Rita L. Irwin

A/r/tography as Living Inquiry Through Art and Text

There is a substantial body of literature on arts-based forms of research demonstrating scholars’ endeavors to theorize the production of the arts as a mode of scholarly inquiry and as a method of representation. However, if arts-based research is to be taken seriously as an emerging field of educational research, then perhaps it needs to be understood as a methodology in its own right. This entails moving beyond the use of existing criteria that exists for qualitative research and toward an understanding of interdisciplinarity not as a patchwork of different disciplines and methodologies but as a loss, a shift, or a rupture where in absence, new courses of action un/fold. This article proposes an understanding of arts-based research as enacted, living inquiry through six renderings of a/r/tography: contiguity, living inquiry, openings, metaphor/metonymy, reverberations, and excess.

The Rhizomatic Relations of A/r/tography

A/r/tography is a form of practice-based research steeped in the arts and education. Alongside other arts-based, arts-informed and aesthetically defined methodologies, a/r/tography is one of many emerging forms of inquiry that refer to the arts as a way of re-searching the world to enhance understanding. Yet, it goes even further by recognizing the educative potential of teaching and learning as acts of inquiry. Together, the arts and education complement, resist, and echo one another through rhizomatic relations of living inquiry. In this article, we demonstrate rhizomatic relations in an ongoing project entitled “The City of Richgate” where meanings are constructed within ongoing a/r/tographic inquiries described as collective artistic and educational praxis. Rhizomatic relations do not seek conclusions and therefore, neither will this account. Instead, we explore a/r/tographical situations as methodological spaces for furthering living inquiry. In doing so, we invite the art education community to consider rhizomatic relations performed through a/r/tography as a politically informed methodology of situations.

Becoming A/r/tography

This article explores moments of becoming a/r/tography. A/r/tography is a research methodology, a creative practice, and a performative pedagogy that lives in the rhizomatic practices of the in-between. Resisting the tendency for endless critique of past experience and bodies of knowledge, a/r/tography is concerned with the creative invention of concepts and mapping the intensities experienced in relational, rhizomatic, yet singular, events. Considering several recent research projects, this article explores what it means to be becoming a/r/tography. Rather than asking what an art education practice means, the question becomes what does this art education practice set in motion do? There can be no being a/r/tography without the processes of becoming a/r/tography.

Medicine Wheel Imag(in)ings: Exploring Holistic Curriculum Perspectives

Here is a call that yearns for what has been separated and one that also rings with a joy at the resounding rhythm of life. Possibilities are all around us— the empty, the full, and all that lies between— the choices among them are ours, a choice to wake up, a choice to hear the call of our own heartbeat. Surely we recognize the rhythm, the spirit that animates our deepest places and pulsates through every now moment, that rhythm which vitalizes our being from its prison of numbness. But do we feel that rhythm? Do we hear that call?

Artist-Teacher Partnerships in Learning: The in/between Spaces of Artist-Teacher Professional Development.

Artist‐in‐residence programs frequently act as professional development initiatives for teachers. Little understanding of the relational nature of artist‐teacher learning exists. In this article, we discuss Learning Through The Arts ™, describing conflicting expectations as artists and teachers learn from each other, and explore the relationship of artists’ growth and learning to teacher development. Using participants’ narratives, we illustrate existing tensions and challenges for visual art education. We present the need to open spaces for artists to construct new understandings of themselves as teachers in relation to themselves as artists, and for teachers to develop artist selves alongside their teacher selves.

A haiku suite: the importance of music making in the lives of secondary school students

This study offers an arts-based a/r/tographic inquiry using poetic transcription and representation of interviews conducted with a co-educational group of 14 students in a West Vancouver, British Columbia secondary school rhythm and blues band class. The decision to translate and analyse the interview transcripts into the Japanese poetry form of haiku is rooted in research literature in education and other fields, primarily health and nursing studies. Those studies demonstrate the efficacy of the highly condensed haiku to transmit meaning in a synthesised and creative form. While music education has a body of scholarship on students’ attitudes towards music and their music education, this kind of research has generally been presented in more traditional ways. Our contention here is that arts-based topics are complemented and illuminated when investigated through arts-based methods. As well, arts-based methods such as a/r/tography, offer multiple and complex perspectives of what the data ‘means’, thereby offering a welcome harmony of topic and method. This paper captures the depth and intensity of emotions, engagement and transformative affects that adolescents experience through music making – music matters to young people.

A/r/tographic Collaboration as Radical Relatedness

In this paper the authors examine a/r/tographical collaboration in a community-engaged research study investigating immigrant understandings of home and place. The study, The City of Richgate, involves a complex collaboration between community members, community organizations, educational institutions, and a research team comprising artist-educators. The study crosses border zones of cultural, ethnic, geographic, institutional, public, private, and disciplinary boundaries, reflecting the ever-changing character of postmodern reality. In this paper the authors reflect critically and theoretically on the lived experience of radical relatedness found within the complex collaboration, particularly within the a/r/tographic research team. This offers a qualitative methodology of radical collaboration applicable to many fields of inquiry in the academy, art world, and community.

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.

Lingering in liminal spaces: a/r/tography as living inquiry in a language arts class

In this article, we explore how we live among students and teachers as a/r/tographers and how we become creatively immersed in the wholeness of the classroom experience as a result. This is in contrast to our initial intentions of using ethnographic techniques and qualitative methods. As we began our project, it became apparent that another lens would be more appropriate for our study: this lens was a/r/tography. Exploring our research processes and practices as relational acts and ruminating on our ways of being in the academy as a/r/tographers, we explore the liminal spaces between the use of a/r/tography as practice‐based research and the use of ethnographic techniques, as qualitative research, and consider how shifting amid these realms can re/shape research in new and innovative ways.

The Educational Imagination Revisited

(Eisner, Elliot W., 1979. The educational imagination: On the design and evaluation of school programs. New York: Macmillan.)