An Aesthetic Methodology of Culturally Responsive Socially Responsible Research Practice

• In Event: Rocks Along the River: Developing Culturally Responsive and Socially Responsible Research Methods

Abstract

I investigate different ways of knowing with special emphasis on the arts as possible pathways of self-determination for my fourth grade students. Researching children's experiences, both looking at and creating works of art, requires an awareness of an adult tendency to colonize children. Developing relationships with children in research settings requires an understanding of inherent power relationships. Children have the need to participate in the visual arts in developmentally appropriate ways, but to also be free from adult preconceived notions of the meaning or making of an image or work of art. The privileged status of Western European art cannot be denied. A socially just, mediated aesthetic experience provides opportunities for children to experience the multicultural diversity found within their communities. I explain how I shape a design that resembles a collage of practices in which techniques overlap to form a creative, transformative methodology for conducting culturally responsive socially responsible research with children that incorporates aesthetic experience with arts-based practice as a unifying, dominant theme. My methodology borrows heavily from emergent research practices such as narrative and visual inquiry, feminist epistemologies, critical and indigenous methodologies, and auto-ethnography (Denzin, Lincoln, & Smith, 2008; Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2006; Leavy, 2009; Sullivan, 2005). Influenced by my new identity as a collage artist and as an imaginative, novice scholar, I find the challenge to tailor a unique methodology liberating and filled with infinite possibility.

Author

• Debora Joy Nodelman, Chapman University