Reconceptualizing Early Career Teacher Mentoring as Reggio-Inspired presents an innovative approach to early career art teacher mentoring informed by both the philosophy of Reggio Emilia and an ontology of immanence while simultaneously illuminating the experiences of the teacher-participants as co-inquirers within the contemporary milieu of public education in the United States.

Readers are invited to travel with a group of teacher educators and early career PK-12 art teachers across a four-year journey to experience the evolving nature of a collaborative inquiry through mentoring-as-research, the Teacher Inquiry Group (TIG). The authors share significant insights regarding what it means to be an early career art teacher--especially in an educational climate steeped in neoliberal agendas, standardization, and accountability--and make potent suggestions for re-visioning entrenched approaches to mentoring and professional learning that better account for the inherent complexities of teaching in schools. Advocating for more complex understandings regarding teacher subjectivity and the contextual forces at work in schools, the authors provoke an expanded vision of how mentoring can be imagined, practiced, and lived in current educational contexts. The authors employ key orientations grounded in the Reggio Emilia philosophy to reimagine an under-researched and undertheorized area of study in art education---early career teacher mentoring--that has implications for teachers at all levels and across all disciplines.

This volume is essential reading for scholars and professionals across the fields of art education, teacher preparation, teacher education, and mentoring. It will appeal to educational researchers, K-12 practitioners, teacher educators, and administrators working with new teachers, as well as those interested in mentoring, Reggio Emilia, professional learning and development, art and aesthetic education, and emergent, process-oriented research methodologies.

Christina Hanawalt is an Associate Professor of Art Education at The University of Georgia, Athens. Christina's primary research is situated within the context of early career art teaching, especially as understood through arts-based methodologies and poststructural theories. Through this work, she aims to both interrogate and intervene in the complex network of relations that exists at the intersections of art, education, and schooling in the US. Christina also pursues historical research and is an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Education and the Arts.

Brooke Anne Hofsess is an associate professor of art education at Appalachian State University. Commitments to creative, ecological, and relational pedagogies and methodologies inform her research in the field of art education. Her artistic practice occurs at the intersection of book arts and alternative photographic processes--influencing her approaches to teaching, learning and inquiring. She is the author of Unfolding Afterglow: Letters and Conversations on Teacher Renewal, and a past recipient of the NAEA Elliot Eisner Doctoral Research Award.