Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
PAKISTAN JOURNAL OF LIFE AND SOCIAL SCIENCES, cilt.23, sa.1, ss.3908-3926, 2025 (Scopus)
In educational sciences, traditional qualitative research methods often focus on utterances or behaviors to explore more insights into the phenomena. Despite the effectiveness of such methods, they also tend to fail to unpack, uncovering unuttered meanings that remain incommunicable. Art-based research is heavily anchored in the notion that art inspires people, evokes them for better expression, and awakens visions, using diverse forms of artistic expression to explore unuttered meanings. With this in mind, this study’s actual raison d’être was to find alternative ways of acquiring future teachers’ notions of the ideal teacher, assuming that non-traditional research methods could provide details that studies following traditional methods had not. Specifically, we sought answers to two research questions: (1) How might a close and critical analysis of the work of pre-service teachers inform us about the ideal teacher they want to be in the future? (2) How can an exploratory ABR study such as ours help us develop and enhance our understanding of the theories and practices of arts-based research? This study was conducted with twelve pre-service English teachers at a state university in Tü rkiye. Data were collected through participants’ drawings and a focus group interview. The visual data were analyzed through criteria for drawing, whereas thematic analysis was employed for verbal data. The analysis of the drawings highlighted the teacher as an ABR object, professional and cultural identity, engaging teaching styles, positive classroom atmosphere, and holistic education as the main aspects of the ideal teacher. These themes are critical as some align with the previous research on the ideal English teacher, whereas others yielded insights that might otherwise remain unexplored in traditional data collection methods. Therefore, we proposed that arts-based research (ABR) methods provide a robust and innovative framework for eliciting nuanced and unarticulated conceptions of the ideal teacher among pre-service teachers, offering deeper insights into professional and cultural identities, pedagogical approaches and educational philosophies that may remain inaccessible through traditional qualitative methodologies.