Conducting Inquiry Through Arts-Based Transmediation

• In Event: Transmediation in Motion: New Directions for Theory and Inquiry on Multimodality in School Spaces

Abstract

In this paper we highlight two studies that used transmediation as a method of analysis. When analyzing qualitative data, researchers often rely on coding. It has become so ubiquitous that coding and qualitative analysis are often used as interchangeable terms (St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014). While we believe coding is a fruitful tool for researchers to employ, hierarchical thinking it is not the only way humans make meaning. The metaphorical thought seen in the arts and arts-based thinking (see Leavy, 2015; Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2018) as well as transmediation (Suhor, 1984) can also be helpful tools when researchers make sense of data in qualitative projects. While some scholars remain skeptical of these methods, Arts Based Educational Research (ABER) has increasingly moved away from the margins of qualitative research (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2018). We place our work within this growing field, arguing that including arts and arts-based analytic methods is methodologically rigorous.

To unpack this claim, the full paper outlines two studies that used arts-based transmediation as part of analysis. The first study was a practitioner research project that examined Author 1’s own practice implementing an arts-based pedagogy in a one-year dual enrollment program for high school seniors interested in education careers. The second study was part of a multi-year research project and focused on the writing practices of 24 adolescents entering their senior year of high school as they participated in a four-week summer academy. A wide range of data were initially analyzed using traditional methods like qualitative coding, but were then paired with analysis that utilized transmediation. Our research inquiries have taken the form of art-making and aesthetic thinking, and we therefore have adopted what we call an art inquiry stance. To take an art inquiry stance is to not only create art, but it has also meant that we collaboratively consider the ways such a stance can help us push beyond traditional research methods in order to uncover new knowledge and representations of that knowledge.

Findings from the two studies detail the ways transmediation paired with other analyses led to new insights. In Author 1’s study, she uses a process of transmediation in the form of art-making (Leland & Harste, 1994; Harste, 2014) in order to re-see data and generate new knowledge about her students’ experiences. In Author 2’s study, he outlines the interactional patterns he found at the group level while adolescent students were individually composing media in a shared computer lab. We believe transmediation is one way to consciously infuse linguistically based analytic methods and arts based analytic methods. In reality, many qualitative researchers already rely on transmediation, for example when creating written transcripts of verbal conversations. In our experience, the default assumption for many researchers is that transcription is preparation for analysis, implying the analysis begins after the transcript has been produced. We argue that transmediation is analysis and outline the ways we purposefully leaned on both widely used methods of qualitative analysis and arts-based transmediation in this paper.

Authors

• Debora Broderick, Central Montco Technical High School

• Matthew Hall, The College of New Jersey