‘Language speaking the subject speaking the arts’: New possibilities for interdisciplinarity in Arts/English education: Explorations in three-dimensional storytelling

This paper presents a theorised classroom-based account discussing the author’s interdisciplinary approach to engaging first-year teacher-education students in self-critical inquiry using creative writing techniques as an entry point into Arts-based three-dimensional storytelling. Via an interpretation of Lacan’s ‘speaking subject’—combined with theories of the postmodern ‘self’—the discussion explores the creative potential of autoethnography as a practice of self-reflection, writing, artistic expression and three-dimensional storytelling. Here, particular examples of students’ works are provided to exemplify the power of this interdisciplinary Arts/English methodology to facilitate students’ opportunities to: a) self-narrate and self-examine personal experience with a view to understanding and visually expressing the personal and public self; and b) utilise creative writing techniques in tandem with Arts-based forms of visual expression to raise questions about how language, dimensionality, and the Arts might intersect to construct and narrate individual subjectivity, and the implications for understanding professional identity.