Educational research is often shaped by procedural approaches in which method is defined in advance, risking a separation between research design and lived educational experience. This study focuses on teachers’ everyday professional experience across different subject areas, exploring how attention to educational situations can be cultivated and researched through artistic practices. The paper examines arts-based and artistic research practices as methodological gestures that reconfigure how inquiry unfolds in education. Drawing on an ongoing doctoral study developed in the Portuguese educational context, it discusses how photography and fragmentary writing function as practices of attention rather than as techniques for data collection. Rather than proposing a new method, the paper argues for an understanding of methodology as an ethical and aesthetic orientation that shapes the researcher’s relation to practice, participants, and research material. The study contributes to current debates in arts education research and educational research methodology concerned with qualitative, arts-based, and reflexive approaches to inquiry.

The study is grounded in critical discussions within educational research methodology that question the dominance of predefined and instrumental models of inquiry. Within arts education research, arts-based research foregrounds aesthetic experience and meaning-making as central dimensions of educational inquiry (Barone & Eisner). In parallel, debates in artistic research emphasise practice as a mode of knowledge production rather than as the application of external theoretical frameworks (Borgdorff). Bringing these perspectives into dialogue, the framework conceptualises methodology as emerging through engagement with educational practice and shaped by attention, proximity, and ethical responsiveness. From this perspective, research in arts education is understood as a situated and relational practice that remains open to what appears within educational experience.

The research adopts a qualitative, arts-based and artistic research approach developed within an ongoing doctoral study. Empirically, the study is conducted in collaboration with ten experienced lower and upper secondary school teachers from different disciplinary backgrounds, working within the Portuguese educational context of Curriculum Autonomy and Flexibility, and taking place within an accredited short-term continuing professional development programme. The research engages with teachers’ everyday professional experience through a participatory process involving photography, fragmentary writing and collective dialogue. These practices are employed not as representational tools or data collection techniques, but as practices of attention that support noticing, reflection and relational inquiry, functioning as methodological gestures that shape how the researcher relates to participants, situations and emerging materials. The research process is iterative and reflexive, emphasising proximity to practice, ethical sensitivity and sustained relational engagement. The analysis takes the form of a relational and interpretive analytic process, in which images, written fragments and group dialogues are brought into dialogue to allow emergent constellations of meaning to take shape.

Rather than producing generalisable findings, the study aims to contribute conceptually and methodologically to debates in arts education research and educational research methodology. It offers a refined understanding of arts-based and artistic practices as methodological gestures that support attentive, situated, and ethically responsive inquiry across educational contexts. The paper contributes to discussions on methodological innovation by clarifying how artistic thinking can inform qualitative research without being reduced to technique. It also offers implications for the formation of researchers and educators by foregrounding attention, presence, and responsibility as central methodological concerns in educational inquiry.

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