The Key to the Treasure: Using Metafictive Qualities in Educational Research to Close the Chasm Between Action and Research

• In Event: Roundtable Session 45
  In Roundtable Session: Rallying Calls: Arts-Based Engagement Within Relational Communities

Abstract

An educational poetic (Gitin & Peck, 2005) examines the role of the scholar-practitioner as activist, centered on Barth’s (2001) image of the key. The key represents the active and cyclical processes of scholarship and activism that enables scholar-practitioners to recognize the key—research—is the treasure—method for change—rather than a way to name a problem. The mediation of the role of scholar and practitioner is likened to the mediated role of artist and text, art and artifact. The postmodern concept of meta-fiction (Waugh, 1984) is applied to the author’s term “meta-research” to position research as self-analytical reflection and mode for transformative leadership as the text is being created.

Author

• Mary Catherine Nino, Stephen F. Austin State University