- Scribbling While Walking Through Hybrid Arts-Based Research Methodologies
- My researcher position(s)
- Being a Teacher
- Being a Mother
- Being an Artist
- Being a Researcher
- Togetherness: Ethnography, theory, subjects, objects, pedagogy, and ethical considerations
- Ethics
- Ice Cracks as Ruptures for Scribbling a Dynamic Research Map
- Intersections in the Research Territory
- Encounter Resistance
- Wandering on/in/around Cracks with Ethnography, A/R/Tography, and Art-Based Research Methodologies.
Ethics
When thinking of research, pedagogy, and ethics, there are ethical issues to consider. Ethically speaking, my responsibility as a researcher (Hannula et al., 2014: 4-5) is to provide a cultural frame where students’ voices are included (p. 15). For example, when giving visual references to artists, they should connect to the theme and the cultural background of students in the class to address diversity and avoid an ethnocentric perspective. Autoethnography, A/R/Tography, and qualitative methods regarding ethics guided me to structure the reflection organization, stability, coherence, economy of expression, and logical consistency (p.14-16) articulating the research process of making, documenting, and writing the research project. But as the inquiry unfolds, more questions come up: How do I choose and write from a particular point of view (p. 17)? What could be the style of my thesis narrative that provides “structural guidelines”(p. 7) for “realistically meaningful” research (p. 9)?
I am not looking to become an activist but planting an activist seed in my lessons through critical thinking. To do this, I found that Couture (2017: 143-146) poses ethical questions regarding the balance between being an activist and a researcher. Couture argues that these roles have to be split from each other when conducting and publishing research but stresses that having no clear answers helps to structure them when doing activist research. In my opinion, this point can be useful to hybridize the teaching practice including activist elements at school.
Togetherness: Ethnography, theory, subjects, objects, pedagogy, and ethical considerations
My different voices/positions as an artist-researcher-educator-mother and being out in nature helped me to use research methods such as drawing. Drawing has been essential because to me is like writing around the center and periferia of arts-based-hybrid-methodologies and theories. Drawing produces knowledge because it connects to Huizinga’s homo ludens’ spirit. Many times I used my research journal to scribble with my son and these playful moments lead me to make creative connections. For example, to apply A/R/Tography (Irwin, 2013) principles to map chaos as an order that is not easy to define and difficult to visualize or determine a priori. There is a lot of time where I am writing and thinking, applying specifically qualitative and quantitative methods, and doing a lot of rational work without using my creative skills. However, to reflect on the research methodologies, I used my artist side and began collecting scribbles from my son, the students, and walking a lot outdoors to trigger creative connections. One of them shown in image 3 is a scribble made by a drawbot –a robot that can draw– made by students of grade 8 for a design class I taught. The repetition and the circular movements made me reflect on Foucault’s ideas of how power circulates in the school context (Mazzei & Jackson, 2012).
In connection to this, Desai (2002: 311-319) argues that experiencing multiple roles and their interaction with the local and global context represented by the community of students and teachers in other schools, can be the cornerstone to making and conducting art-based research. Desai also suggests a focus on “discourse and practice rather than culture, highlighting the ethnography that focuses on particulars rather than generalizations and addressing the positionally of ethnographers and the problems addressing different audiences''(p. 311-312). Could this answer how I put everything together in research through the arts and begin to map my pendular and sometimes erratic movements?
I situate the experience of teaching at an international school, to look at how local and global perspectives converge in the classroom. I also think this justifies the need for a critical look at the arts curriculum as a frame. It is also a call to prase the process more than the outcome which includes the first look into ethnography to make art. Regarding the auto-ethnographic approach that Seton & Trouton (2014) describe as a strategy to apply Foucault's ideas of power genealogies, art offers a ground for praxis to ‘speak the truth’, visualize the affective interaction and disruptions between the body, history, and production of knowledge (pp.100-107). I believe that the idea of the circulation of power from Foucault as described in Haseman (2006) connects to Smith & Dean’s use of the ‘cyclic web’ (2009) and Desai's (2002) views on the artist performing as an ethnographer. In research, I can use this to dissect and change the flow as an alternative direction to include a more ethical production of knowledge made from a plurality of different voices.
Jenssen & Martin (2021) suggest that the idea of methodological thinking to design a pedagogical approach can be useful when interviewing other teachers and finding common ground to design possible lesson plans for each school context. The example of duo ethnographic research allows me and the other teachers to explore how our social and cultural background can influence our practices as a teacher of art.
Spry (2001) explains that auto-ethnography is a way of using one's history reflexively and critically which at the same time allows exposing aspects that occur between being, being in a context allowing interactions between the audience, and the reader. (Spry, 2001: 706-707). She questions how the academic depersonalizes research, turning it into a technocratic product (Spry, 2001: 708). I agree with Spry and consider who am I as a white Latin woman teaching in a culturally diverse school in Norway. Spry also mentions the importance of studies whose nature is autobiographical to “visualize voices oppressed by the dominant culture” (Spry, 2001: 710). Because the goal is to explore intersectionality and visualize it to create artistic responses connected to their body memory, I am interested in incorporating the idea of liminality, of crossing borders: mine, those of the academy, the society enrolled in education and its programs, governments’ policies that interfere in education. I believe that the idea of collecting and making scribbles illustrates this process and can be used as an arts-based research method.
Ice Cracks as Ruptures for Scribbling a Dynamic and Complex Research Mapping
The beauty of the fallen tree brought by a storm to the shore shown in image 3 was also another disruptive and inspiring moment in my winter walks. It made me realize that my research process is better illustrated by ice cracks than roots as an illustration of a rhizomatic thinking process. Serendipity or the irony of conducting research in winter in Norway? Similarly, I see rhizomatic thinking as a dynamic but also a performative system where I feel the history of my body trying also to listen to the other subjects present in my research (Mazzei & Jackson, 2012, Østern et al. 2021, Smith, & Dean, 2009).
I began mapping my research as a rhizomatic thinking process (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, cited in Irwin, 2013, and Mazzei & Jackson, 2012) incorporating the ludic moments with my three-year-old son out on the Stjørdal fjord beach. In one of my walks, my son made a drawing in my research journal shown in image 4. I asked him what it was and he answered: “People walking the line”.
A stop moment happened because when I walked the frozen lines of the ice cracks at the beach, they cracked. And suddenly I had an idea for the research map. So, as shown in image 5, I started to make 3 minutes abstract drawings of the iced Stjørdal beach landscape.
I present this moment as relevant to this reflection about the research structure of the hybrid methodologies in the arts because these playful disruptions triggered a creative moment to map my research. When analyzed from a researcher's perspective, the drawings represent a cracking organic system being the objectives of the research, the directional forces that will open new inquiry paths. While experiencing and observing how cracks are produced, I made videos in which screenshots are shown in image 6. In the videos, I used my own body and rock to experience how it feels to make cracks in different ways. Angelo et al., (2021: 121) explain that performing one’s voice as a social construction of the self, shifts our perspective regarding the implications for becoming and positioning the self within the research constructing the foundations of the unfolding body of the research. The cracks made me think of the entanglement between the correlational and epistemological connections. They act as disruptions, provocations, and diffractions.
After observing this I started to apply A/R/Tography principles (Irwin, 2013, Triggs et al., 2014). As shown in image 7, the map represents a metaphor for thinking in research as ice cracks. There are more similarities, for example in research different forces can provoke unexpected experiences, unstable ground, and moments of knowledge production flowing in all directions. To understand and illustrate this in the research map I present below, I applied, adapted, and juxtaposed the cyclic web (Smith & Dean, 2009, p.20), a multidimensional mapping from the music discipline, and an artistic research diagram (Yip, 2020). I also incorporated concepts from the ‘Diagram 8’ as cited in Conception of artistic research in 3 contexts designed by Alesiūtė (Michelkevičius, 2018). In this diagram, artistic research is presented as a core surrounded by how artists work in connection to other disciplines and contemporary art practice. These concepts are connected and function as a circular cycle with different levels being at the core of artistic research (p. 86). It also situates the artist as a researcher applying methods of social science, humanities, and science in the context of art studies.