Re‐envisioning research, re‐presenting self: putting arts media to work in the analysis and synthesis of data on ‘difference’ and ‘dis/ability’

Abstract

In this paper the author would like to share a small section of text that emerged in the process of analyzing and synthesizing data from her self‐study research into her role as a coordinator for special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream infant education in the UK. The section consists of three Imaginative Conjectures in which she re‐envisions her research: as stage play, television documentary and feminist film narrative respectively. This text emerged as a result of a powerfully felt need to come to new understandings around ‘difference’ and ‘disability’; to break away from the technicist approach to SEN, its descriptors, labels and categories, and to rethink relationships between self and others in this context. Specifically, the text represents a psychological struggle towards alternative conceptualizations of teaching and learning—memory, affect, imaginative conjecture—which technical rational, market‐oriented manifestations of schooling (‘teacher‐proof’ curricula; the ‘audits and bids’ routines of SEN funding, for example,) tend to obscure. Whilst much current educational discussion emphasizes the need to ‘think otherwise’ and ‘do differently’ in response to changing social and individual needs and desires in relation to schooling, the systemic constraints experienced by teachers often make this hard to achieve. By adopting an oblique sense of persona and place, and in particular by admitting into her work the eye of the visual artist, the author was eventually enabled to arrive at a representation of practice that altered significantly her understandings of Self, Self to Others and Self to Curriculum. This paper seeks to explain, at least in part, how this came about.