A Canvas for Learning Qualitative Research: Using Arts-Based Research Processes to Explore Reflexivity

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

Abstract

Objectives:
The purpose of this study is to explore how using visual art enables doctoral students to engage in new ways of seeing their own learning of qualitative research. Additionally, we hope to engage session participants in producing artwork and exploring its potential in an academic research presentation.

Theoretical framework:
We draw on Agar’s (2013) arguments that social sciences need to be reconceptualized as “lively science,” in which human beings and their ways of living are at the forefront of “human social research”. We include arts-based research to explore how art creates “lively science” in qualitative inquiry. We particularly focus on the processes of reflexivity as key to deeper understandings of our own and our participants’ perspectives. While there are many confusions and definitions of the concept of reflexivity (Jootun, McGhee, & Marland, 2009; Kumsa, Chambon, Yan, & Maiter, 2015; Nind & Todd, 2013; Pillow, 2003; Watt, 2007), we use reflexivity to mean deep ways of exploring our own perspectives in relation to others, and taking action that transforms our ways of seeing the worlds.

Modes of Inquiry:
The paper is part of a larger project that explores doctoral student learning of qualitative research. The project is guided by an ethnographic logic of inquiry (Green, Skukauskaite, & Baker, 2012), which creates opportunities for exploring new connections, ways of thinking, and conceptualizations of various phenomena.

Data sources:
Here we use three sources of data: 1) student artwork produced in a qualitative methods class; 2) video recordings of student presentations of their art, and 3) artwork created by participants attending this session. Session participants will be provided art materials to engage in active listening, reflecting, and dialogue with presenters of this session.


Results:
Analyses of student artwork in relation to their presentations of learning qualitative research revealed that art enabled students to integrate their multiple worlds of family, work, school, and interpersonal relationships. Art created spaces for silence, thinking, facing confusions, and sharing various ways of understanding and experiencing qualitative research. Through art, students engaged in deeper reflexivity and started envisioning themselves as qualitative scholars. For the professor, using art in the classroom involved risk and facing the unknown, but it created new learning opportunities for all members of the classroom.

Scholar Significance:
Art in a research classroom opens opportunities for creating new ways of thinking and interacting with ideas and each other. Arts-based research helps generate new concepts and new ways of looking at established concepts such as reflexivity and research. As such, it expands ways of understanding and integrating qualitative and post-qualitative perspectives and performances.

Authors

• Audra Skukauskaite, Academic Research Consulting

• Liudmila Rupsiene, Klaipeda University