From a Formative Intervention to Nomadic Arts-Based Educational Research

• In Event: 44.046 - Exploring the Intersections of Post-Qualitative Inquiry and Arts-Based Research

Abstract

Objectives:
The educational innovation promoted by the Erasmus+ Project “Show your Own Gold” (2014-2017) has, as one of its aims, to situate in a theoretical, methodological and practice framework the visual biographic narratives produce by NEET (neither in employment nor in education or training) youth. However during its development we experienced a ‘nomadic move’, in which artistic methods used (photo, video, personal narrative account, visual narratives), moved us towards an Arts based Research. The process of this transition and how this project was crossed by post-qualitative ways of thinking are what we explore in this paper.

Theoretical framework:
We approached to Gold’s project, guided by the following starting questions:
a) How are these young people (their school trajectories, their expectations, fears and uncertainties).
b) What visual methods allow making visible the interrelations taking place inside and outside the workshops.
c) How Arts based Research approach contributes to change a formative project into a process of inquiry.
d) How post-qualitative inquiry redefines the dialog with the project.
A key notion from the project was ‘self-image’ as a territory to explore how the pedagogical dispositive developed during the workshops generated on the young participants and adults nomadic displacements. We began to map trajectories not as outcomes but as “a question of orientations, points of entry and exit, a constant unfolding” (Braidotti, 2006, p. 160).
Modes of inquiry:
The process carried out in Barcelona involved two groups of young people (27 in total) in two training and job placement programs. During 12 weeks, a workshop with each group was developed to explore competences associated to young people’s self-esteem. They also learnt to recognize and narrate their own values and possibilities and project their personal stories in a biographic visual narrative (Pimenta & Poovaiah, 2010, p. 30).

Data sources:
During the workshops we create an archive of more than 1000 photos, write field journals, and young people generate 23 digital visual narratives. We also produce two video documents to give account in an Arts based Research manner of all that processes.
Results:
Processes promoted by the Gold project generated “a disruption of established ways of knowing, through learning events” (Atkinson, 2012, p. 10) and contributes to move from a formative experience into an inquiry process and to explore alternative forms of Art based Research. The poststructuralist ontology of nomadic thought had a meaningful contribution to this shift. Nomadism is defined in terms of processes of becoming, characterized by forces, flows, and fluxes that disrupt the unity of the subject (Fendler, 2015; Braidotti, 2014; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/2004).
Scholarly significance:
Through this nomadic inquiry process youth and researchers have been able to: Expanding the meanings of personal memories; self-authorizing to master their own voices and share them with others; create alternative (and unexpected) intersections between images, personal stories and post-qualitative concepts; to educate themselves and ourselves and make visible the invisible; and generating questions by transforming experience into knowledge and a formative project into an alternative Arts based Educational Research account.

Authors

• Fernando Hernandez-Hernandez, Universitat de Barcelona

• Juana M. Sancho-Gil, Universitat de Barcelona

• Maria Domingo-Coscollola, Universitat Internacional de Catalunya