“I Feel Like I Have Finally Begun Blooming!”: Female Art Educators’ Collective Renewal of Researcher Identities Through a Writing Group

Utilizing collaborative autoethnography, we examine in this study how four female tenured art educators at teaching-oriented institutions engaged in the renewal of our researcher identities and empowerment in our academic experiences by participating in a writing group. Our group activities, including writing, discussing books and articles, and engaging in collaborative research, provided us with valuable opportunities to revisit our researcher identities. This research explores the following four questions: (1) How do we define our researcher identities? (2) What challenges have we encountered as researchers? (3) How did we renew our researcher identities individually and collectively in the writing group? (4) What empowerment did we concurrently undergo in our academic experiences? In this article, we first examine the theoretical frameworks regarding researcher identity development and writing group and collaborative research practices. We then report and discuss the findings, providing implications for the art education field.