Teija Löytönen

Engaging Dialogue: Co-Creating Communities of Collaborative Inquiry.

This dialogical article reflects stories of encounter. The unexpected collision of our worlds and thoughts, and the familiarities and tensions we came to recognize in each other’s experiences when facilitating collaborative research in two communities of dance teachers, has given birth to this shared line of inquiry. We have come to acknowledge that our collaborative endeavor to better understand our experiences facilitating dance professionals in exploring their cultures of dance teaching and pedagogical practices has offered reassurance, inspiration, even discomfort, as it has led us to newfound awareness of our ways of doing research and facilitating inquiry. Our two-year dialogical journey has led us to consider the chaotic and continually shifting, transformative process of constructing oneself as a researcher in the midst of converging locations, spaces, time and others. In this article, we consider how perspectives gained from our experiences facilitating dance teachers in inquiry, and our conversations about theses encounters, might align with, challenge or present new ways of looking at collaborative inquiry as a mode of research, learning, discovery and change.

Educational development within higher arts education: an experimental move beyond fixed pedagogies

Abstract This paper explores creative educational development by asking what it is or might become. It is based on a singular pedagogical process within the fields of arts, design, and architecture in higher education. The exploration is framed by Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, which allows for a movement beyond educational certainties that might sometimes limit developmental efforts in higher education. With the intersection of artistic-pedagogical processes and theoretical investigations, the paper aims to imagine potentialities for thinking and doing otherwise in educational development. Thus, this paper strives to become open toward expanding difference and creation within educational development processes.

A Slow Reading [of] Notes and Some Possibilities of Liberated, Open, Becoming Universities

University similar to church is one of the oldest institutions passing and preserving cultural heritage. In addition, universities are active societal contributors and influential communal contingences in our contemporary societies. However, recently increasing numbers of these traditional and historical functions of universities have become hijacked by neoliberal practices and values. Oftentimes, alternatives to the restructured and liberated universities are considered as unwanted exceptions. Potential higher education anomalies cannot be fully materialized or practiced due to the limited resources, paralyzing normative practices, market-driven beliefs, and capitalistic values of dominant higher education systems and structures. Rather than continuing these discourses, in this article, we will take a step forward, discuss, dream, and image diverse possibilities or universities to come. Thus, we will focus on imagining, pondering alternatives, and writing notes (to be read slowly) about fragile futures of liberated, open, and becoming universities.

Mo(ve)ments, Encounters, Repetitions Writing With (Embodied and Textual) Encounters

This article illustrates and invites into a shared (ad)venture and process of collaborative inquiry inspired by taking the concepts of “becoming” and “thisness” both seriously and joyfully. Collaborative and embodied research practices between four academics in the intersection of arts, education, and artistic/post qualitative research affect the multiple processes of knowing: What and how we come to know, what we ask, and how we approach our work and each other, and others in the academia. In this process/article, we wonder, how material and immaterial encounters entangle with/in writing, how subjectivities become smooth(er), and how knowing turns toward open-ended movements.

Developing a Transdisciplinary University in Finland through Arts-Based Practices

Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland, is engaging in broad university initiatives around art and creative practices that offer access to arts-based theory and production for all students through transdisciplinary courses, exhibition spaces and art events across campus. In this chapter, we explore the theoretical framework for the development and implementation of these initiatives. Within this framework, we provide examples of how university pedagogy functions at the limits of disciplines, offering an opportunity for thinking and activities that might not (yet) be possible within the traditions of the dominant disciplines. We discuss in detail how one initiative creates new pedagogical approaches to higher education and encourages experimentation and exploration through arts-based methods and methodologies. Lastly, we discuss a critical, self-reflexive approach to university pedagogy, where our present understanding of art and design is problematized and transformed by other disciplines, and the emergence of completely new areas of inquiry and practice.

Relational spaces: wit(h)ness-ing in writescapes

ABSTRACT This paper might not describe spatial writing or qualitative inquiry. This paper might not express or represent writing in well-defined space by clearly identified scholars or authors. This paper might not write and presented images might not speak. Instead, possibilities in this paper might be stimulated through the acts of reading, writing, thinking, and doing. Writescapes, as lived and discussed in this paper, have potential to create and produce other writings, becoming thinkings, and conceptual experimenting in relation to qualitative inquiry even at the times of continuously changing political apparatuses. As such writescapes produce often in very unexpected ways through their relationality and connectedness and they bring together writers, texts, spaces, and processes. In this article, we interact with spatialized texts and relational processes in very intimate ways acknowledging our scholarly and socio-political contexts but at the same time working against normative scholarship and linear scholarly thinking and writing.