Letters to Lab Rats and Stories of Magical Stardust; Storying as Relationally Mediated Artistic Practice

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

Abstract

Art offers us a medium of engagement with each others’ thinking, desires, and explorations. In this paper we consider 1) children's literary and creative labor as artwork (not solely learning artifacts) 2) children’s literary work as a shared creative endeavor between educator and student alike. As such, we bring an aesthetic lens to our research analysis as we ask: What might student work offer educators when considered as artistic endeavors? How might the interpretation of students’ creative labor inform real-time pedagogical interventions? Using an aesthetic-informed critical text analysis, and an examination of student artistic choices, we explore what these works say about students’ worlds, their agency, and their co-construction of learning spaces. We further bring this interpretive work to our partnerships with educators to inform new methods of inquiry into student thinking. We argue that creative writing and storytelling work has value for engaging youth and adults in bidirectional activity, where young peoples’ ideas shape the pedagogical responses of educators and vice versa.
We present analyzed data from two distinct studies, both centered on the creative writing and storytelling work of youth and educators in afterschool settings. We examine the arts as a research method on two planes- 1) letters and drawings authored by young people are interpreted as works of art. And, 2) the storyline of the curricula, co-constructed by the research-educator team and students, is itself analyzed as a relationally mediated artistic practice. Employing elements of critical content analysis of literary arts (Johnson, Mathis & Short, 2017), we attune to how youth, educators and researchers may be engaging the arts as a mode of inquiry into their worlds, personal, socio-political, aesthetic or existential.
Data includes ethnographic co-participant observational field notes, audio recording of weekly design and reflection meetings with local educators, and the letters, drawings and art works produced by young people and the educator-researcher team, and student-authored publications.
We found across both studies that students pushed narrative work in directions not anticipated or prompted by educators. In one case, students chose to write intimate stories despite being prompted to engage magic and silliness. In another, the shared narrative was refocused on non-agentic characters by a student interested in subverting the researcher-educator team's proposed storyline. This act invited educators to re-frame their previous understandings of the student’s ongoing efforts to resist and critique his immediate environment. The educators’ responses in this jointly created story became an avenue through which their pedagogical intention and care for youth wellbeing could work through artistic production.
Student art is often secondary or collateral to the subject lesson when art is leveraged as a pedagogical tool or hook. We have identified two main threads of value for educators and researchers alike: 1) Our analysis suggests that by respecting students’ creative labor as primary, we gain a more expansive view into student thinking, identity and agency. 2) That collaborative creative processes like storying and literary publication offer educators opportunity to respond pedagogically with in-the-moment artistic improvisations as well as more crafted visions of possible worlds.

Authors

• Meg Elena Escudé, University of California - Berkeley

• Jorge Eduardo Garcia, Stanford University