Arts practice as method,urban spaces and intra-active faiths

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the research design for an arts-based interfaith research project that is intended to build relationships between children from different faiths and to increase research participants’ understandings of faiths other than their own. The project is funded as an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship called Early Start Arts to Counter Radicalization and has a mixed method approach that brings arts-based workshop groups for children together with focus groups for parents. Early findings demonstrate the utility of art for developing a sense of belonging and self-worth in children and clearly show ways in which art facilitates comment on complex social issues even from primary school age. The nature of such socially engaged arts-based research means it must be developed or, at the least, refined, through engagement with community and social context. As such, consideration of the urban environment that shapes the lives of the young research participants and their families forms part of the discussion undertaken.     

Chapter 5 The purposes of arts-based educational research

The author describes the confusion surrounding postmodern conceptions of social science, including the blurring of traditional distinctions between science and art. He argues that the disinction is an important one, for, as the two basic forms of human inquiry, science and art serve fundamentally distinct purposes. Unfortunately, only (social) scientific texts are considered useful by many educationists. The author attempts to clarify the basic purpose of value negation that is served by good arts-based research texts and argues for their legitimacy as a form of educational research.     

Co-constructing imaginative spaces: public art in pre-service teacher education

This documentary account explores the potential of public art pedagogy to co-construct imaginative spaces in pre-service teacher education. Based upon a collaborative venture between two professors and an arts-based educational organization, the present article describes and analyzes key features and relations that were influential in transforming the response of a resistant professor and students. Using arts-based educational research methodology, this research finds that at least five thematic ingredients were influential in designing an education event with public art that promoted the generation of imaginative inquiry in teacher education: a base of trust; a naturalistic encounter; the choice to “shake-it-up”; a jolt of awareness; and a longer shelf-life. Strategies and insights for furthering the integration of public art into pre-service teacher education are included.     

Awakening Teachers’ Capacities for Social Justice With/In Arts-Based Inquiries

Social justice-oriented teacher education can guide preservice teachers toward greater critical sociocultural knowledge, analytic skills, social responsibility, and commitment to act in the interest of providing all students with high quality educational experiences. This qualitative case study examines how arts-based inquiries in social justice-oriented teacher education can provide the necessary generative spaces for developing preservice teachers’ critical sociocultural knowledge. Data were drawn from student interviews and reflective papers across four sections of a course employing collaborative, arts-based inquiry. Findings highlight the cumulative knowledge, pleasure, anxiety, confrontation with material and symbolic bodies, and self-transformations that can develop from art practices and help to awaken preservice teachers’ critical consciousness for teaching for social justice.     

Researchers under the spell of the arts: Two decades of using arts-based methods in community-based inquiry with vulnerable populations

In the last decade, we have witnessed a growing number of published articles featuring arts-based methods. These methods have been picked up by researchers interested in education in, through and for communities. This scoping review focuses on the use of arts-based methods in community-based research. It was undertaken to provide an overview of how these methods are applied in research practice. Different databases were systematically searched, covering literature published over twenty years (1993–2013). We identified different types of arts-based methods. We described the reported rationales, benefits and limitations, and presented a definition of arts-based methods as used in community-based inquiry. Four challenges were reported: the need to support researchers to explore alternative analytical approaches, the need for methodological reflections, the need to reflect on the voice-component in this work, and the need to push the boundaries of what counts as ‘the’ academic standard. Despite the challenges involved in working on the thin line between art and research, the learning curve it creates for researchers, its value in terms of creating understanding and its capacity to engage participants makes it a worthwhile endeavor to invest in.     

Pragmatism and post-qualitative futures

This paper notes that there has been a relatively recent revision of the pragmatist philosophy canon, one that moves beyond a focus on epistemic and pedagogical theories, and locates pragmatism in a tradition of radical ontological theorizing and political action. This essay examines this revision for its relevance to the emerging materialist turn in qualitative research methodology. The essay focuses on two themes within contemporary and classical pragmatist philosophy: a reflexive realism and an ontology of the future. The methodological implications of these features are explored in detail. These implications are compared to post-structuralist conceptions of reflexivity that informed the last wave of qualitative research innovation and to the new materialism theories that are inspiring a new wave of methodological innovation. The most significant methodological implications of pragmatic philosophy are located in its ideas about the ontologically co-constituting relationship between inquiry practice and future possibilities.     

Expanding and sustaining arts-based educational research as practitioner inquiry

ABSTRACT

As practitioner inquiry is now established as a widely-recognized research tradition and flourishing movement for educational change, we might consider ways that practitioner inquiry could be conceptualized and executed to broaden implementation, deepen understanding, and sustain inquiry within teacher education. Arts-based research may be an ideal methodology for the extension and sustainment of such inquiry as its visual, performative orientation lends itself to participant engagement and provides access in the representation and dissemination of results. This article will put forth models for advancing arts-based practitioner inquiry within the field of teacher education, by drawing from multiple cycles of a dual-layered, ABER study. This vision of arts-based practitioner inquiry is that of inclusion, increasing the number of those who conduct and interact with research; collaboration, blurring boundaries between the inquiries of teacher educators and pre-service teachers; accessibility, tapping into the power of the arts to engage and communicate in ways that scientific language cannot; and continued engagement, using learning from one cycle to inform inquiry in the next.     

Do straight teachers experience this? Performance as a medium to explore LGBTQ world language teacher identity

School and work climate studies of LGBTQ-identified students and educators often reflect challenging environments for those with non-normative sexual and gender identities. Thus, this study sought to understand the experiences of LGBTQ-identified world language (WL) educators in the classroom as well as the intersections of their gender and sexual identities. Drawing upon Butler’s theory of gender performativity and arts-based approaches to research, specifically ethnodrama and performance, this article describes a researcher’s process of working through contradictions in research and representation. Through arts-based approaches to qualitative inquiry, the author maintains how such approaches can provide different mediums for exploring and conveying participants’ lived experiences that are often not possible through traditional qualitative methods of representation.     

LEARNING TO BE IN PUBLIC SPACES: IN FROM THE MARGINS WITH DANCERS, SCULPTORS, PAINTERS AND MUSICIANS

ABSTRACT:  This article reports research in three Nottingham schools, concerned with (1) 'The school as fertile ground: how the ethos of a school enables everyone in it to benefit from the presence of artists in class'; (2) 'Children on the edge: how the arts reach those children who otherwise exclude themselves from class activities, for any reason' and (3) 'Children's voices and choices: how even very young children can learn to express their wishes, and then have them realised through arts projects'. The research methodology was rooted in two modes of inquiry, philosophical investigation and action research. The article draws on this research to argue that arts-based work in school has helped disadvantaged and/or disaffected children to engage in activities (both arts-based and others), and to be able to lay the groundwork for exercising voice and agency as they did so. If social justice is to flourish there is a need for particular kinds of public spaces and a need to create conditions such that children can learn to participate in those spaces, whether or not they are comfortable with the usual settings for 'rational argument' or 'deliberative democracy'. It is suggested that arts-based education, in some forms, is one good way of creating these conditions.     

哲学视域下译者的社会心理研究——从翻译的认知转向谈起

认知转向后的翻译研究更多地注意到译者的语言认知和双语转换机制,但对译者的“非语言认知”如社会认知和文化认知却关注不够.然而,从哲学的观点来看,无论是体验哲学还是现代主体性哲学抑或是翻译学科框架的本体论哲学,都为译者认知研究的社会视角提供了理论依据.认知范式下的译者研究,不仅应继承文化范式下对译者主体身份的关注,而且应从跨学科角度借助社会心理学来考察译者的群体身份和社会身份.     

The post-human I: encountering ‘data’ in new materialism

The editors of a recent special edition of Qualitative Studies in Education map a new field of post-qualitative research and raise fundamental questions about core concepts such as ‘method’ and ‘data.’ They ask whether qualitative inquiry as we know it is any longer possible if we understand language, the human and the material as completely imbricated. In taking up the relation between language and representation as core to what is proposed as the ‘new new,’ the paper examines these questions in relation to data generated in a project called ‘Love Your Lagoons’ conducted with 10 schools and 300 children in Sydney’s water catchment. In particular, the paper focuses on data from one secondary school that offered ‘Regeneration’ as a sport option in which the students walked to their local Redbank Creek every week and spent time there. By closely attending to the circumstances of the collection of data and analyzing it through approaches offered within the ‘new new,’ insights into the relationship between language, materiality, and the human are offered. Summary comments are made about the politico/ethical project of the post-human I and the relevance of data and method to such post-qualitative inquiry.     

Post-qualitative line of flight and the confabulative conversation: a methodological ethnography

This paper is a methodological ethnography aiming to highlight the difficulties in using conventional methods in connection with an explorative philosophy; Deleuze and Guattari’s. Taking an empirical point of departure in conversations about the future with students in upper secondary school, the struggle to find a scientifically valid label through the focus group interview is outlined. However, combining the particular philosophy with a conventional qualitative method turned out to be an impossible aim since the ideals of the focus group interview departures in the image of stable subject simultaneously as the method is blemished by positivistic language and standards. By turning to post-qualitative research, which encourages new concepts and methods, the confabulative conversation was produced. Within these confabulative conversations, the aim has been to create a methodologically smooth space in order to enable movements beyond manifested knowledge in favor of the virtual and the not-yet-seen, and thus producing possibilities for something new.     

Images of thinking in feminist materialisms: ontological divergences and the production of researcher subjectivities

Qualitative feminist studies are much challenged by the contemporary critique of social constructionist postmodernism, as well as the renewed search for the body and materiality. The result is (at least) two diverging research accounts: a renewed feminist materialism, relying on some foundational ontologies and what has been called a new materialist feminist account that constitutes radical ontological rewritings. The aim of this paper is to investigate what kind of researcher subjectivities these different accounts produce for qualitative inquiry. This investigation will be unfolded using an example from a collaborative research process involving 10 PhD students. The example is woven into Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions on the Image of Thought and the three images of thinking outlined in A Thousand Plateaus. The investigation shows that although the aim of our collaborative process was to resist the assumed Cogito/“I” of philosophy and qualitative inquiry, we still got caught up in taken-for-granted images of thinking and doing analysis. A deterritorializing of habits of thinking and practicing in order for new and other researcher subjectivities to emerge required collaborative efforts that put to work a rhizomatic image of thinking and operated from within an ontology of difference.     

The Necessity of Studio Art as a Site and Source for Dissertation Research

The issue raised by the authors in this article question why studio art continues to be ignored as a site and source for research in art education. The necessity of the field to be able to participate within the research community in addressing cultural, social, educational and political concerns is acknowledged. It is argued, however, that the exclusive use of methods of inquiry that align with the conventions of social science research has been done at the expense of fully appreciating the capacity of artistic research undertaken in studio contexts. This tendency is especially prevalent in doctoral research in higher education. Three accounts of dissertation research are given that incorporate studio activity as a central agency of inquiry in conceptualising and theorising issues. Each highlights the capacity of art practice to reveal insights that are a consequence of what the researcher did in the studio setting as issues, ideas and interpretive stances emerged, and problems were re‐conceptualised. What is different in these accounts from more mainstream approaches to research is the readiness to accept that constructing new knowledge is a creative and critical process.     

Toward a Social Ontology for Science Education: Introducing Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblages

This essay’s main objective is to develop a theoretical, ontological basis for critical, social justice-oriented science education. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of assemblages, rhizomes, and arborescent structures, this article challenges authoritarian institutional practices, as well as the subject of these practices, and offers a way for critical-social justice-oriented science educators and students to connect with sociopolitical contexts. Through diagramming institutional and community relationships using DG’s theory of assemblages, we envision new ontological spaces that bridge social and material entities. A conceptualization of science education through DG’s philosophy of rhizomes and assemblages allows educators to merge critical, post-foundational perspectives with questions of ontology: not just what exists, but what could exist in terms of human social organizations (governments and community groups), inorganic matter, microorganisms, and plant/animal populations.     

A critical-realist response to the postmodern agenda in instructional design and technology: a way forward

Although providing an invigorating foundation for instructional design and technology theory and research, the postmodern agenda would benefit from clearer articulation and further refinement of ontological, epistemological, and methodological positions. Consequently, we reveal possible weaknesses in the radically constructivist-inspired position and, in the spirit of scholarly dialogue, counter with a critical-realist perspective that presents a potentially more innovative and defensible approach to the discovery of scientific knowledge about teaching and learning infused with technology. Without doubt, we concur with postmodernists that issues of agency, identity, race, gender and ethnicity must be addressed and given a central position in instructional design and technology research and practice. Under the critical-realist designator, case study, ethnographic, arts-based, and phenomenological methodologies are appropriate and can co-exist. Our point of distinction is that as a scientific venture, instructional design and technology as a discipline must be more public and transparent in warrants, claims and discourse for proposed change to take place. We conclude by indicating future lines of inquiry inspired by the critical-realist perspective, detailing topics in technology integration and digital games.     

Head teachers’ spirituality and inclusive education: a perspective from critical realism

ABSTRACT

Spiritual leadership gains attention amongst researchers for closing the gap between achieving personal and organisational goals. Despite documentations that spirituality undergirds head teacher’s actions leading inclusive schools, research still remains thin in understanding how spirituality underpins leadership for inclusive education. This paper draws on the philosophy of critical realism to offer a conceptual tool that identifies head teachers’ spiritual actions in their efforts to include ethnic minority students. This is done through multiple qualitative methods collection from an in-depth case study at a multicultural primary school in Cyprus. The critical realist framework helps uncover head teacher’s spiritual actions in a more systematic, structured and holistic way. It reveals that head teachers’ spirituality supports the goals of inclusion and occurs in at least four interrelated and emergent ontological levels (psychological, social, cultural and policy levels) which are set in four scaler levels from microscopic to macroscopic (sub-individual, micro, meso and macro levels). This framework problematises mono-dimensional and reductionist understandings of spirituality in leadership. The paper concludes by suggesting solutions to enrich leadership programmes for inclusive education with fostering leaders’ spirituality at different ontological levels.     

对施密特自然概念的解读

以施密特的《马克思的自然概念》一书为文本依据,通过施密特对哲学唯物主义自然观的批判,揭示了马克思主义哲学中自然概念的实质。即马克思主义哲学视阚中的自然是指在一定历史条件下经过人类的社会实践中介的自然、非本体论意义上的自然,而不是哲学唯物主义所认为的作为本体论意义上的客观存在的物质世界,继而进一步指出了施密特对马克思自然概念解释的理论贡献与不足。     

An ontology of RPL: improving non-traditional learners' access to the recognition of prior learning through a philosophy of recognition

This article considers the underachievement of RPL in the Australian vocational education and training (VET) system, in terms of its apparent failure to reach and achieve outcomes for marginalised groups. It notes a range of analyses that are currently used to address this concern and draws on doctoral research in progress to highlight ontological questions that are brought to the process by RPL candidates. Axel Honneth's theory of recognition is then introduced as a means to shed light on these issues. Viewing RPL through the lens of a philosophy of recognition and the concept of ontological security the article asks questions about the nature and effects of the assessor–candidate relationship, inviting consideration of this relationship as an intersubjective exchange within a wider, more fundamental ‘struggle for recognition’. It is argued that a more ontological perspective could provide a framework for increasing access to and successful completion of RPL by non-traditional learners.     

New perspectives on the positioning of parents in children’s bullying at school

This article explores the subject of parents with respect to children’s bullying at school. The overarching claim is that parental agency and positions on children’s bullying at school are produced and made possible by an apparatus of multiple, concurrent forces that provide poor conditions for a constructive partnership between parents and schools in cases of bullying. This research adds to the existing literature in the field by suggesting that the connections between schools, parents and their children’s social behaviour at school must be seen as complexly entangled and involving a range of forces at local, societal and political levels. Furthermore, based on an emergent research design, the article contributes to the discussion of post-qualitative research, drawing upon varied, qualitative empirical material and analytically experimenting with combining Adele Clarke’s idea of situational analysis and Karen Barad’s concepts of intra-action and apparatus.