Researching a pedagogic innovation: An affective entanglement.

Author(s):

Chris Hanley(presenting / submitting)Edda Sant Obiols

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

29. Research on Arts Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

29 SES 07, Disrupting Arts Education

Research Workshop

Time:

2017-08-23

17:15-18:45

Room:

W2.06

Chair:

Catarina Almeida

Contribution

This paper is concerned with a pedagogic innovation undertaken at a university in the north west of England. The innovation took place at a specially convened colloquium involving researchers from a number of international universities, school pupils, practising teachers, officials from various educational bodies and others. The purpose of the innovation was to explore the possibilities of using a non-conventional methodological approach when researching questions of citizenship and value in educational research. In the particular context of this research, these issues were influenced by recent developments in the UK culminating in the Brexit vote. They were also influenced by the statutory requirement for teachers in England to uphold a particular conception of ‘British values’ (Teachers Standards, 2012). In grappling with these issues the researchers found that individual responses were complex, tangled, emotive and highly responsive to emotional and attitudinal shifts in others (Hanley & Sant, 2017). Thus, the research objective was to develop an innovative means for capturing the multiple dimensions of response to uncertain questions of citizenship, educative value, Brexit and related issues.

The study was referenced to wider debates about innovative pedagogies in the field of teacher learning, reflecting various approaches to these issues across the UK and Europe (see Hanley & Brown, 2016). The project reflected contemporary shifts in representations of national identity in the context of a fragmentary idea of the European project (e.g., Sant, 2016).

Drawing on neo-materialist theoretical underpinnings provided by Gilles Deleuze, the researchers were also tapping into a recent vein of educational research that aims to blur boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’ (e.g., Adams, Kueh, Newman-Storen, & Ryan, 2015; Caldwell, Osborne, Mewburn, & Nottingham, 2015). In particular, we were interested in the Deleuzian concept ‘event’ (Deleuze, 1990). Here the outcomes of educational research are seen not as representations of an actually existent state-of-affairs but as signs of the potential in things to change and re-connect. We therefore view our research ‘event’ as comprising not interfacing individuals but dynamic potentialities viewed as conditioning these individual viewpoints. Our research entanglement sought to capture some of the ways in which potentialities can interact, including affective, emotive, discursive, analytic-rational and spatio-temporal dimensions.

Method

Methodology The ‘entanglement’ was spread across two occasions at the research colloquium. The participants included school pupils (aged 10-11 and 14-16), their teachers, newly qualified teachers, officials and academics. On each occasion, the participants had been engaging in more conventional forms of interaction on the selected themes prior to the ‘entanglement’, including discussion, debate and generating ideas to inform future pedagogy. In contrast, the ‘entanglement’ activity was conceived as involving looser, individual and collective forms of engagement with a range of stimuli and platforms of expression. These included a ‘writing wall’ seeking responses to abstract conceptualisations, a mobile voice recorder for capturing thoughts as they occurred and a carousel of provocative images of international citizenship. The researchers adopted an additional range of means for capturing various dimensions of the research dynamic, including still-image capture of the research rooms and surroundings, still images of participants, reflexive journals. Participants were free to engage with avenues of expression however they saw fit. There was no research ‘schedule’ as such. After the event, data recordings were either transcribed or dealt with more holistically by researchers in their original format. Here researchers were seeking to further tap their own affective responses to the original data (Zembylas, 2009). The researchers’ analytical discussions around the data were intended to do justice to the complexity and uncertainty raised by the data and to shy away from notions of ‘truth’ typically associated with internally coherent sets of representations (Schostak, 2002). Data were therefore not being regarded as knowledge – bearing objects but material configurations through which aspects of the research dynamic emerged in different ways (De Freitas, 2014).

Expected Outcomes

The research is seeking to explore how participants responded to the unconventional avenues made available to them. Whilst results are still being collated, we found that although some respondents gave conventional ‘feedback’, others seemed to approach the situation in different ways. For example, one respondent posted a diagram of how they had witnessed the power dynamic unfolding at their table where discussion had taken place. The lines of power were presented as flowing away from the adults towards the children, as if the children had possessed the power and the adults had been subservient. Other responses represented the movement of power differently, for example on our ‘writing wall’, linking abstractions like ‘capitalism’ and ‘the environment’ with arrows with added comments that concretised aspects of the abstractions being referenced. Still images also revealed the quiet moments, physical proximities and alternative visual framings that marked alternative forms of response to the event activity. Early indications from the data suggest that in addition to the ‘structured’ colloquium event, which was supported by tight timings and planned sequences of activity, a parallel event had occurred in the same space that was messier, emotionally charged and harder to quantify. In this paper, we use the Deleuzian frame of reference to further reflect on these findings towards more robust theorisations of an arts and affect-based methodologies.

References

Adams, L., Kueh, C., Newman-Storen, R., & Ryan, J. (2015). This is not an article: A reflection on creative research dialogues (This is not a seminar). Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47, 1330-1347. doi:10.1080/00131857.2015.1035630 Caldwell, G. A., Osborne, L., Mewburn, I., & Nottingham, A. (2015). Connecting the space between design and research: Explorations in participatory research supervision. Educational Philosophy and Theory. doi: 10.1080/00131857.2015.1111129 De Freitas, L. (2014). Mathematics and the Body: Material entanglements in the classroom. New York: Cambridge University Press. Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense. London: Bloomsbury. Hanley, C. & Sant, E. (2017) Student teacher as ethical inquirer: Exploring ‘British values’ with student teachers. Forthcoming. Hanley, C., & Brown, T. (2016). Developing a university contribution to teacher education: Creating an analytical space for learning narratives. Journal of Curriculum Studies. Available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00220272.2016.1140811 Sant, E. (In Press). Can the subaltern nation speak by herself in the history curriculum?, Educational Studies (Journal of the American Educational Studies Association), 10.1080/00131946.2016.1238376, Manuscript accepted 9th September 2016. Schostak, J. (2002), Understanding, designing and conducting qualitative research in education: Buckingham: Open University Press. Teachers Standards (England) Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/teachers-standards Zembylas, M. (2009) Affect, citizenship, politics: implications for education, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 17:3, 369-383, DOI: 10.1080/14681360903194376

Author Information

Chris Hanley (presenting / submitting)

Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom

Edda Sant Obiols