School as material : Modes of operation for teachers as conceptual artists

Teachers in arts education frequently struggle with their professional identity (Hatfield, Montana & Deffenbaugh, 2006; Welch, Purves, Hargreaves & Marshall, 2011). Am I an artist? A performer? A teacher? When probed about the reasons for this confusion, arts teachers often answer that they believe that their main responsibility is education at the expense of understanding themselves as artists (Hall, 2010). In this discussion about teacher/artist identities, the Mexican-American artist and scholar Jorge Lucero (2011) questions whether an occupation as teacher needs to stand in the way of nurturing a creative practice and argues that the perceived gap between teacher/artist identities could be closed through an understanding of how they overlap and integrate into each other.