How visual documentation carried out by students matters and intra-acts with the spaces of the school in a DIYLab.
Author(s):
Judit Onsès (presenting / submitting)
Conference:
ECER 2017
Network:
29. Research on Arts Education
Format:
Paper

Session Information

29 SES 02 A, Arts-based Research: Challenges and transformation

Paper Session

Time:
2017-08-22
15:15-16:45
Room:
W2.06
Chair:
Lara Soares

Contribution

How could a process of visual documentation transform the understanding and, therefore, the use of the spaces of the school? How does visual documentation's agential realism (Barad, 2003; 2007; Dolphin and Van der Tuin, 2012) generate new relationalities among classmates, teacher and spaces of the school?

Throughout this paper we will map our understanding of these questions connected with an arts-based research about how visual documentation of learning processes opens new spaces of learning and agency in a classroom with young people between ages 10 and 11 while developing a project based on do it yourself (DIY) philosophy. In this way, we will focus on the part of the project that happened, as an unexpected way, out of classroom and how it transformed the educational entanglement of school, students, teacher and researcher involved.

The project

What follows here took place during the spring term of 2015. A spanish classroom of 10-11 years old students and their teacher carried out the implementation of the European project “Do it yourself in Education: expanding digital competence to foster student agency and collaborative learning (DIYLab)” (543177-LLP-1-2013-1-ES-KA3MP). The main objective of this project is put into practice DIY philosophies (Guzzetti, Elliott, and Welsch, 2010; Lankshear, and Knobel, 2011) in primary, secondary and higher education by proposing collaborative, meaningful and authentic learning experiences to promote lifelong and life-wide learning as well as expanding students’ digital competence, agency, and creativity. This practice depends on the use and implementation of different technologies as tools (video editing software, mobile/ flexible applications, html5-based services for learning, etc.), focused in one way on documenting students learning processes and on the other, the dissemination and construction of a DIY community (Kafai and Peppler, 2011) based on the open online platform ‘DIYHub’. I, as a researcher, accompanied them in this uncertain trip, in which we decided the lines of flight and the coordenates (Deleuze, and Guattari, 2004) to follow with the project step by step, according with the point of the rhizome we were in each moment.

 

The implementation with visual documentation

When I arrived as researcher in the classroom, we (I and the teacher) proposed to students something they have never done before: documenting visually their learning processes. As nobody of us had previous experience on that, we started playing and performing like reporters of school. Thus, the group of three students that would document their classmates learning processes understood more or less the meaning of visual documentation and could start with their cultural background, behaving like their idea of how a reporter have to behave.

They started documenting inside classroom, interviewing and picturing their classmates sometimes with one camera, sometimes with one table for each reporter. But soon they realized that for better collecting of their classmates’ opinions, they needed a more suitable space than classroom. Their teacher also realized of that, so they decided to look for other spaces of school that could be occupied by them during the classroom time. Then I realized that we cannot avoid in research the physical spaces, the subjects, the furniture, the cameras… Altogether were intra-acting (Barad, 2003; 2007) among them all the time, affecting one to each other, transforming the relationalities among them. How we were carrying out visual documentation inside classroom collapsed in a common willing to carry it out for some moments out of classroom, looking for a more opened space, more quiet space, some space that allowed students-becoming-reporters other behaviours than those adopted in classroom, other possibilities of movements and speeds (Deleuze, and Guattari, 2004).

Method

The implementation of DIYLab project was carried out from January to June of 2015, 6 hours per week splitted in two hours three days in a week. When the “project” subject started, the three reporters took two or three classmates and they looked for a better place inside school for interviewing. The teacher told them which spaces were unoccupied for other students and they chose the best ones for them. In this way, they started occupying the classroom of 14-15 years old students. While teacher remained in primary classroom with other students, the team of reporters and few classmates went up to the “older classroom”. Sometimes I accompanied them but, those days I couldn’t go to school, they go to the classroom on their own. Gradually, I observed how those students while being in those other spaces, they behaved differently. Their related with the physical space, with their classmates and with the recording technologies in a different way that they did in classroom under the supervision of teacher. Explicitly, they discussed what to say in the interview, how to say it, how to perform in front of the camera. Meanwhile, implicitly they were testing other modes of relation, other subjectivities, other ways of be(com)ing in school. New intra-actions (Barad, 2003; 2007) were being generated in school. But sometimes the “older classroom” was occupied. It led them to look for other spaces in school like art classroom; the teacher’s desk; the stairway between the primary and secondary floors; the fire escape; and the courtyard. It meant an openness of possibilities of testing themselves in a different positions, different intra-actions but also disturbances, as those spaces were not thought and, therefore, used as a set but as a classroom, as a desk, etc. In this way, they had to deal with interruptions, misunderstandings, and negotiations in the use of some spaces. That remembered me the Dennis Atkinson's analyses and reflections regarding the project Rogue Game by artist Can Altay. In the Rogue Game, “participants for three or four games are asked to play their respective game simultaneously on the overlapping game areas.” (Atkinson, 2014:16). In school case, reporters had to negotiate their role and try to keep on their work, while teachers, other students, maintenance workers and other people interrupted or broke into scene. Therefore, the reverberation of their intra-actions were affecting a wider range in school.

Expected Outcomes

The experience of documenting visually learning processes during the implementation of DYLab project by students, has reported different reflections and awarenesses: - Reflecting about the possibilities of visual documentation in classroom and school: In this case, visual documentation not only was useful to illustrate what students were working on, but for increasing the students’ agency in their learning; becoming more aware of their processes of work and thinking; exploring other modes of subjectivation, other modes of being in relation with their classmates; testing other pedagogical relationship with their teacher, based on the trust and mutual learning-teaching; and exploring and using differently some institutionalized spaces of school. -Learning about visuals and its technology: From the beginning to the end of implementation, students could learn not only the technique of cameras and tablets for recording videos and pictures, but also think about the meanings of images and how they affect our understanding of the world, our gaze. How they can transmit positions, opinions, relations and transform the mood of classroom. - Dealing with the not-known and disruptions: Becoming-reporters in those spaces of school was “to learn how to become in a rather uncertain world of becoming, where individual (psychic) and social becomings are entwined, where the relations between ‘I’ and ‘we’ are constantly being reconfigured.” (Atkinson, 2014:17). “Such relations are therefore viewed as intra-active, a process whereby bodies and strategies become constituted in the thisness of relation in contrast to pre-established identities or codes” (Atkinson, 2014:16-17). In summary, this part of the research fostered a continuous rethinking not only about visual documentation but also about how school are using their spaces and how they could use them. How all them matter in learning and relationalities in school.

References

Atkinson, Dennis (2014). Art, Pedagogies and Becoming: The Force of Art and the Individuation of New Worlds’. In Jonathan Mosley and Rachel Sara INSEA 34th World Congress of The International Society for Education through Art (InSEA). Melbourne, 7 - 11 July 2014. Barad, Karen (2003). Posthumanist Performativity. Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs, 28(3), 801-831. Recovered 9th of January 2017 from http://humweb.ucsc.edu/feministstudies/faculty/barad/barad-posthumanist.pdf Barad, Karen (2007). Chapter 2. Diffractions: Differences, Contingencies and entanglements that matter. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Recovered 9th of January 2017 from https://smartnightreadingroom.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/meeting-the-universe-halfway.pdf Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix (2004). Mil mesetas. Capitalismo y esquizofrenia (6th spanish ed.; translation of José Vázquez Pérez in collaboration with Umbelina Larraceleta of french edition 1980). Valencia: Pre-Textos. Dolphijn, Rick, and van der Tuin, Iris (2012). Interview with Karen Barad. In New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (48-71). Open Humanity Press. Recovered 30 may 2016 from http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Dolphijn-van-der-Tuin_2013_New- Materialism.pdf

Author Information

Judit Onsès (presenting / submitting)
University of Barcelona
Department of Teaching and Educational Organization
La Garriga

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