a decelerated alternative to restless societal optimisations. Journeys into meaningful teaching are investigated through a ‘vagabond’ lens. Vagabond vagueness challenges the idea that professional belongings require a standardised path. Fixed templates for resilient teachers tend to overlook intrinsic nuances in negotiations with ambivalent educational spheres. This work contributes to debates around teacher retention by focusing on individuals’ silent, unaudited struggles with meaning. The existential sphere often remains invisible in traditional initial teacher education programmes. The significance of inner worlds for long-term professional belonging is demonstrated in the research participants’ artistic mapping artefacts which open up to profound conversations.

Findings suggest that the crafts for nurturing singular teacher becomings are not limited to reflexivity modules in compartmentalised curricula. Inner riches require broader existential care as spatio-temporal refuge within institutions. This implies taking further risks to reimagine university and school timetabling from outdoor positionalities. The unlearning of teaching-to-the-test formats is sustained by public disruption. Undomesticated ‘vehicles-in-residence’ then circulate between communities, conferences and degree programmes. A future orientation for arts-based research as societal transformation therefore lies in curating long-term, micro-scale frameworks for affective academic hospitalities.