Ontological Tracings Informing Qualitative Research: Arts-Based Pedagogies as Inquiry

• In Event: Pedagogical Approaches to Teaching Qualitative Inquiry for and Beyond the Academy

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to highlight arts-based pedagogical practices used in an introductory doctoral level qualitative research class that allowed students to trace their ontological orientations in intelligible and embodied ways. Ontological orientations influenced how students navigated through epistemology, theoretical frameworks, subjectivities, and methodology that informed their inquiry. At the end of the class, students were invited to participate in a study specifically designed to understand how they traced their ontological tentacles into various parts of qualitative inquiry. Findings and implications emphasize the ways in which educational leaders, who aspired to become scholarly practitioners, and those who aspired to become future academics, discuss the effects of arts-based pedagogies on their nuanced understanding of qualitative inquiry, accessibility, and intelligibility in their future work.

Perspective(s)
Grounded in post-oppositional theorizing (Keating, 2013), this paper explores teaching qualitative research as a nepantlera (Anzaldúa, 1981). A nepantlera is a threshold theorist who can travel in between multiple worldviews without the need to belong in any one permanently and can honor varied ways of framing assumptions, values, beliefs, and understanding. Teaching qualitative research as a nepantlera allows for a post-oppositional theorizing where the educator meets the student where s/he is at, whether that might be in post-positivist spaces or in deep deconstructive spaces. Additionally, the educator can also nurture a student’s interest in “finding the essence of shared lived experiences” even if s/he is not particularly drawn to this worldview.

Methods
Informed by arts-based pedagogies, students created a self-portrait and participated in a duoethnography project. Duoethnography is a collaborative research methodology where two or more researchers explore each other’s life histories surrounding a phenomenon (Norris, Sawyer, & Lund, 2012). Upon conclusion of the class, students were invited to volunteer in a study specifically aimed to understand how participating in arts-based projects informed the ways in which they understood and connected their ontological orientations to other parts of qualitative research and the implications on their future work.

Data sources
Data sources include interview transcripts, arts-based and academic artifacts from class assignments, researcher journal, and conversations with peer-debriefers. About 400 pages of raw data were collected for 6 participants.


Results
Students emphasized how arts-based pedagogies created an embodied intelligibility allowing them insights into working with complex and interconnected social issues in education. Additionally, arts-based pedagogies created possibilities for data analysis, representation, and dissemination of knowledge in a way that could elicit transformative moments necessary to inspire scholarly practitioners and future academics to become change agents within and beyond academia.

Significance
Given that discourses of evidence-based research dominates policy, funding decisions, and accountability in education, it is critical that educational leaders/academics become strong advocates of qualitative research with a nuanced understanding of qualitative inquiry to mitigate the privileging of positivist and post-positivist forms of knowledge making. Often qualitative research can come across too abstract and unintelligible to pragmatic-minded scholarly practitioners. Using arts-based research as a bridge to create an accessible yet complex understanding of qualitative research opens up agentic possibilities of engagement with research.

Author

• Kakali Bhattacharya, Kansas State University