Chapter 8 Becoming Research Stories
Practices of Life Writing in Visual Art Education
In: Perspectives on Arts Education Research in Canada, Volume 2Search for other papers by Anita Sinner in
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Abstract
Our chapter unfolds as a métissage of five distinct research strands in art education where we weave together visual and literary expressions in what is often called the intimate practice of life writing. Stories open spaces to consider when is research, as a gesture that shifts thinking to movements, and to stories as sources of information that offer aesthetic, experiential, embodied, intellectual and emotional ways of knowing. In this conversation, the application of stories as a method of inquiry begins with our first strand, which questions whose voices and bodies need to be considered in curricular encounters during workshops conducted at the Heeum Comfort Women Museum in South Korea. In this case, art-making actions and dialogues raise questions about historical and cultural hegemonic practices. Questions of indigenous identity are then advanced in a self-study about in-between social and cultural boundaries that asks, “How indigenous am I?” and “Who gets to decide?” Proceeding to curricular intensities we turn our attention to differences, and visual life writing with photography to explore the diaspora of Egyptian Jews in Canada. Turning to just and caring notions of learning and teaching, the stories of ‘at-risk’ students in an inner-city high school in Montreal emerge as integral to visual art practice. Our final exemplar of storying research materialises as collaborative a/r/tography, where social fiction and multisensory art production maps transatlantic familial maritime histories. We braid our reflective vignettes from each individual research story to demonstrate the application of stories as part of our ongoing conceptualization of practice through creative expression. Our research stories are introduced as pedagogic pivots, demonstrating how stories operate as a vernacular method that is an accessible, artful form of expression.