Teachers’ Learning Cartographies as Process of Research Entitlement

Author(s):

Fernando Hernández-Hernández(presenting / submitting)Aurelio Castro-Varela(presenting)Carlos Canales-Bonilla

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

29. Research on Arts Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

29 SES 10, Researching Contemporary Art, Visual Culture and Visual Literacy

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-24

15:30-17:00

Room:

W2.06

Chair:

Catarina Almeida

Contribution

This paper is part of the ongoing research project "How teachers learn: Educational implications and challenges to address social change" (EDU2015-70912-C2-1-R), which main objective is mapping those scenarios inside and outside school where teachers learn and reveal what they value as source of knowledge and experience. We invite teachers to build a visual cartography about their learning trajectories and participate in a conversation to generate forms of understandings teachers’ nomadic learning displacements (Braidotti, 2006, 2014), their tensions and professional expectations. By generating visual cartographies, not as a method, but as an artistic epistemology, we try to inquiry those interstices, displacements, instable journeys, ways of knowing, assemblages and entanglementthrough which teachers perform their learning paths. During this process we do not seek for results but generate concepts and other ways of approaching research.

This project is part of the trajectory of our research group, and our interest on understanding how learning take place in context. We have done projects with young people, on how they learn inside and outside high school (Domingo, Sánchez, & Sancho, 2014), and with teachers, on their learning itineraries during the first five years of their professional career (Sancho & Hernández-Hernández, 2014). These projects made evident that personal and professional knowledge cannot be separated from the biographic, cultural, social, technological, and even emotional and affective experiences of the learners. In this sense learning is embodied on an ecological process. This environmental notion of learning and our interest on the use of visual and artistic methods in educational research (Fendler, Onses & Hernández-Hernández, 2013) made us to decide the use of visual narratives (cartographies) as a methodological strategy to explore teachers‘ transitions and nomadic learning experiences as well as our own trajectories as higher education teachers and researchers.

Cartography as epistemology and research method. Time to time in social and educational sciences a new turn arrives to the research agenda. This turn can be occasional or more permanent. This seems the case of the spatial turn, that coming from Geography involves a reworking of the very notion and significance of spatiality (Warf & Arias, 2008: 1, paraphrased). In this context we arrive to visual cartographies both, as an epistemological tool and as a research method, with a long trajectory in social sciences and education research (Paulston, & Liebman, 1994; Ruitenberg, 2007; Ulmer& Koro-Ljungberg, 2015). We took in particular, Guattari’ s notion of ‘schizoanalytic cartographies’ (Guattari , 1989) considered as maps which refuse a fixed and invariant domain of subjectivity, but are rather relational configurations, which change state and status as a function of particular assemblages. This notion was useful for our research purpose because could be taken as a strategy to generate 'knowledge' and relate to the theory, from combining different elements, keeping a driver and articulator of a narrative.

This idea of cartographies is not as results but a space of thinking and making connections between teachers’ nomadic learning experiences and their visual mapping process. Nomadic learning (Fendler, 2015) is used to give account of those interactions that subvert learning 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 Braidotti (2014), Jackson and Mazzei (2009; 2012) have guided us to explore and signify what is outside the framework of the learning cartographies.

Method

During the research process we are adopting "an artistic form of the social sciences, a form of radically interpretive representation" (Richardson & St.Pierre, 2005: 964) inspired on post-qualitative approaches (St. Pierre, 2011; Jackson, & Mazzei, 2012; Lather, 2013; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013) which shape a not unified movement which puts into question the very notion of research: it is no longer about getting results but generate concepts. Under this approach the fieldwork was carried out during November and December, 2016 in three secondary schools around Barcelona, with groups of 8-12 teachers. At the beginning, teachers were asked for introducing themselves, explaining why they wanted to participate in what most of them called a “training”, and advancing a bit their cartographic proposals. After that, our role as researchers limited itself to accompany one or two teachers and energize –but never judge– the making of the cartography. In addition, they all had to tell afterwards what they had done and why. Our approach to this process of mapping teachers' learning we “give up representational and binary logics” and “see language, the human, and the material not as separate entities mixed together but as completely imbricated 'on the surface'” (Lather & Pierre, 2013: p. 630). In that sense, cartographies are not just a visual method but an entanglement in which all these substances –bodies and things, texts and situations, ideas and manners of doing, etc.– remain assembled, an also a challenge we brought to the teachers. They had to solve it by capturing and relating three issues previously proposed by us: a) the learning places b) their transits between the inside and the outside of the institution c) the sense they make to the very act of learning. Instead of applying a previous method to scrutinize them, our stand on the cartographies contents departed from the acknowledgement and the potentiality of «not knowing» (Rogoff, 2006). Thus we were looking for a new kind of object of inquiry, “'pulled out of shape by its framings' and, equally importantly, 'framings pulled out of shape by the object'” (Lather, 2013: p. 639). To this end, the cartographies, the accounts teachers gave of them and our field notes were put together to produce an emerging conversation. Rather than meaning, this allowed us to open up to “unexpected readings of and listenings to materials in what might be termed 'fractal analysis'” (Lather, 2016: p. 127).

Expected Outcomes

Before going into the results we want to start with a post-qualitative question: What concepts allows us to think the process of making these cartographies, after having maintained a material and semiotic conversation with them? We would like to explore three nomadic spaces: 'the space of reality' (theory, methods, data), 'the space of representation' (to produce different knowledge and resist the stable meanings) and 'the space of subjectivity' (to account for how we become learners) (Jackson & Mazzei, 2009: p. 2). Cartographies as spaces of reality. We pay attention to the ‘cartographic discourse’ revealed in teachers’ maps and to the rhetoric of images “bound by rules which govern their codes and modes of social production, exchange and use” (Harley, 1988: pp. 278–279). Cartographies as spaces of representation. Cartography is a form of visual representation organized by axes, links, key places (notions), locations, positions, distances... It is not a result but a not ending process where the producer brings their memories, experiences, desires and fantasies, giving account of a set of relations organized around a symbolic border. The possibility of characterize this ‘non place’ is one of the interest of our research. Cartographies as spaces of subjectivity. The cartographies produced in the workshops include as a key matter many aspects linked to teachers’ biographies. Thus mapping appears not only as a method of representation but as a way to understand how the subject places and interprets learning in a network of relationships. How we are learning is something we cannot really know. We are able to locate spaces, moments and experiences of learning, but not how it takes place. Teachers’ cartographies tell stories about where and with whom they learn, but it is unclear what they tell us about how we learn.

References

Braidotti, R. (2006). Transpositions. On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge, Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2014). Writing as a nomadic subject. Comparative Critical Studies 11(2-3), 163-184. Domingo, M., Sánchez, J. A., Sancho, J. M. (2014). Researching on and with Young People: Collaborating and Educating. Researching with Young People: Collaborating and Educating. Comunicar , 42, 157-164. Fendler, R. (2015). Navigating the eventful space of learning: Mobilities, nomadism and other tactical maneuvers. Barcelona: University of Barcelona. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Fendler, R. & Hernández-Hernández, F. (2014). Using arts-based research strategies to document learning in a course on arts-based research. In, R. Marin Viadel, J. Roldán & X. Molinet Medina (Eds.), Foundations, criteria, contexts in arts based research and artistic research, (pp. 157-168). Granada: University of Granada. Fendler, R., Onses, J., Hernández-Hernández, F. (2013). Becoming arts-based researchers: A journey throught the experiencie of silence in the university classroom. Internatioan Journal of Educations through Art, 9 (2), 257-263. Guattari, F. (2012). Schizoanalytic Cartographies. Bloomsbury: London. Jackson, A.Y., & Mazzei, L. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative research: Viewing data across multiple perspectives. NewYork: Routledge. Harley, J. B. (1988). Maps, knowledge, and power. In D. Cosgrove & S. Daniels (eds). The iconography of landscape: Essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of past environments, (pp.277–312). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lather, P. (2013). Methodology-21: what do we do in the afterward? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26:6, pp. 634-645. Lather, P. (2016). Top Ten + List: (Re)Thinking Ontology in (Post)Qualitative Research. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 125-131. Lather, P. & Pierre, E. A. St. (2013). Post-qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26:6, 629-633. Richardson, L., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2005). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N.K. Denzin & Y.S. Lincolns (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative rsearch. (3rd ed., 959-978). Thousan Oaks; CA: Sage. Rogoff, I. (2006). Academy as Potentiality. Zehar, 60-61, 4-9. Ruitenberg, C. (2007). Here be dragons: Exploring Cartography in Educational Theory and Research. Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education, 4, pp. 7-24. Sancho, J.M. y Hernández-Hernández, F. (coord.), (2014) Maestros al vaivén. Aprender la profesión docente en el mundo actual [Teachers on the swing. Learning teaching profession on contemporary world]. Barcelona: Octaedro. St. Pierre, E. (2011). Post-qualitative research: The critique and the coming after. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), The handbook of qualitative research (4th ed., 611-625). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Author Information

Fernando Hernández-Hernández (presenting / submitting)

University of Barcelona

Cultural Pedagogies

Barcelona

Aurelio Castro-Varela (presenting)

University of Barcelona, Spain

Carlos Canales-Bonilla