Feeling the data: Mirrored Invitations to Make, Listen and See Educational Possibility

• In Event: Centering Relationality & Expanding Knowledge through Artistic Practice: Transdisciplinary Education Research and Arts Methodologies for Change

Abstract

Human communities across time and place have always engaged in artmaking to make sense of lived experience and share stories. We therefore turn to arts-based research that centers relationality and ethical partnership to address a recognized need to disrupt hierarchies of knowledge and disciplinary silos prevalent throughout the research process (Mignolo, 2007; Warren, et. al., 2021). This paper shares the impacts of engaging collaborative data analysis as an artistic practice, paralleling a design commitment present in our middle school programming.
Disrupting settled paradigms that position subjectivity and emotions as interference over insight, we amplify the critical role the arts play in participatory research partnerships (Bagley & Castro-Salazar, 2019; Cahnmann-Taylor, 2013; Leavy, 2015; Tuhiwai Smith, 2021). We take up the arts as an attitude or approach to noticing with data (Camnitzer, 2020), wherein co-participants’ emotional and intellectual life histories (Bagley & Castro-Salazar, 2019) intertwine and make visible the experience of learning.
Data for this study is co-constructed within a nine-year participatory design research partnership (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) between a midwestern university and a community-based STEAM organization serving Black, Latinx/e and Asian/South Asian youth. Our multi-generational team of educators of color (spanning ages 13-45) intentionally blend the roles of educators, artists and researchers across all phases of research, teaching and design. Our data set includes over 650 pages of multi-voiced field notes, audio-video recordings, debriefs, and artifacts. Using ethnographic methods, we closely analyze interactional moments during design and co-analysis meetings.
We highlight four key moments that center artistic practices, engaging researcher-artist-educators in deepening discussions around data while making explicit a value for the subjective and felt in our noticings of the beauty and complexity of pedagogical interactions. The first moment exemplifies mediational portals that set new possibilities into motion. Using colored paper, yarn and fieldnotes, two team members (an arts education professor and undergraduate student) introduced a way of seeing the connections across field notes (Figure 1). Excitement for this new perceptional opening was palpable, and contextualizes how team members leaned into artistic methods of sensing the data in subsequent weeks, including improvised drawings rendering the embodied spatial affect of key pedagogical moments (Figure 2).
Over time, such practices took hold as rotating facilitators found ways to weave with the arts. In moment three, we share emerging parallels between the mediational conditions that support our students to take their artist-selves seriously, and invitations for the research team to embrace process (Figure 3).
The last moment draws from another undergraduate student-educator-artist-researcher bringing in a loom, inviting the team to engage in weaving as a physical process mirroring the phenomena in the data she wanted us to attune to—the ways teachers verbally wove and built on each others’ ideas with students (Figure 4).
Our arts-based approach to collaborative research impacted our relationships with each other, research and teaching, influencing our sense of possibility. We conclude by reflecting on how participatory arts-based methods can shape attunement to felt layers of pedagogical interaction, creating new perceptual resources for educational decision-making towards just and beautiful learning.

Authors

• Melita Morales, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University

• Sam Carroll, Northwestern University

• Onam Lansana, Northwestern University