Arts-based Educational Research Research Articles

Learning to Teach about Climate Justice and Social Justice in Science Methods

In November, the Editors of NWJTE sat down for a conversation with Dr. Mindy J. Chappell, a Science Teacher Educator in the College of Education at Portland State University. Dr. Chappell’s passions include developing teachers who are prepared to disrupt normative science ideologies and provide young people with science instruction that encourages and empowers them to be leaders in their communities. She engages in arts-based educational science research through the methodology of Ethnodance (a term she coined). She places young people and their lived experiences at the heart of her work.

Embodied Reflexivity Through the Arts: An Introduction

Emerging from a global health crisis that shone the light on the effects of alienation, isolation, and physical and spiritual vulnerability, we wondered what we might offer to re/center humanness and remind us of individual and collective possibilities to create positive change. With this call in our hearts and bodies, our special issue began to take shape. We are three scholars at different stages of our careers and with intersecting areas of expertise, but who are all grounded in reflexive ways of being, embodied ways of knowing, and artful ways of engaging. We acknowledge the scholars(hip) in each of these distinct areas and are grateful for the foundation on which we build. Thus, with our collective yearnings to centre an integrated way of at/tending to an emergent process of re/making and re/imagining knowledge, we offer this special issue with three intentions: to advance arts-based educational research in developing critical, social, and relational consciousness; to evoke/provoke embodied pedagogical practices that transform teaching/learning; and to contribute to re/humanizing education (Lyle, 2022) and social justice reform.

Resisting Heteronormative Traditions to Stage the Possible

Concerned with the heteronormative nature of education, we engage with queer theory and pedagogy to destabilize heteronormative constructs. Guided by arts-based educational research (ABER) and ethnodramatic practices, we stage the lived teaching experiences of educators who challenge heteronormativity while preparing their students for an elementary school musical production. We discover that creating opportunities for students to delve into varied costumes, themes, and characters can strengthen or transform their self-perception, and can embolden them to uncover facets of their identity. Moreover, our inquiry demonstrates how queering curriculum and pedagogy can provide more inclusive opportunities for all students as they engage in arts learning experiences.

Children of Drama: An Arts-Based Educational Action Research Project Applied to a Group of In-Service Educators

Children of Drama is an arts-based educational action research project with five drama pedagogy actions, launched in 2019 at the University of Gävle, Sweden. It aimed to explore drama pedagogy’s personal and professional impacts on a group of in-service educators using Winnicott’s potential space theory. The results revealed that participants enriched their teaching method toolbox with drama pedagogical techniques and theories, fostering self-exploration and motivation to use drama in the classroom. Notably, the qualities of the drama pedagogical instructor and environment enhanced safety, inspiration, and engagement. This study contributes to research in drama pedagogy and educators’ arts-based professional development.

Plastic’s mark: A didactic strategy about ecology based on photography, printing and projections

The predominance of plastic is without doubt a major problem in today’s society. In order to create environmental awareness, it is necessary to teach critical reflection about its propagation to counteract its ecological consequences. This article proposes a revision of the use of plastic in contemporary art as an aesthetic material and as a creator of social and cultural knowledge in order to question its use in current arts education. An arts-based educational project is presented that hopes to sensitize students in the school of education about the predominance of plastic in today’s society and its mark on the environment. The main objective of this educational proposal is to make students work with plastic from an aesthetic viewpoint and artistically materialize their mark on the world using photography, engraving and projections. Through arts-based educational research, different student productions are analysed to create visual discourses that aesthetically express awareness of plastic’s predominance.

How Do Arts Contribute to Educational Research? A Book Review of Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice

I write this review as a recommendation for potential readers: those who are new to and veterans with respect to arts-based research. Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice is edited by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor and Richard Siegesmund, with contributions from 22 authors and a cover artist. In addition to providing some information from a usual structure around contents, central themes and concepts, intended audience, genres of writing styles, strengths and weaknesses, and uniquenesses, I primarily focus on the content of the chapter entitled “Four guiding principles for arts-based research practice” which I found extraordinarily significant in the second edition of this book and most meaningful for those planning their arts-based research projects.

Using Memory Work To Recall Childhood Experiences of Learning: Collaborative Reflections on Four Self-Study Projects

We are South African self-study researchers who started building our collaborative relationship as critical friends completing our doctoral studies. We have a keen interest in self-study research, and we all received our doctorates through self-study using arts-based research. Our collective self-study explores our doctoral work as critical friends teaching and learning using arts-based research in education. This article presents how we used memory work in a self-study project to elicit childhood memories for teacher-learner engagement and mentor-mentee knowledge sharing. We understand that a sociocultural theoretical perspective highlights the fundamental requirement of working together in educational contexts to make sense of collective and personal experiences. In addition, employing self-study research and revisiting our learning has assisted or even encouraged us to engage deeply with past life experiences to improve our teaching practice. We understand that our past experiences have the power to shape our teaching practices now and in the future. Although these experiences occur both inside and outside the classroom, the principles that we endorse remain the same: collaborative and interactive teaching and learning, and acknowledging the children's and our own earlier learning and backgrounds.

Doing arts-based master’s thesis supervision/writing in teacher education: A new materialist approach to supervision

Arts-based research has been proposed to be a new paradigm in teacher education, but research on supervising arts-based educational research in master’s theses in education remains scarce. Recently, researchers have begun re-thinking supervision with relational, more-than-human ontologies, acknowledging that it encompasses doings and relational becomings produced by a multiplicity of human and non-human bodies. However, little attention has been given to the becoming for both student and supervisor, and this research has been limited to doctoral supervision. Originating through a student–supervisor relationship, the study explored the entangled supervision/thesis writing processes to produce an understanding of arts-based educational master’s thesis supervision in teacher education. The analytical questions were: (1) What doings make a difference when supervising and writing an arts-based educational master’s thesis, and (2) what are their opportunities and challenges for teacher education? A diffractive analysis produced doings of thinking-together with/in theory and arts-based educational research practice, be(com)ing-teacher and be(com)ing-supervisor, and be(com)ing-with-the-thesis. The doings focused on the master’s thesis project but extended its boundaries. The doings drew on the past concerning previous experiences and knowledges, were fueled by present mutual interests, and affected future teaching practices. The study holds implications by providing valuable insights into arts-based educational research supervision in teacher education.

‘I don’t want to be a teacher’: a collaborative autoethnographic inquiry into the construction of university ELT instructors’ professional identity

ABSTRACT Believing teachers as agents who actively make meaning about their professional identities, we depict the construction of our identity as three mid-career female English language teachers. Anchored by collaborative autoethnography (CAE) and arts-based educational research (ABER) approaches, we explored and reflected on our lived critical incidences significant to our professional learning and identity development. By expressing and reflecting upon literary and visual data that we concurrently collected and iteratively analysed, we are becoming more aware of how our identity as ELT instructors has been historical, socio-culturally, and institutionally shaped and reshaped. Our collaborative work has helped us to forecast our future professional development paths and inspired us to extend the collaborative research that promotes community capacity building among us and the wider academic community.

The power of narrative storytelling: How podcasts as an arts-based practice enhance solidarity and social activism in adult education

This article emerges from a podcast hosted by a Centre for Migration at a Canadian University in 2021. In this discussion, we explore how podcasts offer a unique and often under-researched arts-based medium that can be used as a form of creative expression to tell stories, build dialogue, and create solidarity. We argue that podcasts offer benefits and learning not only to the listeners but also to participants who are part of the creation process. Drawing upon direct quotes from the podcast and qualitative reflections from the podcast interviewees, this collaboratively written article examines how the podcast stimulates activism and access to deeper understandings and collectively made meanings around the lived experiences of migration. It sheds light upon the less-researched emotional and participatory dimensions of arts-based podcast-making, teaching, and research in adult education. We conclude that the podcast created spaces of disruption, public pedagogy, and praxis.

Unsettling the Settler: An Arts-Based Exploration

This article considers how meta-narratives can be created through arts-based educational research as a way to shift personal positions and values, using a monologue called Unsettling the settler, written by the author. The creation of meta-narratives that disrupt ideas of national identity, the safety and security of patriarchal and colonial regimes, and who gets to decide what knowledge is worth knowing are essential as antiracist solidarity processes that seek to create belongingness, care and responsibility. This article picks up a thread from a long-term research project in which the author learnt from her participants (actors, audience members and the production team) that performing anti-racist, decolonizing work necessarily begins with an examination of one’s positionality (i.e., body/position/identity/race/cultural background, etc.). “Doing the work” means that one must be committed to sitting with discomfort and accept that there are no easy solutions as a part of the process of change.

Clearing the Clouds: Finding Motivation and Clarity in a Non-Traditional Dissertation Using Arts Based Educational Research (ABER)

By crafting a dramatic script about struggling high school readers that I then shared with real students in my Reading classes, I applied Arts-based education research (ABER) methods. Through the writing, presentation, collection, and reflection on student feedback, as well as during the script rewriting process, I was allowed to engage in a unique and motivating research experience. This approach allowed me to attend to three challenges with my Dissertation in Practice (DiP). First, instead of being part of this big, scary, abstract world called ‘research’, it allowed me to demonstrate inquiry though a means that I was more familiar and confident with—writing and theatre. My confidence working in these areas allowed me to initiate and remain engaged throughout the dissertation work. Second, it allowed me to take on a problem in my practice—the skepticism of many high school students in Reading classes about being in those classes. This helped me better understand my students, and thus inform and guide in the identification of best practices. Third, it positioned me to work with colleagues and administrators in my building and across our school district to rethink how we offer reading support to the heterogeneous cross-section of students who currently are being identified as needing such support. This account summarizes my DiP and, I hope, positions other classroom teachers who double as EdD students to imagine new and effective ways forward as they engage with problems of practice.

ARTful Design: Disruptions Within the Dissertation in Practice

A student within a university’s Ed.D. program is encouraged by her director to narrow her research focus; however, her interests in Curriculum Studies, Arts-Based Educational Research, and Composition Studies led her to design a practitioner action research study examining intersections between the fields. As she collected participants’ data, she experienced poststructural disruptions within all stages of the dissertation process, from designing and collecting data to formatting and identity as a researcher. This narrative, exploratory article showcases how dissertations in practice can follow nonlinear pathways to knowledge when researchers are open to possibilities.

Opening Thirdspace: Cultivating critical geographies in art teacher education

Pre-service teachers new to a field placement need the opportunity to orient themselves in relation to their larger teaching contexts and configure geographies that resonate with the lives of their students. Soja’s Thirdspace offers a lens through which teachers might explore place multi-dimensionally. Building upon a previous arts-based educational research study assessing the potential of arts-based inquiry for supporting pre-service teachers in exploring their teaching contexts, this study, through a second curricular iteration, focused explicitly on art pre-service teachers’ critical geographic analysis, in the form of Thirdspace. In mapping their school zones, pre-service teachers began to identify illusory impressions and conceptions of students, schools and communities and then began to deconstruct them. Such Thirdspace journeys offer space for pre-service teachers to hone their perceptions, to retrain their gazes to see their students’ physical and lived worlds in their complexity and plurality, and to re-imagine the relation between place and pedagogy.

A poiésis Dilaporal: formação estética docente e performance art

O presente artigo teve por temática a poiésis, a performance art e a formação estética docente. O objetivo foi investigar processos poéticos no qual o corpo do pesquisador também fosse tema e suporte na poiésis, relacionando à/aos artistas Marina Abramović, Hélio Oiticica e Artur Barrio e a suas obras. De abordagem qualitativa, o percurso metodológico abarcou a Pesquisa Educacional Baseada em Arte (DIAS; IRWIN, 2013) e a matriz a/r/tográfica, organizada em levantamento bibliográfico, aprofundamento teórico, percurso poético e visualidades. Barthes (2018) norteou a análise da investigação, em que o studium perpassou a formação docente, garimpando estesias que foram absorvidas na poíesis em forma de punctum. Os resultados apresentam quatro obras que compõem a série Dilaporal. Conclui-se que as visualidades poetizadas são como garimpagens do a/r/tógrafo na formação estética docente.

Fostering somatic movement literacy with young children

ABSTRACT Somatic movement literacy is when one is literate in Body, making meaning from somatic experiences. It is not just developing an understanding about the body, objectively. Oriented around somatics and embodied cognition, this article will present a framework of somatic movement literacy developed by Paul Linden to be mapped onto arts-based, phenomenological findings of the lived experience of three young children in their preschool mindful movement classes.Methods of arts-based educational research, such as bodily writing, Laban Movement Analysis, and phenomenological methods were originally applied to understand young children’s experiences with a mindfully somatic pedagogy. The initial findings were mapped onto Linden’s framework of somatic literacy to investigate if this mode of literacy could be fostered with preschool aged childrenSomatic movement literacy was found to involve aspects of agency, Body-awareness, cultural community membership, experiential knowledge, and physical proficiency. Findings demonstrated that young children are capable of understanding who they are, what is happening internally and externally through movement and bodily learning, and how their lives are interconnected with others.

Review of Arts-based education research and qualitative inquiry: Walking the path

Review of Arts-based education research and qualitative inquiry: Walking the path

Lower CaseTruth: Bridging Affect Theory and Arts-Based Education Research to Explore Color as Affect

As education researchers increase our focus on affect as a crucial dimension of school practice and pedagogy, we also have the responsibility of taking up the paradoxical nature of seeking to represent and analyze moments of feeling that, by their very nature, evade our understanding. This article explores the question of attending to affect in education research by drawing on research conducted in a seventh grade classroom in a mid-sized city in the western United States, where students were explicitly invited to ground argumentative writing in lived experiences that were significant to them, including those experiences often deemed difficult and thus saturated with affective intensities. Invited to use visual arts-based methods of representing the felt dimension of the project, participants used both color and abstract design as a method for representing the complexity of these affective intensities. The author makes an argument for this visual method of representation that invites students to illustrate their affective experience in ways that maintain its complex, contrasting and often non-linguistic nature.

Welcome to Ducks on the Moon, an Afternoon of Music Theatre as Professional Development about Families and Autism Spectrum Disorder

As a playwright-actor-researcher, Burke (2010) created, toured, and published a one-woman play, Ducks on the Moon (DOTM) about her (and her family’s) journey from denial to acceptance to celebration of her youngest son’s diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) during his first 5 years. DOTM is not only a drama, but also an arts-based educational research (ABER) project; Burke (2010) labelled her methodology “performative memoir.” In this current project, seven songs were added to the play. As authors-researchers we performed DOTM as a workshop to pre-service and in-service teachers. In particular, we wanted to see if DOTM might serve as professional development (PD) or might become part of a teacher education curriculum. The research questions were as follows: What was the audience’s general reaction to the play-with-music DOTM? And, what might be the implications of such an experience for educators? Did the audience feel that the play-with-music was useful as a vehicle to relay information about ASD and family–professional relationships? Might DOTM serve as PD for in-service teachers or as part of curriculum to prepare pre-service teachers for inclusive practice? We uncovered five inter-related themes: the audience enjoyed DOTM and claimed it was also it was educational, they experienced a range of emotions, they stated that parents need to come to terms with their child’s diagnosis in their own time, many teachers identified with Burke as a mother, and finally, DOTM would make productive PD.

Walking ABER: Of pedagogy, practice and potentiality

This paper seeks to explain and share resources with teachers/colleagues to help them incorporate a walking-based Arts-Based Educational Research in their own classrooms. First, it proposes walking to be a viable research, art-making and pedagogical tool; followed with a template to use in the classroom to help pre-service art education students complete an ABER project. The essay ends with an example of the author's own walking-based ABER project to use as an exemplar.