Seeing Double Helix: Art Making as Pathway to Humanizing Research Design

• In Event: Disruption, Collaboration, and Healing: The Roles of Arts-Based Research in Doctoral Education

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show how art-making clears pathways into what as a doctoral candidate I finally understand as my research-creation (Springgay & Truman, 2017) practice, and how art-making inspired and empowered me to design a nontraditional dissertation study of the building blocks of collaborative leadership across socially constructed lines of difference.

That study was a collaboration with adult leaders at a diverse urban elementary school in a gentrifying neighborhood, a community I’ve belonged to for more than a decade. It’s the first attempt at what I am calling Community Creative Inquiry, combining community work with scholarly and artistic work in an example of what a reimagined relationship between research and community building might yield.

The study is designed as a double helix that entwines my individual strand—the multimodal autoethnography of a White gentrifier—with a community strand in the form of a collective multimodal autoethnography. Both strands involve making art and reflecting on the process, and intentionally invoke the idea of healing. This design answers Ginwright’s (2022) call to institutionalize practices such as creativity, holism, reciprocity, and care, bringing them into dialogue with traditional academic knowledge creation and related policy-making structures.

From a theoretical standpoint, my dissertation study adapts and translates the notion of critical kaleidoscopic pedagogy (Kress et al, 2019), which emerged out of the tradition of postformalism (Kincheloe, 2008), into a community process of offering/combining various theories to frame knowledge that emerges during collaborative analysis. The intent of this approach is to tap into and express the full range of wisdom in the room. For this paper, I use Bobbie Harro’s Cycle of Liberation (2008) to examine art as a catalyst for change in my life that allowed me to interrogate and integrate various parts of my human identity into a new, specific identity of scholar-artist.

I will also briefly discuss study methods and results, with an emphasis on my own autoethnographic strand. Methods include a series of crayon/watercolor/salt works (Figure 2) that use glyphs to represent and explore key historical moments and relationships. Findings include that scholarly art-making is an effective tool for collecting personal memory data (Chang, 2008); that it encourages a deeper, broader exploration of a topic than writing/discussing alone, in part by modulating the pace of scholarly work; and that it assists with both surfacing and regulating the emotional intelligence that is crucial to holistic understanding.

In the spirit of research as ceremony (Wilson, 2008), the study’s intent is to unsettle research forms as well as boundaries among participants’ roles through a collective inward turn, and to ultimately contribute the story of our efforts to academic and popular conversations about the health of our schools, communities, and culture. Its potential significance lies in its possibilities for building community through innovative research as well as creating pathways for community-generated wisdom to enter the knowledge base. Related, the significance of this paper is that it could inspire more educators and students to embrace arts-based methods that push the frontiers of education research.

Author

• Kelly E. Bare, Molloy University