School as material: Modes of operation for teachers as conceptual artists

Teachers  in  arts  education  frequently  struggle  with  their   professional   identity   (Hatfield,   Montana & Deffenbaugh,  2006;  Welch,  Purves,  Hargreaves  &  Marshall,  2011).  Am  I  an  artist?  A  performer? A teacher?  When  probed  about  the  reasons for  this  confusion,  arts  teachers  often  answer  that they believe that their main responsibility is  education  at  the  expense  of  understanding  themselves  as  artists  (Hall,  2010).  In  this  discussion  about  teacher/artist  identities,  the  Mexican-American  artist  and  scholar  Jorge  
Lucero (2011) questions whether an occupation as teacher needs to stand in the way of nurturing  a  creative  practice  and  argues  that  the  perceived  gap  between  teacher/artist  identities  could be closed through an understanding of how they overlap  and  integrate  into  each  other.