Using the Senses in Reflective Practice: Preparing School Leaders for Non-Text-Based Understandings

• In Event: Sensual Curriculum: Making Educational Sense Through the Senses

Abstract

School leaders and teachers concerned with student learning recognize the need to pay closer attention to the impact of the nation’s cultural texture, racial tensions, and increasing percentage of students from historically disenfranchised populations (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2010), and the influence such changes will continue to have on the nation’s schools, colleges, and universities (Gay, 2010). Scholars—including Sonia Nieto, Geneva Gay, Lisa Delpit, Patrick Slattery, and Gloria Ladson-Billings—are concerned about the serious academic achievement problems among children and families who live on the margins. Their underachievement calls for systemic, holistic, authentic, comprehensive, and curriculum transformative interventions in U.S. public schools (e.g., Gay, 2010; Henderson & Gornik, 2007; Sleeter & Grant, 2009). This broad-based and systemic curriculum reform requires deeper and more comprehensive analysis of schools, which needs to be collectively addressed with transformative curriculum leaders who focus on raising consciousness (Burns, 1978; Eisner, 1994; Noddings, 1984). Given these connections, questions of equity and access are applicable not only to some strands in the field that focus on questions of teachers as leaders (e.g., Henderson & Gornik, 2007), but also, and perhaps more importantly, speak to core questions that remain central to curriculum studies (e.g., Kridel, 2010; Malewski, 2009).

This study examined the overarching question: How do students experience encounters with sense-making in such a way to understand, examine, and make meaning in being in relation with school communities as school leaders? Artmaking is recognized as an experiential mode of inquiry that reveals insights and ways of understanding that impact our capacities for knowing (e.g., Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2008; Dewey, 1934; Eisner, 2008). Utilizing artmaking for making sense of our lived experiences through sensory exploration creates spaces for school leaders to consider their actions and reflect upon their impact (e.g., Ellsworth, 2005; Springgay, 2008).

The researcher utilized a case study approach to research, a method that was particularly well-suited to the work because of the ways in which it affords the researcher an opportunity to investigate a contemporary phenomenon within a real-life context across multiple sources of data (Feagin, Orum, & Sjoberg, 1991; Yin, 1994). Data collected consisted primarily of 48 weekly audio/video reflections (three participants and 15 reflections each), field notes, and course assignments (i.e., 3 equity audits, 27 metaphors, 15 small group reflections, 3 action research studies, and three artmaking projects). Data analysis consisted of examining and categorizing data evidence to address the initial propositions of a study (Trochim, 1989; Yin, 1994). Analysis yielded the following four emergent themes: (1) Promoting social justice leadership; (2) sense-making and school leadership identity; (3) living inquiries through sense-making; and (4) embodied sense-making through artmaking.
Findings open up possibilities to deepen understanding in how to prepare school leaders’ ways of knowing through sensory experience in order to make meaningful change. Experimental exploration and thinking about knowing through sense-making suggests faculty reconsider how to expand candidates’ ways of knowing about what it means to lead for social justice (e.g., Author, 2010).

Author

• Christa A. Boske, Kent State University