The Duration of Ontology

• In Event: Pedagogies of Ontology: Interventions and Intraventions of Practice-Based Research

Abstract

Objectives:
This paper presents the processes of inquiry provoked by the intervention to examine how re-conceptualizing time through Deleuze’s (1991) concept of duration aids in exploring how it creates subsequent opportunities for personal inquiry into teaching and research practices. It argues that rather than adopting an epistemological form of research interested in what is known about teaching, the intervention provokes an ontological form of research into the yet unknowable. This ontological shift is unique in that, rather than utilizing processes of reflection to explore and learn from experiences of the past, it explores the ontological event of becoming (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) which involves learning through rather than from experience to create new potentials.

Theoretical Framework:
Drawing from the work of Deleuze (1991) and Garoian (2013), this paper suggests that to enact and explore types of experiences best described as disruptions, or interventions, ontological research conceptualizes time as a non-linear simultaneity of past, present and future as duration (Deleuze, 1991). Duration disrupts processes that have been used to make sense of experience, primarily acts of reflection, favouring instead practices that form generative connections for the potential for new and creative thought. This process emerged through the artistic intervention creating the conditions to disrupt personal perceptions of practices associated with researching and teaching, including opportunities for seeking what is yet unknown as a potential for teacher practice and arts based educational research.

Modes of Inquiry:
The three graduate research assistants involved in this project explore becoming pedagogical alongside the secondary visual art teacher candidates and over the course of three years, meet to discuss some of the tensions emerging in their conflicting identities and relationships. Utilizing an artistic auto-ethnographic approach, this paper explores one of the GRA’s shifting conceptions of arts based educational research that entertains intuitive forms of knowledge.

Data Sources:
Observations, field notes, journals, and researcher-produced films are examined, exploring the self-other interactions that unfolded during and after the research project. Writing the self into the research provoked on-going observations and encounters in which assumptions of the stable self were made to shift, move, and rupture.

Results:
As a result of the intervention, perceptions about what is possible in both teaching and researching have become amenable to change, shifting the artistic intervention to the practice of intravention, implicating personal perceptions of teacher education, pedagogy, practice based research and art. Through the concept of duration, this paper argues how the intravention destabilizes perception, memory and future desires in the present rather than affirming normative understandings thereby creating the conditions for new and creative thought.

Scholarly Significance:
As a response to Pitt and Britzman (2003), who argue that research and pedagogy should provoke rather than represent knowledge, this project pursues the potentiality of the encounter (O’Sullivan, 2006), producing asignifying ruptures that offer timely insight into how the graduate research assistant involved in the collaborative research accepts changes in their perceptions of arts based educational research practices in and through their own practice of inquiry.

Author

• Adrienne Boulton, The University of British Columbia