Vulnerability in Educational Research: Reading High School Students' Multimedia Stories of Power and Place

• In Event: 29.028 - Participatory Media as Intervention and Method

Abstract

This paper explores the role of researcher vulnerability in the work of interpreting visual forms in educational research; specifically, in the context of reading fictionalized, multi-media narratives created by high school students as ‘evidence’ of learning. The paper draws on qualitative data from a two-year research project with students in 9 Chicago high schools who participated in a national arts and writing competition in response to the question, “What’s the Real Deal on Power and Place?” (www.scenariosusa.org) The students submitted screenplays and visual-arts projects in which they tell stories about the role of power in their everyday lives for an audience of their peers.

The students situated their “Power and Place” stories in specific schools, neighborhoods and communities, yet they also used the storytelling process to move beyond geographical location and evoke the emotional situations and states of mind that shape their experiences of difficult learning; for example, one story brings into focus the experience of peer to peer aggression that erupts during a group social studies project. In these stories, the experiences of empowerment and change that support young peoples’ learning meet the emotional experiences of uncertainty, dislocation and conflict that may be interpreted as obstacles to learning.

The paper asks, what methodological orientation would enable educational researchers to locate and listen for evidence of learning in narratives of emotional difficulty? In the paper, the analysis of data draws upon the work of Brushwood Rose and Low (2014), whose discussion of the “craftedness” of multi-media narratives challenges educational researchers to attend to the more perplexing qualities of narrative in which “complex and contradictory meanings and experiences are revealed” (p. 2). This approach invites researchers to see the storytelling process as an exercise in world making for young people. From this vantage, evidence of learning is found in the complicated places of identification and emotional struggle the students create for an audience of their peers. These places of emotional struggle are connected to the students’ actual lives and localities, but as fictional narratives, they also address young peoples’ capacity to imagine stuck places and alternative scenarios, and experience the identificatory pull of everyday conundrums of power and difference.

The paper describes some challenges, for the researchers, of encountering the students’ stories as data. While the logics of educational accountability have taught us to look for evidence of learning in outcomes and demonstrations of mastery (Taubman, 2009), the method of analysis in this project is one of noticing how aesthetic forms evoke places of ambiguity and emotional complexity both in adolescent narratives of learning, and in the researcher’s encounter with these narratives; for example, a story about peer violence in a group social studies project might bring into focus the researchers’ investments in finding evidence of learning in resolutions and positive outcomes. The paper engages Dimitriadis’s (2012) speculations on researcher vulnerability, a method of “being moved by evidence—not conscript[ing] it into pre-existing intellectual and political frameworks” (p. 20).

Author

• Karyn E. Sandlos, School of the Art Institute of Chicago