Dancing around drawn edges: Reimagining deficit storylines as sites for relational Arts teacher professional learning collaboration

This article offers an examination of three Arts teacher professional learning initiatives implemented in Australia. Through a process of developing storied vignettes for relational encounter and meaning making, the article identifies some key factors that operate across contexts to enable and/or inhibit Arts teachers to achieve and embody transformative outcomes for Arts learning and pedagogy. Adopting an iterative collaborative process individual storylines become an entwined metanarrative in which vignettes of recent Arts teacher professional learning exemplars disrupt the deficit storylines of competition and conflict that have operated historically to marginalise the Arts in education contexts. We suggest that such deficit storylines can be reimagined as generative spaces for possibility. Subject or discipline borders in context can be viewed as thresholds to enliven rather than fragment the presence and purpose of future oriented agendas for Arts education.