An Apple among a Cacophony of Glass Vases: Navigating Dissonance and Agency in Artist‐Teacher Practice

In June of 2019, during my first year of teaching high school art, I encountered a moment that would later reshape how I understand and enact my artist‐teacher practice. Acting on an impulse that emerged from the entanglement of my teaching and creative practices, I placed a faux green apple among a crowded cluster of glass jars and vases in the drawing studio classroom. This small intervention became unexpectedly revelatory. In this paper, I use an a/r/tographical lens as I re‐turn to the moments surrounding this intervention and diffractively re‐examine how it emerged from the constellation of my creative and teaching practices. I situate this analysis within broader conversations on artist‐teacher identity and practice, lines of flight in the classroom assemblage and the agency of objects. And I use this to consider how the human and non‐human elements of the classroom and larger teaching assemblage shaped the event, what it revealed about my artist‐teacher practice, and how it continues to reverberate in my current research and teaching. Through this re‐turn, I came to see how intra‐actions with objects can trouble professional environments, surface tensions and reveal wider forces that might otherwise remain unspoken and unseen. Additionally, examination of such intra‐actions can open possibilities for transformation in artist‐teacher practice, pedagogy and research. This inquiry contributes to artist‐teacher scholarship by demonstrating how small, intuitive material interventions can become sites of knowledge production, revealing the affective forces of objects and their capacity to shape artist‐teacher becoming.