Nomadic learning as mode of inquiry in an Arts Based Research on students artistic imaginaries

Author(s):

Fernando Hernández-Hernández(presenting / submitting)Rachel Fendler

Conference:

ECER 2016

Network:

29. Research on Arts Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

29 SES 11, Artistic Research

Paper/Video Session

Time:

2016-08-25

17:15-18:45

Room:

NM- J114

Chair:

Catarina Silva Martins

Contribution

For five scholastic years we are building a learning process shared with students based on the possibilities offered by the elective course Arts Based Research that is given as part of the Fine Arts degree at the University of Barcelona.

One of the main contributions of that course is that we developed (students and teachers) a research project, which enables set up a dialogue between the inquiry process and the readings and examples with whom we dialogue. In addition we carry out a public dissemination of the performed process through papers and presentations at conferences, seminars, publications, etc. This last quarter (September 2015 to January 2016) the proposal we made to the students, after they shared their college dissatisfaction, was to explore what builds them as young artists and constitutes their imaginary about art and the meaning of being an artist.

One of the key concepts in 2015-16 course has been the notion of nomadic learning that comes from the approach that Rachel took in her doctoral thesis (Fendler, 2015) and is used to account those interactions that subvert the teaching and research process, unveiling what constitutes their limits. This notion invites us to consider how access these ‘places’ beyond those frameworks pre- established in teaching and research.Someauthors such as Britzmann (2000), Braidotti (2014), Jackson and Mazzei (2009; 2012) have guided us to explore and signify what is outside the framework of the course and the research we do with the students.

Nomadology remains central on both, the teaching on ABR and the inquiry process on students’ artistic imaginaries, because it allows to introduce provocative questions. Questions that made the data (students and teachers journals, micro-narratives, photographs...) glow. Nomadology therefore is a movement through the teaching and research process that works across both horizontal and vertical axes, affecting how the project advances (the questions that are posed along the way) as well as interacting with the different layers implicit within the project (the generation of evidences, the analysis, and the decisions on how make public the research process).

Adopting a nomadic approach has allowed us to introduce during the ABR sessions disruptive ways of thinking concepts such as "becoming, images of thought, simulacrum, colonization, subalternity, strength, assemblage...”. These and other concepts (which students mapped in the last sessions of the course) have circulated in the approach to ABR and research that has taken place to name the shared experiences, to expand the ways of narrating and to raise new questions about: a) what it means to generate an artistic research, b) how investigate the sources and experiences that founded students’ learning on what is being an artist and c) how advance our understanding on the effects of the colonizing effects of training practices in the field of arts.

One consequence of this way of bringing into action the nomadic approach into the inquiry process on students artistic imaginaries is that the contributions and experiences bringing into the research are taken not by themselves and their visibility but by how they affect the context of our thinking trajectories and those learning practices that take place in the course and outside it.

Method

Nomadology, as is understood from the poststructuralist feminism allows us to think and explore those places of learning and researching from the perspective of what Atkinson (2010) calls a ‘space-event’. This event generates “a disruption of established ways of knowing, through learning events”, because they are able “to handle states of uncertainty as new knowledge and (where) new competences begin to emerge” (Atkinson, 2012, p. 10). We want to explore this disruption in three nomadic spaces: 'the space of reality' (,theory, methods, data), 'the space of representation' (produce different knowledge, resist the stable meanings) and 'space subjectivity '(to account for how we become researchers) (Jackson and Mazzei, 2009: p. 2). The sources to develop this inquiry process are the 15 episodes selected by the students to represent their learning trajectories: Introduction, Silence, Intermittent attendance, Disappointment with the Art College, Change of the teaching room, Searching for the artistic scaffoldings I, a visitor professor disruption, Searching for the artistic scaffoldings II, Letter to Jaen students, Return to the biographic, Research personal trajectories, A/r/tography, Tension: what we do next?, Visual dispositive and Dissemination. Each of these episodes is represented in a DIN3 format which included: contextual frame, images related to the episode (produced by the students) and ‘flashes’ narrating the experience and the relationship with each moment. What we do in our ‘analysis’ is tray to read these evidences from the nomadic theory, by making questions such as: How students transit through the tensions arising from their unstable positionalities during the course? How they move from the position of art students to art researchers? How they confront the demands and responsibilities of build a learning/research process where they are inextricably actors; How they uses artistic methods not as representations tools but as epistemological medium? How they give account of their learning and empowerment process beyond to the sessions of the ABR course?

Expected Outcomes

If we point us these questions is because nomadology is an approach that considers students' actions and processes differently than the more humanistic concept of agency. Agency draws our attention to how students' capacity to act is regulated by external forces—as illustrated by the phrase “giving voice”. Nomadology takes a different approach, to consider how students' actions, which they are always already engaged in, affect the context in which they are embedded or introduced. This difference is captured by the shift in perspective from student voice to learning practices. Following this approach has allowed us to investigate also to ourselves as part of a process that is permanently questioning our frames of what means to be a teacher and a researcher. As participants accompanying a process of an artistic inquiry on students’ art imaginaries we have challenged to be involved in a process of learning that subverts the limits of pedagogical relationship and that has enabled to generate and live an event. An event that at the same time disturbs us transforms us, and modifies the traditional places of research and learning at the university.

References

Atkinson, D. (2012). Contemporary Art in Education: The New, Emancipation and Truth. The International Journal of Art & Design Education, 31 (1), 5-18. Braidotti, R. (2014). Writing as a nomadic subject. Comparative Critical Studies 11(2): 163-184. Britzmann, D. P. (2000). “The Question of Belief”. Writing Poststructural Ethnography. In, E.A. St. Pierre & W. Pillow (Eds.), Working the ruins, (pp. 27-40). New York: Routledge. Fendler, R. (2015). Navigating the eventful space of learning: Mobilities, nomadism and other tactical maneuvers . Barcelona: University of Barcelona. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Jackson, A.Y., & Mazzei, L. (2009). Voice in Qualitative Inquiry: Challenging Conventional, Interpretative, and Critical Conceptions in Qualitative Research. London and New York: Routledge. Jackson, A.Y., & Mazzei, L. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative research: Viewing data across multiple perspectives. NewYork: Routledge.

Author Information

Fernando Hernández-Hernández (presenting / submitting)

University of Barcelona, Spain

Rachel Fendler

Florida State University

Search the ECER Programme

Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
Search for authors and in the respective field.
For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.