Daniel T. Barney

Complexity thinking mentorship: an emergent pedagogy of graduate research development

In this article we articulate a view of mentoring that extends into interactive and relational forms, fostering a redefinition of traditional roles and practices within mentor‐protégé models. From the perspectives of a senior administrator and two assistant professors, we revisit the mentoring spaces and relations within which we were engaged while working in an approach to arts‐based educational research known as a/r/tography during dissertation research projects. From our interconnected experiences, we propose a framing of the intersections between a/r/tographic research and mentorship informed by complexity thinking. We analyzed our work together while deconstructing the ways in which we have supported and unsettled each other. Through narrative inquiry we share reflections from dissertation research experiences, while also describing patterns of an emerging pedagogy of mentoring within higher education that we term complexity thinking mentorship. Borrowing from complexity theory, this conception of mentorship attends to the specific conditions of redundancy, decentralized control and diversity as being facilitative of evolving change and insight within graduate student research development.

A Vision for Arts Based Education Research within the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy

It’s a great time for arts-based research, especially but not only in education as a field. Indeed, one of the great strengths of arts-based research is its interdisciplinarity. Never before has the door been so wide open to methodological innovation, and the uptake of ABER continues to increase. In addition to ongoing interest in the visual and performing arts, there is a growing interest in film and video-based research (video-as-method, ethnocinema, performative documentary, to name just a few), and music-based research in scholarly communities in a range of disciplines, areas that have been underserved in the recent past. Amongst these important innovations in content and approach are developments in the critical theorizing of arts-based research, only strengthening its cross-disciplinary potential, and practitioner and researcher understandings of its power for social change. Arts-based education research innovations also continue to impact the ways in which research is “written up,” shared, and disseminated. This is one reason why we are so excited about fostering the section devoted to ABER

The Poster and the Poster Critical Arts-Based Research as Dissensual Aesthetics

This essay articulates how arts-based inquiry acts as dissensual activity holding possibilities for the redistribution of the visible, audible, and sensible within knowledge production and dissemination associated with research. Rancière’s conceptions of politics and aesthetics are used to analyze expanded relations among art, inquiry, and democracy within the academic poster session format at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting. We share how our reconceptualized poster defied institutionalized structures under the control of neoliberal logics through strategies of disidentification. This subversion of form and structure identifies exclusions in how we operate, so that we might redistribute spaces and processes associated with academic conferences for alternatives to be heard, seen, spoken, and performed. For these reasons, our poster serves as a generative locale from which researchers may articulate ways for representing data, engaging audiences, and undertaking critical arts-based inquiry with others that might further the practices of democracy.

A/r/tography Around the World

In this paper, artist-educators representing six continents share their experiences conducting a/r/tographic studies or teaching courses with an a/r/tographic influence. Authors share the new understandings gained from this form of arts practice-based educational research and offer ideas for how we might gain from this methodology as we attempt to better understand current issues around the globe.