Microethnographies and Labyrinth-Walking: Studio Arts-Based Educational Research Practices for Early Career Researchers

• In Event: Tending, Teaching, Writing, and Walking: Arts-Based Educational Research Methodological Possibilities and Praxis

Abstract

Arts-based educational research (ABER) practices urge qualitative researchers to refocus our gaze by dwelling in liminal spaces. How might early-career researchers (ECRs) expand their methodological repertoire by engaging in ABER? What helps ECRs learn to visualize the lives they encounter while creating microethnographies? And how do they learn to walk with others in order to absorb and understand the lives they are curious about? What forms of listening, reflexivity, and distinctions between emic and etic perspectives are enlivened by ABER practices? This paper takes up these methodological questions and offers promising pedagogical practices related to Labyrinth-walking as an ABER practice. Ways to introduce ECRs to the benefits of ABER and examples of new forms of mentoring ECRs will be discussed.

Authors

• Thalia Mulvihill, Ball State University

• Raji Swaminathan, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee