Autoethnographic, Arts-Based, and Music Education Research: Reilluminating Shards From Prior Experience

• In Event: 31.078 - Social Fictions: Creative Research for Social Change

Abstract

Objectives or Purposes
This presentation represents some of the process and findings enabling my book Arts-Based research, autoethnography, and music education: Singing through a culture of marginalization (manovski, 2014). Here I work to represent my journey-into-quest as a hybrid qualitative researcher away from experiences of marginalization in educational or other negative settings that fostered and normalized bullying and harassment in my life. I work to take our audience on my evolving journey of building and negotiating my identity while engaging in both self and social reflection within the process of this scholarly work (Canhmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2008).

Theoretical Framework(s)
Barbara Rogoff (2003) notes that being human involves constraints and possibilities stemming from long histories of human practice. I aim to share snapshot practices that prohibited healthful belief in myself, away from becoming more aware of my capacity to engage, initiate, and intentionally influence my life circumstance in meaningful ways (Bandura, 2006). Participants may also come to empathize that as a male singer, I have often been taunted and called “gay” and inquire how I have worked to join a community of mentors, colleagues, and writers that healthfully empowered me to become more aware of my evolving identity and voice, in ways that positively allowed me to more deeply conceive of myself as an agent impelled by self-generated intentions (Bruner, 1996).

Methods
Personifying Golde’s (2006) notion of “steward of the discipline” (p. 5), my emergent findings include that it is human to want and need to learn and for some learners, there are obstacles rooted in their prior experience. Empowering collaborations in trust through agency toward healing may provide opportunity for potentially new and positive stories to yield experience that are more meaningful, rich, and socio-culturally just. Such transformations derive from processes of learning in healthy spaces to create our fluid selves, mindful of careful reflection away from causing further harm.

Data Sources
This autoethnographic and arts-based approach will include a mixed-medium collage of woven narrative, music, visual art, and other media curated for this presentation, enabling discussion.

Results
This paper demonstrates methodological innovation while inviting the audience to engage and consider the important and fluid role arts-based educational/evolutionary research.

Scholarly Significance
Like Barone and Eisner (2012) I will work to thoughtfully render crafted and curated data depicting my evolving arts-based processes that strive to enable empathic participation in the life of another, those expressive qualities of an artistically crafted form expressing meaning and significance. Sidling next to my artwork, music, photographs, and audio/visual recordings, I may additionally share personal narratives or stories about myself––viewing myself as phenomenon––writing from my academic, research, and personal life (e.g., Berry, 2007; Ellis, Adams, and Bochner, 2010; Goodall, 2006; Poulos, 2008; Tillman, 2009). My aim is to humbly continue embodying my developing and blended epistemological qualitative researcher role in ways that invites participants to re-examine what they think they have already seen or have come to know in ways that are accessible (Leavy, 2009).

Author

• Miroslav Pavle Manovski, Independent Scholar