Displacements And Transits In A Research About Body In Initial Art Teacher Training.

Author(s):

Sara Carrasco Segovia(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2016

Network:

Emerging Researchers' Group (for presentation at Emerging Researchers' Conference)

Format:

Paper

Session Information

ERG SES H 03, Teachers' Training and Education

Paper Session

Time:

2016-08-23

11:00-12:30

Room:

OB-E2.16 (ALE 3)

Chair:

Janinka Greenwood

Contribution

This paper aims to relate the disruptive turn experienced after the extensive and exhaustive coding and analysis process through the Grounded Theory as an analysis method in my doctoral research. Also, describes some of the pathways that emerged from the complex displacements and becomings (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). These pathways illustrates not only my movement as a researcher, but also how the focus of the study is shifted, causing a transformation of the initial question and methodology.

Initially, the doctoral research highlighted the importance of making questions about how the collaborators, Art teachers in training education, were building their corporealities and performative actions in their educational process. However as a result of the continuous movements, the focus of the research shifted to other territories by expanding meanings of the body in the inquiry. This allowed me to dialogue about the multiple places that a body takes within educational relations. Indeed, after all, I suggest that the body experience becomes in something circulating.

The body, being our first meeting point with the other and acting as central to social relations, offers us many possibilities. It acts as an unquestionable object of pedagogical control under surveillance techniques, standardization, classification and totalization (Gore, 2000) that often act in a hidden and naturalized way.

Is worth to say that, when I am referring to the body presence in education, I am not trying to discuss if it occupies a neglected or predominant position within the practices and discourses of the educational process. My aim in this paper is to make visible how the body flows through what I nominate as ‘educational spectrum’: how teachers are transiting, what is revealed about an educational institution, about the teacher profession, the relationships established when talking about the body, what could be revealed about the curriculum, and so on. To that end it is necessary to place the body as the center of research due to the place that occupies within the whole educational relational system and therefore in an institution: an ambiguous place configured as a place of exploration.

Thereby, this study looks for open spaces, in collaboration with eight students from Pedagogy of Visual Arts degree, - in order to think and talk about the multiple territories that body could be occupy in education, and the different meanings of body that can expand and connect with other ideas and questions. Along with this, it was sought to reveal what kind of social, cultural, political and institutional forces were present in the narratives of each collaborator. I believe these forces are not exactly a consequence of relationships generated, but indeed as a constituent of collaborators and materiality as an assemblage.

Even when the coding process was slightly normative, following some methods of the second generation of Grounded Theory (Kathy Charmaz, Adele E. Clarke, Calder W. Kaufman), I intend to build the process of generating knowledge in a non-normative way.

The following section of methodology argues, how an exhaustive analysis process allowed me to go deep into the interviews, to identify aspects like relationships, empties and concepts that I had not previously thought about. Namely, the coding and analysis process, following the GT, was not used to generate theory, but to create ways of dialogue and understanding from what the collaborators said to me. At the present, the purpose is not focused on the question, but in what emerges from there, i.e., the focus is in how I dialog with those narratives to develop concepts and the way of assembling them.

Method

Initially, I connect the notion of research linked directly to which for me means the experience of be a teacher: a constant transit through a position of not knowing, walking by the loss and disorientation fluctuations (Contrera and Pérez, 2010:17). Consequently, post-humanist notions such as displacement, turn, becoming, wandering, among many others, have been fundamental in my study because allowed me to make a transit across the inquiry process, and rescue the unexpected. At the same time this supposed to adopt a nomadic position (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Braidotti, 2004) as a researcher, open to accept the different changes lived along the research experience. One the most important changes were the initial research question, because at the beginning, the idea about body refers to a normative notion about, due to the strong tradition that exists behind body studies in social sciences. But now, the notion of body has an expanded concept that emerged from collaborators' ideas, understanding as a body that is not only in a physical or symbolic level (corporeality), but that occupies each territory of the pedagogical relationship, including the materiality that constitutes it. This shift causes a displacement from the initial research question that refers to a ‘built body’, and besides, the relevance is no longer on the question, but, in what emerges from there and how to assemble it. This carry out to me not only put the focus on what collaborators said to me, but on the dialogue that I can establish with this. For that, was necessary making visible the notions and concepts of body emerging from discussion and how discuss with that. In this point, the disruptive turn, was: the body experience it is not only something to be built, but something circulating, and goes through the whole educational spectrum. The post qualitative author Lisa Mazzei suggests exploring the concept of voice by a Deleuzian approach. He refers to the voice of the humanist subject like a fleshless voice, i.e., without body. Furthermore, that voice never is a 'unique voice' because it is constituted with other voices, the framing and materiality/matter (Flat Ontology). In my research this ‘unique voice’ disappears, because the 'voices' of collaborators go through me and return in the narrative. The subject is diluted when I speak about them. In the same vein, I understand the interview's data, and the voices of participants as 'enactment' among researcher-data-participants-theory-analysis (Mazzei, 2013).

Expected Outcomes

The coding process at the beginning followed the basics notions of the GT in a normative way but all these changes of perspective and becomings given to me the possibility of establish tactics of dialog and comprehension of the collaborators' narratives. Make a rigorous analysis of these narratives, was not a masochist exercise, but a possibility of turning the initial aim of the Grounded Theory by using it as a method analysis and not as methodology. To conclude this idea, this way of making the coding and analysis process allowed me to immersing myself into the narratives that the collaborators gave to me. So, I expect this paper works as an exploration about others ways to understand the traditional coding and analysis process from a post humanist and post materialist approach. On the other hand, the body always has been considered from the carnality idea (physical or symbolic sense), but now, I am trying to develop an expanded body's idea (i.e., from the live body). The sense of the body/corporeality that collaborators has built from different focus, frameworks, experiences, times, materiality, background and environments, understands the body as a place of transit through the spaces, relationships and institutions. Finally the notion of assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) helps me to understand the writing process as an entanglement where can exist areas beyond borders, and that don't fit perfectly. Further, this helps to understanding the body as an ambiguous place configured as a territory of exploration in Education.

References

Braidotti R (2004) Feminismo, diferencia sexual y subjetividad nómade. Barcelona: Editorial Gedisa. Charmaz K (1990) Discovering chronic illness: Using grounded theory. Social Science and Medicine 30(11): 1161-1172. Charmaz K (2000) Grounded theory: Objectivist and constructivist methods. In Denzin N and Lincoln Y (eds) Handbook of qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 509-535. Charmaz K (2002) Grounded theory: Methodology and theory construction. In: Smelser NJ and Baltes PB (eds) International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences. Amsterdam: Pergamon, pp.6396-6399. Charmaz C (2006) Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide Through Qualitative Analysis. London: Sage. Contreras J and Pérez de Lara N (2010) Investigar la experiencia educativa. Madrid: Editorial Morata. Deleuze G and Guattari F (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (1 edition December 21, 1987). Mirmeapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Glaser B and Strauss A (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company. Glaser B (1978) Theoretical sensitivity: advances in the methodology of grounded theory. Mill Valley, CA: Sociology Press. Gore J (2000) Disciplinar los cuerpos: sobre la continuidad de las relaciones de poder en pedagogía. In: Popkewitz T y Brennan M (comp) El desafío de Foucault. Discurso, conocimiento y poder en la educación. Barcelona: Pomares-Corredor, pp. 228-249. Mazzei L (2013) A voice without organs: interviewing in posthumanist research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26(6): 732-740. DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2013.788761

Author Information

Sara Carrasco Segovia (presenting / submitting)

University of Barcelona

Fine Arts

Santiago

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