Keywords

Introduction

The development of self-study in our academic culture parallels the trajectory of each of our journeys as scholars and researchers in the school of education at a midsize private, faith-based institution of higher education in the southeastern region of the USA. As self-study researchers, we have taken a creative, arts-based approach in both the doing and teaching of self-study and reflexive practice while simultaneously using art as a mediating artifact to reflect on and develop our own work, as well as engaging others in exploring their research and scholarly pursuits through an arts-based, self-study lens. Additionally, we have developed and explored reflexive arts-based self-study activities as pedagogic devices to mediate students’ developing understandings of positionality and reflexivity in qualitative research processes in general and in self-study methods and practice more specifically. Our journey has taken us recursively from an arts-based pedagogy to self-study methodology and from methodology to reflexive pedagogy as we strive to develop our unique living theory.

In this chapter we trace our development as collaborative arts-based self-study researchers and the rhizome-like influences we have had on ourselves, colleagues, and graduate students. Each section discusses both methodological and pedagogical approaches used within the context of graduate teacher education, research courses, dissertation thesis advising, and professional development contexts in the broader communities. The chapter mirrors research and practice representative of our growing research interests over the last several years focusing on the integration of the arts, the use of arts-based research methods, and the use of self-study methods coupled with a variety of narrative tools for data collection, analysis of data, and representation of findings.

The evolution of our collaborative self-study journey led us to discover how arts-based methods could be useful as both processes and products for our research. Our results led us to the development of a new research methodology that we refer to as arts-based dialogic narrative analysis (ABDNA). Using a visual and narrative format, we hope to demonstrate our successes in integrating self-study into our academic culture, as well as a variety of local and international contexts, while critically reflecting on the significance of these experiences on our own practices as teacher educators and doctoral research advisors. To begin this narrative journey, we have chosen to introduce ourselves through narrative profiles to provide the reader with personal biographical details that will serve to elucidate how our early years were pivotal in forming both our philosophical and epistemological inclinations.

Our Art-Making Materials: Personal and Contextual Resources

Jill: The Artist

My training as a visual artist began in childhood under the tutelage of my father, who introduced me to “the arts” at a very young age and nurtured both my fascination with the making and the viewing of anything arts related. Whenever I was ill, my father would bring me a paint by number kit; containers of clay, glue, and small objects for collage making; as well as books on “how-to” draw, paint, mold, etc. My “formal training” began with painting classes at a small gallery owned by my father’s friends and then continued at the Lowe Gallery on the University of Miami campus, while my brother was in classes for advanced science and math. I think that I was pegged as the future artist, while my brother was being groomed for aeronautical engineering!

My dad made a living as a painting/interior contractor, but his true passion was singing, performing, and helping his children with projects. Every weekend was spent at fairs, movies and live performances, craft and art shows, or outside in South Florida’s beautiful, visual landscape. As a child I learned to appreciate the beauty of the world around me, both man-made and natural, through my father’s discerning eye. I will be forever grateful for his guidance in helping me to view the world with wonder and awe: a habit of mind that has been instrumental in guiding me throughout my professional journey. But it was my mother, herself a teacher and school administrator, whose advice I took while earning my Bachelor of Fine Arts, majoring in drawing/printmaking and art history – “get your teaching certificate while you’re there. When you can’t make a living as an artist, you can teach. You’ve always been wonderful with children.” It is Mom I can thank for having the foresight to guide me to my vocation and true calling: teaching. Throughout my professional life, my mother has always been there as my champion – to listen to me, to advise me, to support me, and to reassure me that I had chosen the most noble of professions of teaching.

As a visual artist, art educator, and teacher educator – coupled with my roles as principal, faculty member, chair, associate dean, and dean over the last 30 years – I have deepened and expanded my knowledge in a number of areas within the field of education, and I have deliberately worked to synthesize this knowledge while engaging in scholarly endeavors. Both my formal educational background, coupled with my years serving as teacher, curriculum director, principal, professor, and dean have compelled me to constantly seek ways to integrate and synthesize the foundation and knowledge I have gained from various disciplines in order to enhance the subjects that I have taught. Experiences gleaned from these professional roles, juxtaposed against the fields of curriculum and instructional leadership, have allowed me to traverse the literature and make connections between seemingly disparate fields. My research agenda has evolved in parallel to my practice, finally bringing me full circle in the pursuit of my own essential knowledge and truths, as evidenced by explanations of practice that demonstrate my emerging living theories.

I can trace my journey back to when I first started teaching as an adjunct instructor for my university. I was asked to teach action research for the first time and was able to offer this to teachers working in the school where I was principal. As I guided the students in my graduate course, as well as the teachers who chose to participate in a yearlong study of their practice in the classroom, I felt the power of studying and reflecting on my own practice as a teacher educator, observing that what I was experiencing was the beginning of my own “living theory” of how educational influence was being evidenced in the stories and actions of the social formations in which I was living and working.

My journey as a teacher educator and self-study researcher took a turn when I first turned my lens backwards, to my roots and grounding as an art teacher and visual artist. It began when I took a 2-week training in Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) – my paradigm shifted. It was serendipitous that I wound up at the Lowe Gallery of Art on the UM campus to take my students on a field trip (EDU 555-Integrating the ARTs) and wound up in the VTS training. The epiphany I had during those 2 weeks hit me like a bolt of lightning: My practice was my canvas, and I realized that I could begin using “the arts” as both the foci for my unfolding research agenda, as well as to examine my practice through my self-study scholarship.

Carter: The Actor

My career trajectory within academia began not from the classroom, but rather from the stage. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in theater performance in 1985 from Indiana State University with a number of professional summer stock credits already under my belt. I even had to forgo commencement exercises in order not to miss the first week of rehearsals for a reoccurring summer acting job as – what I have now come to refer to as – a “professional Cornelius Hackle” in the Jerry Herman musical, Hello, Dolly! This set into motion a decade of both paid and unpaid performance work around the country, much of it in New York City. However, once I became a member of the professional actors’ union – Actors’ Equity Association – the paying jobs in New York became fewer and fewer. What had been my office “temp job” became permanent, and within 10 years I was an assistant vice president of a leading structured finance insurance company. This career transition was as much of a surprise to me as it was to my parents: an academician father and a librarian-cum-stage mother. My husband – then partner – had a significant job opportunity which had us relocating to South Florida, and, soon after our arrival in Miami, the USA was struck by the horrific tragedies of September 11, 2001. Through the sadness and turmoil which followed, I made the decision to transition to English language teaching as a vocation and enrolled in an Applied Linguistics MA program in order to obtain the requisite knowledge, skills, and credentials to teach English at the college level. There was certainly something performative about teaching, and I have little doubt that my “he’s-a-natural” classroom successes have been supported by the formal preparation I received for the stage, as well as my own professional experiences in theater performance. Still, as life’s journey continued, I was feeling less and less like an actor and more like an educator and that felt – and still feels – right to me.

While teaching English language at an area college, I returned to university once again: this time to earn my PhD in curriculum and instruction with a specialization in teaching English as a second language at Barry University, where I currently serve as an Associate Professor and Program Director for our master’s degree programs in curriculum and instruction. You see, I am a product of institutional incest. I am one of the rare, eschewed-by-the-academy-at-large examples of university programs’ hiring their own academic children. Jill and I share a close academic kinship: she has long been and continues to be my teacher, mentor, friend, and research partner. It was through both coursework and collaborative research inquiries with Jill that I was first introduced to self-study as research practice. Nearing the end of my coursework was the Doctoral Colloquium in Curriculum course and then facilitated by Jill – a course which we will be describing more fully elsewhere within this chapter – and it was in the Colloquium where I began to understand the opportunities for the resurrecting and leveraging of my artistic abilities, sensibilities, and identities.

Bill Ayers’ (2006) Trudge toward Freedom: Educational Research in the Public Interest was pivotal in activating my view that I and other “educational researchers can gain sustenance and perspective by drawing on the humanities—poetry, film, theatre, and imaginative literature—in their search for knowledge and understanding” (p. 81), especially when one’s aim is to serve a public good through empirical inquiry. In particular, Ayers’ description of the work of performing artist, Anna Devere Smith (1993), and her performances in On the Road: A Search for American Character triggered within me a reawakening of myself as a theater artist with tools and sensibilities valuable to educational research, specifically through ethnodrama (Winkle 2016).

Our Canvas: Theoretical/Methodological Underpinnings

Vygotskian/Sociocultural Theory

Our work has been grounded in past experiences with each other and with other communities of practice, where we have explored the integration of arts-based research methods to portray perceptions of our collaboration as both construct and process. The theoretical underpinnings guiding our work are based on the primary concept that learning is a social activity (Vygotsky 1978; Wenger 1998). Fundamentally, Vygotsky’s theory of social learning resides in the concept of the mediated mind, “human beings do not have a direct relationship with the world; their relationship is mediated by objects, others, and the self, as well as through tools and cultural artifacts” (Vygotsky 1978). His theory describes development as starting on an external-interpersonal-social plane before being internalized and intrapersonally appropriated through language, the most important mediational tool.

Vygotsky also considered the art image as a form of communication, as it exposes and connects the “unconscious and the conscious” conflicts and emotions within and between the artist and the viewer (Lima 1995, p. 417). According to Vygotsky (1978), when the viewer is surprised by something unique in an image or process, the shock caused within the viewer’s visual experience mediates psychological change, resulting in the generation of new mental dispositions. These forms of critical thinking allow opportunities for art problem-solving in the zone of proximal development (ZPD), which operates when individuals are jointly engaged with others during art activities (Hedegaard 1990). As a shared, collective experience, the art activity nurtures interpersonal procedures that become social, historical, and cultural traditions among participants (Hedegaard 1990). Learning in the ZPD “transforms” the individual’s self-image, their art skills and knowledge, and their working relationships as they engage in the art activity (Wells 1999, p. 333). Changes that may occur during art activities may include “a capacity to participate more effectively in future actions,” “the invention of new tools or practices,” and “the modification of existing tools or practices, and changes in the nature of social relationships” (Wells 1999, p. 328).

Arts-Based Self-Study: Narrative Inquiry, Portraiture, and Visual Narrative Inquiry

The use of an arts-based educational research (ABER) approach within each of our shared inquiries was intentionally chosen to disrupt conventional approaches to research and the representation of our findings and is grounded in Dewey’s challenge “to break through the conventionalized and routine consciousness” (1958, p. 184) so that we might view things in new and perhaps truer ways. The evolution of our development as collaborative arts-based self-study researchers mirrors Weber’s (2014) explanation of the use of images rather than words as a better representation of the complexity of the whole while offering multiple viewpoints and multiple interpretations of theoretical positions.

We believe that a distinctive aspect of our approach is the pairing of the visual and the narrative. Thus, we integrate the methodology of portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot and Hoffmann Davis 1997) which itself is grounded within a phenomenological frame utilizing various ethnographic inquiry approaches. Story is central to portraiture, and we therefore draw upon narrative inquiry (Clandinin and Connelly 2000) traditions of understandings of experience as dialogically three-dimensional: interaction, continuity, and temporality. A distinction between traditional ethnographic inquiry and portraiture is that ethnographers listen to a story, while portraitists listen for story (Lawrence-Lightfoot 2005). Voice of participants is a key construct within portraiture: as witness, interpreter, preoccupation, autobiography, discernment of others’ voices, and voice in dialogue. But the voice of the researcher or portraitist is not silent. “With portraiture, the person of the researcher – even when vigorously controlled – is more evident and more visible than in any other research form” (Lawrence-Lightfoot 2005, p. 11). Intentionally resisting research traditions of documenting pathology and suggesting remedies, portraiture calls for an initial search for goodness within the phenomena under study (Lawrence-Lightfoot and Hoffmann Davis 1997). It assumes that areas of strength, flaws, weaknesses, and inconsistencies will be revealed through explication of emergent themes, participant and researcher relationships, context, voice, and the resultant portrait or aesthetic whole (Dixson et al. 2005).

Portraiture aims to bridge the realms of science and art. It aspires to capture the essence of human lived experience and examine, interpret, and present findings through aesthetically rich stories or portraits which we believe results in making empirical educational research more accessible to a broader audience of stakeholders. The primary tools and artifacts used throughout our longitudinal self-study inquiries have been language and art/image-making. Together, these tools and artifacts have been pivotal in helping us to reach new levels of understanding of self, of each other, and of our collaboration. Data and findings generated throughout our ongoing research have caused a ripple effect (Weber 2014) that has had a significant influence on each of us within our practice. Correspondingly, as we introduce our graduate students to a variety of unique lenses for analyzing their experiences in new ways, they are expanding their epistemological knowledge bases and introduced to unique approaches to ethical and just practices with their own students.

As artists and inquirers, we are inspired by Bach’s (2007) conception of visual narrative inquiry, which – in her use – primarily involves photography and photographic images as a means to explicating, expanding, or evoking participants’ or one’s own narrative story or experience. Building upon the work of Clandinin and Connelly (2000) and others, she suggests photographic images provide a visual realm to explore the dimensions of interaction, continuity, and temporality central to the conceptions of narrative inquiry. While in our own work we have not yet incorporated the use of photographic images, we believe Bach’s working definition for a visional narrative inquiry remains apropos: Visual narrative inquiry is an “intentional, reflective, active human process in which researchers and participants explore and make meaning of experience both visually and narratively” (p. 281).

Visual Thinking Strategies

In one of our first papers Looking In, Looking Out: Reflection, Refraction, and Transformation Through Three-Dimensional Self-Study, we reported on what occurred in our self-study community (Farrell et al. 2013) when we brought a specific pedagogy that democratizes the arts, Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), to a culturally and linguistically diverse low socioeconomic status (SES) urban high school. VTS, the brainchild of Abigail Housen and Phillip Yenawine, has been used for over 20 years through their nonprofit organization Visual Understanding in Education (VUE) to study how looking and talking about art, facilitated by teachers, impacts cognition (Yenawine 2014). Housen (1999) investigated visual thinking in her doctoral research while examining the experience of museum attendees when viewing works of art. From the patterns of thought that emerged in her longitudinal, qualitative study, Housen posited and developed her five-stage aesthetic developmental theory. The theory describes the characteristics of the novice art viewer as they progress through a series of experiences in art interpretation. Each of the five stages represents a more sophisticated level of knowledge, thinking, and communication. Housen’s theory, coupled with Yenawine’s background and experiential knowledge in museum education, led to the development and implementation of the VTS curriculum for grades K–2, 3–5, and 6–8. The teacher-facilitator using VTS presents a series of 10 lessons over a period of 20 or more weeks to the student/viewers. There are three principal stages which are designed to stimulate the thinking, communication, and visual-literacy skills of students: (a) looking at art images of increasing complexity, (b) responding to questions which are developmentally based, and (c) participating in carefully facilitated teacher-led group discussions (Goldberg 2005). The student/viewer is asked to orally respond to a grade-level appropriate narrative art image, prompted by the teacher-facilitator with the three sequential questions that guide all VTS inquiry: (a) “What is going on in this picture/image?”, (b) “What do you see (in the picture) that makes you say that?”, and (c) “What more can you find?” (Visual Understanding in Education 2012, pp. 5–5). During the art interpretation session, the students draw upon their observations and prior knowledge in order to communicate their thinking through interpretive-art dialogue by openly discussing their observations and reasoning in a mediated environment. This is then facilitated through clarifying statements and paraphrasing with neither explicit endorsement nor contradiction by the teacher; this democratic and dialogic environment nurtures divergent thinking and unpredictable, complex descriptions of viewers’ interpretation of the image (Hubard 2010; Zander 2007) supported by evidentiary reasoning (Guilfoyle et al. 2004).

Our research for this chapter was grounded in our hope that these students would benefit from the rich discussion and interaction that emanates from participation in VTS to enhance their skills in communication, critical thinking, visual thinking, and writing (Housen and Yenawine 2000). At the time we were advocating for the role of the arts in a milieu that placed great value on verbal thinking while many students were visual thinkers. We wished to develop the multiplicity of lenses and the “plasticity of body and mind” that would allow for multiple modes of thought, knowing that visual thinking skills atrophy when not developed or with lack of practice due to over emphasis on verbal and numerical activities (Brumberger 2007). Our belief at the time was that through the introduction of the VTS pedagogy to a group of teachers, we could help them to reframe some of their classroom content through visual thinking methods while guiding them to be more reflective in the process (Schon 1983).

Our Journey from Pedagogy to Arts-Based Self-Study Methodology

In 2013, we – along with doctoral student Mark Rosenkrantz – embarked on a collaborative self-study inquiry examining and aesthetically representing our experiences and learnings surrounding the conception, planning, and implementation of a Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) (Yenawine 2003, 2014) professional development training series for teachers in a low-socioeconomic, culturally and linguistically diverse urban high school in Southeast Florida (Farrell et al. 2013). The quasi-longitudinal self-study was informed through a Portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis 1997) methodological approach which we disaggregated through three metaphorical phases of “Old Masters” painting techniques and processes: Grisaille, Color Washing, and Opaque Color Application. For us, these three metaphorical phases would guide us through an (1) initial and preliminary study or sketch of the phenomena – rather than a fully formed portrait or series of portraiture artifacts – (2) a laying in of reflexive analysis in terms of our own sensemaking vis-à-vis the phenomena, and finally (3) the “completed” portrait.

It was during this “grisaille phase” when we organically developed the arts-based research methodology – serendipitously born of the VTS instructional pedagogy – that would become central to our ongoing work as collaborative self-study researchers, teacher- and researcher-educators, and dissertation research advisors: arts-based dialogic narrative analysis (ABDNA) (Winkle and Farrell 2014).

As teacher educators and researchers in a liberal arts and professional studies university located in an urban environment, we are faced daily with acting on and living out the social justice commitment of our university’s mission, which is grounded in the core commitments of knowledge and truth, inclusive community, social justice, and collaborative service. Through a formalized Community Learning Partnership involving neighboring public and private schools, the mission is enacted through the cross-institutional sharing of personnel and resources in order to provide educational and leadership opportunities for secondary school students, teachers, and administrators who encourage collaboration and support the nurturing of these values among all community stakeholders. As a result of our ongoing collaborative efforts to assist one of the “neediest” high schools in in this partnership, we were asked to bring strategies and best practices to the teaching faculty to help boost student performance in multiple content areas. Our ultimate charge was to introduce VTS to educators and to foster an understanding of and value for both visual and verbal ways of thinking as we attempted to create a culture of inquiry while offering teachers the opportunity to learn VTS and introduce it into their respective classrooms. We had entered this new inquiry as instructional practitioners and researchers constantly searching for ways of enhancing our practice – and ourselves – while striving to add legitimacy to our “scholarship of teaching” (Shulman 1986) and “living theory” (Whitehead 2007) through self-study.

In this section, we include an abridged sharing of the inquiry, its processes, and findings which led us to the development and refinement of the ABDNA methodology.

Developing Methodology Within Grisaille: Three-Dimensional Self-Study of Professional Development Practitioners

Grisaille – an artist’s term derived from the French word gris or gray – refers to a monochromatic painting technique used extensively by European Old Masters artists predating 1800. This technique of painting historically served the purposes of providing (a) an opportunity for the preliminary study of the person or subject; (b) a form of underpainting for a forthcoming, more richly detailed aesthetic artifact; (c) a teaching device used by mentor artists to focus students’ attention to depiction of subjects’ form; and (d) an opportunity for the laying in of contextual background elements (Krieger 2001) which we suggest contributes to a viewer’s understanding of time and place. In the Grisaille phase of our inquiry, we preliminarily sketched and “work[ed]-out all compositional considerations and tonal value relations before proceeding to the final color version of the painting” (Krieger 2001, p. 25). And as a newly formed collaborative triad of PD facilitators, we first worked through the developing understandings of our relationships to one another, sharing and valuing each other’s particular areas of expertise.

Through a series of meetings that involved the administrators of the high school with faculty and administrators from our institution, the decision was made to begin using this school as a field experience site for placement of pre-service student teachers enrolled in our required TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) methods’ classes. While revealing the specific academic and linguistic needs of the student population in the school – largely English language learners (ELLs) with Hattian Creole as a first language – a series of conversations led us to consider how the use of a VTS curriculum and pedagogy might assist the high school teachers in helping their students acquire the vocabulary and critical thinking skills needed to assist them in successfully matriculating through high school.

We were asked by the principal to bring VTS to the school as a professional development opportunity for the teachers as a means of raising student achievement and helping the school to meet its desired goals for adequate yearly progress, as determined by the state.

Methodology

Recognizing the legitimacy of using multiple qualitative methods in self-study research (Bullough and Pinnegar 2001) – and sensitive to the forms we used to design and sketch our inquiry – careful consideration was given to our methodological choices and stance. Initially, we entered the research responsively, through a series of collegial conversations and informal meetings, when the seeds were planted for the current inquiry to begin. Our initial dialogue began inside and outside of the institution over the course of several weeks in both informal and formal contexts that resulted in our formalization of the current inquiry. Through individual and collective reflections of these early meetings, we were able to “reframe” (Schon 1983) our individual goals for how our study should unfold, as well as our perceptions of how the teachers might feel about the imposition of the VTS PD. In true self-study fashion, the nature of our collaborative dialogue was replete with stages of communal reflecting and reframing (Loughran 2002), helping us to unpack our individual perspectives and work them out through our shared dialogue.

This dialogue was the impetus that helped us to explore new ideas, theories, and concepts that we were applying, enhancing our understanding, and spurring us to further action (Guilfoyle et al. 2004). As we continued to meet, reflect, and record, individually and collaboratively, we were reminded of and encouraged by the work of other self-study researchers as they reported on their experiences with promoting reflective practice (Dinkelman 2003) and developing a shared research agenda to better understand one’s practice and to improve teacher education programs (Berry and Crowe 2007). Throughout our work we were mindful of Zeichner’s (2000) call to build on the self-study work of others as we engaged in and reported on our own collaborative self-study efforts.

As our inquiry progressed over time and as we engaged in cycles of data gathering and analysis in a storied way, Bullough and Pinnegar’s (2001) words reminded us that “[T]he aim of self-study research is to provoke, challenge, and illuminate rather than confirm and settle” (p. 20) helping us to work through our questions and concerns – separately and together – and resulting in changes to our perspectives (Griffiths and Windle 2002). At times we had difficulty finding intersubjectivity regarding our research design, as we were constantly sketching, shaping, and thinking about how we would represent our research and validate our “claims to knowledge” (Whitehead and McNiff 2006). A pivotal moment occurred when we saw that our forms of inquiry and representation were becoming one and the same, developing simultaneously and interactively rather than linearly (Berry and Loughran 2002).

As researchers we tried to understand experience through multiple lenses while remaining cognizant of our own perspectives and the influence of those perspectives (Eyring 1998). The ability to fluidly shift one’s focus from the experience, to what shapes the experience, allows for more detail to emerge and a deeper understanding of the phenomena. As “native phenomenologists” (Keen 1975), we alternately explored our areas of inquiry, experiencing, reflecting, and interpreting, individually and collectively.

We began, then, to view ourselves within the inquiry as the lateral faces of a three-sided prism, with the phenomena (the VTS professional development series) viewed through the prism base. This relocated self-study to a deeper location within the prism core, where the central triangle became the methodology that grounded our inquiry as we viewed the phenomena through the lens of existing self-study literature. The interior triangles are the three dimensions of narrative inquiry: interaction, continuity, and temporality (Clandinin and Connelly 2000). Figure 1 below is a visual representation of our prism as research lens.

Fig. 1
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Prism as research lens

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By using the prism as our representational lens, we established our guiding question:

In what ways does the experience of designing and implementing a Visual Thinking Strategies professional learning community in an urban high school influence our practice as HE administrator, teacher educator, and art education practitioner?

As we began the implementation of the VTS PD series, there were various contextual constraints that were impediments to our desired progress. Scheduling of PD sessions, district policy regarding teacher professional development responsibilities, personal life circumstances, professional responsibilities, and participants’ attitudes and beliefs about professional development and art interpretation were acknowledged by us as challenges inherent in the development of the VTS cohort. We continued to examine and reflect upon our ongoing relationships to and with the teachers and leadership of “Henry Ford Senior High School” and – as well – our continuing co-construction and development of the evolving VTS curriculum for diverse high school learners.

Data and Analysis

Multiple data sources for the initial phases of the study included our ongoing dialogue, through email and face-to-face (F2F) meetings; telephone and Skype communication; preliminary meetings with administrators and teachers; journals; individual, collective, and community reflections; visual artifacts; and audio and video recordings of self-study meetings. As the study progressed, the researchers were each responsible for collecting data in the field related to individual and collaborative actions, observations, and reflections on the VTS training sessions and ongoing negotiations with school partners. Visual artifacts were used throughout the study to represent both data sources and findings and as a primary means of engaging in data analysis.

Data were also constructed and interpreted through a process of reflective art-making sessions, the products of which were analyzed, guided by the three VTS questions. Coming together for extended blocks of (mostly) uninterrupted time, we independently drew, painted, and sculpted what each of us perceived as “going on in the picture” of our work together as researcher-practitioners and, as well, the evolving grisaille of the professional development learning community which was emerging through our work at “Henry Ford Senior High School.” Next, each of us – as artist – used our own work as the object of an audio-recorded VTS session facilitated for the other two researchers. For example, Jill used one of her own images – a gesture drawing of a VTS lesson being delivered at the school site – for her facilitation with Carter and Mark using the VTS pedagogy, questions, and nonjudgmental orientation: “What is going on in this picture?”, “What is it you see that makes you say that?”, and “What else can we find?”. In other words, we used the pedagogy of the VTS teaching strategy central to our PD as a means to understanding our own experience of the phenomena of both planning and implementing the VTS training series. Figures 2, 3, and 4 below are the products of this initial foray into ABDNA.

Fig. 2
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Jill – The emerging VTS community

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Fig. 3
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Carter – Framework for a community of influence

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Fig. 4
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Mark – Three hands reaching

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Three-Dimensional Collaborative Self-Study Portraits: Findings

In this section we describe our findings (Farrell et al. 2013), which emerged as a result of engaging in multiple cycles of DNA, before, during, and after the creation and examination of our visual artifacts. It was during the third phase of our analysis when we began to ask ourselves, “what happens in a prism, and what has occurred in our prism?” During these cycles of ongoing dialogic inquiry as we explored the social, cultural, and historical contexts of our learning and practice, we simultaneously experienced Bakhtin’s ideas of heteroglossia, extracting meaning from each other’s words and using them to explain our own meanings and intentions (Guilfoyle et al. 2004). The following themes emerged during the final stages of our ABDNA, and we have chosen to use these themes – with vignettes from our individual narratives – as evidence to validate our newly found “claims to knowledge” derived from this study (Whitehead and McNiff 2006). Our themes extended our understanding of our collaborative self-study as prism as the following: refraction, transparency, illumination, mirroring, and dispersion. The hyperlinks which follow each theme’s description take readers to artistic artifacts which have narrative evidences of our learnings superimposed.

Refraction: Moments of Tensions

These were “critical incidents” (Loughran and Berry 2005) where tensions that surfaced during our dialogue in meetings caused us to push beyond our comfort zones and beyond our current thinking and current ways of knowing. These transitional moments of tension – drawn from misperceptions and, at times, opaque communications – often inhibited us with each other and during certain interactions. Yet, due to the nature of our dynamic, they also served as catalysts for each of us, pushing us in new directions and leading to new insights, both individually and collectively.

Transparency: Moments of Honesty

The refraction, or refracted moments, led to increasing honesty in our relationships, with one another and with others in our respective communities. This was when we truly engaged in the professional dialogue characteristic of many self-study groups (Guilfoyle et al. 2004) and essential to true collaboration. The safety we all felt with each other, and the value that we all put on the work, allowed for these moments of honesty, necessary in working through the critical moments in our collaborative research process, as well as the critical tensions inherent in our practice, which were revealed through our research. Eisner (2002) stated, “Representation can be thought of, first, as aimed at transforming the contents of consciousness with the constraints and affordances of a material” (p. 6). Together, as a team, we designed and acknowledged the constraints and choices of materials that mediated our access and ability to engage in the representation of our research and vision of the VTS PD curriculum.

Illumination: Moments of Clarity and Transformation

These were moments of insight when it all came together for one, or all of us, as a result of the scaffolding of our professional dialogue. Often, working on the debriefing of a VTS session and the planning for the next stage, something said by one of us would ignite another and help us to come to new insights and to shape our understanding of the phenomena. These “critical moments” were the experiences that helped to transform our existing notions of self, other, learning, and ways of knowing. Throughout our research there were times in our sharing of concepts and negotiating shared meaning that required us to go beyond words and included visual image-making as a way of processing our thinking individually and together. Cultural pluralism is the acceptance of multiple modes of representation in the mediation of thinking (John-Steiner and Mahn 1996). The internalization of our socially constructed meaning was supported by both discussion and image-making activities.

Mirroring: Visions of Self in our Collaborative Partners

Art is communication, the mediation of thinking through form (Eisner 2002). As we attempted to understand each other’s experiences and actions, specifically when engaged in our “art/image-making” ideas surfaced among all of us concerning our professional learning, forming our emerging living theories. “Living theory” is defined within the context of real-life theorizing, evident from the way teachers reflect on their practice, gather data, and generate evidence to support claims based on beliefs. The testing of these beliefs for validation occurs through ongoing dialogue and critical feedback (Whitehead and McNiff 2006).

Dispersions: Educational Influence on Others

We began our work together as collaborative research partners with several goals in mind. In this particular inquiry, the improvement of our own practice, in each of our respective roles, was pivotal for each of us as practitioners and self-study researchers. We each acknowledge “traces” of our individual selves that have been shaped and influenced by our interaction with one another within the prism of our collaboration. While we cannot emphatically make claims that the present study had a significant impact on the students and teachers with whom we interacted throughout the duration of this study, we do feel that there were incidents that occurred where the “rays of light” shining through our relationship break into constituent spectral colors, resulting in moments of influence external to the prism of our self-study collaborative. The relationships and ideas communicated through our dialogue extended our influence to other relationships, actions, and ideas that emerged in other places.

From Pedagogy to Methodology: Developing an Arts-Based Dialogic Narrative Analysis

Following this work with Mark – who was, by now, deeply invested in his dissertation thesis work – Jill and Carter continued to reflect upon our experiences within the triad collaborative, but our conversations seemed always to return to the data analysis processes that had so naturally emerged. Beyond the valuable learnings and new understandings of ourselves and our practices as developers and deliverers of professional development training, we had a shared conviction that perhaps the most significant outcome of the work had been the germinating seeds of a data analysis method grounded in the orientation and procedures of the VTS pedagogy. As a continuation of this dialogue around our experiences, we codified the procedures and shared them through academic presentation at the Fifth International Qualitative Research Conference in Guanajuato, Mexico (Winkle and Farrell 2014), formally conceiving it as arts-based dialogic narrative analysis (ABDNA). To follow is a description of the three-stage recursive process:

Studio Stage

ABDNA has three recursive stages. In the first stage (the studio stage), we come together to negotiate a reflexive foci or prompt. We then independently create visual representations of our self-study collaboration. Using a variety of art-making materials, we draw, paint, and sculpt what each of us individually perceives as “what is going on in this picture,” i.e., the picture of our self-study relationship. The art-making typically occurred in relative silence, though in close personal proximity with occasional verbal interactions.

Gallery Walk Stage

In the second stage – generally a week later and while audio or video recording ourselves – we meet to display our visual artifacts. We take part in a gallery walk whereby we each reflect on what we believe is represented in each other’s images. It is at this stage where each artistic artifact creator takes on the traditional role of VTS facilitator and engages the co-researchers using the three VTS questions which are at the heart of the pedagogical strategy. At this point, the artist-facilitator does not confirm or contradict viewers’ interpretations of their experiential art objects; through their paraphrasing and questioning, they maintain a neutral orientation while facilitating viewers’ opportunities to express interpretation of meaning vis-à-vis the artifact:

  1. 1.

    What is going on in this image?

  2. 2.

    What do you see that makes you say that?

  3. 3.

    What more can we find?

We use these questions to begin our dialogue, unpacking the images as artifacts in order to mediate our understanding of the phenomenon of our experiences as viewed by each one of us as a member of the collaborative. The art that we each created was the tool – the cultural artifact – that was used to ask each other what we saw in each other’s work or what we perceived was going on in that image. At times we modified the questions slightly, to fit our purposes, asking each other “what do we see that we perceive made the artist visualize it that way?” We used this process with each of the multiple images that we had created, taking turns to look, to reflect, and to ask each other “OK, what more can we find?” Ultimately, the artist-facilitator does share their personal interpretation of their own artifact and the meanings she or he had intended to instill within the image, resulting in a new cycle of dialogic analysis which is – again – recorded. This opportunity for the artist to share their “intended” meaning is a significant departure from the traditional VTS pedagogy which would never reveal an artist’s original intent or meaning.

Recursive Content-Analysis Stage

In the third stage (recursive content analysis), we transcribe and then collectively view, review, and code the video recordings of our gallery walk sessions using a content analysis approach: examining our data for keywords, phrases, and other notations and denoting categories of concepts which were refined and reduced, first individually, then collaboratively through our combined perspectives.

This assemblage of stages in the ABDNA data collection and analysis reflects our notion of heteroglossic dialogue (Bakhtin 1984) used to represent the multiplicity of voices and meanings shared through our research. Through this sharing, “living and telling, reliving and retelling” (Clandinin and Connelly 2000), we reveal to each other differing perspectives and interpretations of events. As we attempt to understand each other’s experiences and actions, ideas surface concerning professional learning, forming an emerging living theory. “Living theory” is defined within the context of real-life theorizing, evident from the way teachers reflect on their practice, gather data, and generate evidence to support claims based on beliefs. The testing of these beliefs for validation occurs through ongoing dialogue and critical feedback (Whitehead and McNiff 2006).

Through the interplay of our language and iconography, we see the influencing actions of our dialogue and the resulting changes in our interaction. The boundaries that inhibit the sharing of insights and meanings of our experiences with one another begin to disappear, allowing our intellectual and emotional skins to become permeable and allow for the flow of the rhizoaction to move us to newer levels of shared understanding of a particular phenomenon.

Recursive Journeying from Methodology to Reflexive Pedagogical Device: Evolution of the Doctoral Colloquium

Our journey has taken us recursively from an arts-based pedagogy to self-study methodology and from methodology to reflexive pedagogy as we strive to develop our unique living theory. While retrospectively examining the trajectory of our collaborative self-study research, what emerges for us is the distinction between our uses of a specific arts-based pedagogic approach (VTS) when delivering PD in a community of classroom teachers, to our later use of the VTS questioning as the basis for a methodological tool for data analysis, resulting in our development of ABDNA. The findings that emerged from that study and implications for our practice led us to the next stage of our journey wherein we began to integrate arts-based pedagogic devices within the context of our graduate teacher education and research courses as tools to engage students in reflexive processes and practice. The reciprocal manner in which we have engaged in team-teaching and the examination of our practice as collaborative self-study researchers has resulted in the integration of self-study, arts-based research methods, and emancipatory practices within several of our graduate courses, but more specifically it has led to the evolution and regeneration of “the Colloquium,” a unique course that reflects the recursive journey of our collaborative research which has evolved to its current form as a direct result of our longitudinal inquiry: we have come full circle.

Historical Orientation to “the Colloquium”

Since the inception of the PhD. in curriculum and instruction program at our institution, the “Colloquium” has been a distinct course that offers advanced study of special topics and current issues related to the broad field of curriculum while providing continuous support and direction to doctoral students in developing their expertise in areas of inquiry and research, identifying professional development activities, writing professional publications, and designing presentations. Intended as a unique complement to the prescribed curriculum core, but required by curriculum and instruction majors, the Colloquium is open to intermediate and advanced doctoral students who wish to “broaden their horizons” by considering perspectives, issues, and principles central to other disciplines, professional fields, or areas of criticism, as juxtaposed against the broad field of curriculum thought and inquiry.

The course activates participants in critical reflection around research-based knowledge and truth claims through readings and collegial discourses vis-a-vis purposes and motivations for engaging in educational research. Through explicit examinations of whose voices and truths are privileged and whose are marginalized, course participants consider their own and others’ motivations for choosing a particular research foci: potentially identifying opportunities for entering into empirical inquiry through a social justice or advocacy lens, congruent with our university’s mission and core commitments. By engaging participants in readings, community and service activities, as well as collaborative arts-based experiences, we take action to foster an inclusive community. This is specifically embodied through a community service or community action project or research proposal which promotes a public interest.

Historically, this was a course that Jill had conceptualized and written, taught, and labored over every other year, and one in which she implicitly embedded pedagogies and methodologies that she was utilizing as part of her own professional development and evolving research agenda (i.e., self-study, VTS, arts-based research methods, and portraiture). While the stated overall goal is to engage students in issues relevant to their programs using academic as well as “popular literature” as sources, she had always used this course as an opportunity for students to consider contemporary issues and topics situated within the current milieu while examining their own and others’ motivations for choosing particular research foci and offering them opportunities for entering into inquiry through a social justice or advocacy lens. In truth, the Colloquium was also an opportunity for Jill to open students’ eyes to her own passions: the arts and the environment and the sustainability and significance of both.

In the first few iterations of delivering the Colloquium, students’ comments attested to their “ah-ha” moments when forced to consider how they might use their researchers’ lens to both advocate for the interests and perspectives of marginalized groups while trying out different methodological tools. It was also evident that research foci selected by students in the Colloquium oftentimes became the seeds of their dissertation research. We have often referred to one of Carter’s comments, reflecting on his doctoral coursework, when he shared the impact of the Colloquium on his epistemological orientation and the motivation he felt to do “research in the public interest.” It was also during that same offering of the Colloquium–when on a “field trip” to hear Philip Yenawine–that Carter was first introduced to Visual Thinking Strategies. The seeds had been planted.

Transference of Course “Ownership”

In the summer of 2013, Carter shadowed Jill when she decided to use Maxine Greene’s Releasing the Imagination (1995) for the first time, along with Lynn Butler-Kisber’s Qualitative Inquiry (2010). Jill had already been dabbling with arts-informed inquiry and the integration of arts-based methods in her research and had recently used collage, visual mapping, and painting in a collaborative self-study done with two doctoral students (Farrell et al. 2012). Having served as videographer in this study, Carter was familiar with the arts-based approaches, and we readily agreed to using collage as a pedagogical device. Through the art-making collage activities, we hoped to scaffold students’ examination of their own – and others’ – motivations for choosing research foci. The aim was for students to identify opportunities for entering into inquiry through a social justice or advocacy lens through the development and articulation of a personal advocacy position which gives voice to a marginalized population or entity. We further had students articulate its application through a community-based research project or project proposal that serves the public interest.

That summer was a pivotal moment in the history of the Colloquium, as the groundwork laid led to the generation of the next few years’ iterations where we were motivated to expand our knowledge and that of our participants with new theories, curricula, and pedagogical strategies emerging from our own collaborative self-study research and our engagement in critical praxis with each other, as well as our colleagues in the larger communities in which we were each engaged. Our shared delivery that summer also resulted in the recognition that some of the pedagogic and methodological tools that we were using in the course, and in our self-study inquiry, were “keepers” and that these things needed to be more explicit in the syllabus.

This experience, along with insights gleaned and lessons learned, led us into the next phase of our collaborative research: From Mission Alignment to Lived Curriculum: Walking the Walk in a Doctoral-Level “Special Topics” Course (Farrell and Winkle 2014). This collaborative self-study examined the nature of our co-facilitation of the next iteration of the Colloquium which was presented at the 13th Biennial Colloquium of Dominican Colleges and Universities.

Having grappled with the intentional and amorphous nature of the Colloquium, but challenged with the parameters of an upcoming program review, we used our self-study lens to explicate processes in which we were engaged as we attempted to transform a “flexible” curriculum in order to codify key readings and experiences in our effort to maintain meaningful and explicit alignment to our University Mission and Core Commitments, regardless of the faculty charged with its facilitation. This required us to shift from the written curriculum, the syllabus as it had existed, to the lived curriculum: what was actually happening in terms of including an ABER and social justice focus – engaging our students in “doing research in the public interest.”

Once again we tried on a different arts-based lens, choosing to represent our findings vis-à-vis this self-study inquiry through the performative metaphor of a dance. Why dance, one may ask? It was during this time that both of our roles were shifting and the nature of our relationship as collaborative research partners and critical friends was taking us both into new directions. Jill’s responsibilities as an associate dean were mounting, and her availability to teach multiple courses in the doctoral curriculum core was limited. At the same time, Carter was establishing himself in his full-time faculty role and beginning to explore ethnodrama as a research practice (Winkle 2016) while also wanting to take on additional course preps in the doctoral program. The Colloquium was a course that Carter had long coveted, and, while Jill was reluctant to let go, she knew the time had come to release ownership and that Carter was the one faculty member who “got it.” We saw this as an opportunity to come back as research partners, once again exploring our dyad through a collaborative self-study lens with dance as the chosen art form.

It was during one of our research meetings when we were working on the presentation for the Dominican Colloquium that the idea of stepping into someone else’s shoes was explored. Our shared dialogue took us from “if the shoe fits, wear it” to “following others’ footsteps” to “can I live without my favorite shoes?” This was a critical juncture in the dynamic of the collaboration as Carter found himself walking on eggshells as he cautiously provided and responded to critical feedback about the existing syllabus and his own experience of the course, while Jill had to carefully navigate and steer the conversation, mindful of Carter’s developing role as a faculty member. We vividly remember the meeting when we were both moved to jump up and do the waltz, ever mindful of not wanting to step on the others’ toes!

In 2015 – during the next iteration of the Colloquium – Carter “flew solo” with Jill joining the final session as we used “arts-based dialogic narrative analysis” (ABDNA) to unpack the students’ collage presentations. At this point we had agreed to adopting a persistent theme for the Colloquium “non satis scire: to know is not enough,” but we were still grappling with a yet-to-be-codified learning outcome which included an exploration of educational research practices absent from the core doctoral research curriculum, such as arts-based inquiry, self-study, participatory action research, and emancipatory inquiry.

Returning to a Co-facilitated Colloquium

Our relationship as self-study research partners over the last 2 years had taken on a new dimension in tandem with the direction of our professional identities. As we were evolving in our respective practice – Carter as a more seasoned faculty member and Jill as Dean – opportunities for collaborative research had become more limited. But given the nature of our relationship and the commitment we each held to growing our “living theory,” we continued to meet regularly for critical friends’ sessions. It was during one such session in the Fall of 2016 when the seeds for our latest inquiry were sown. During the previous summer when Carter was given the opportunity to teach Qualitative Inquiry in the doctoral research core for the first time, he decided to be more explicit in helping students to be more aware of their positionality as researchers, mindfully and explicitly including reflexivity (Berger 2015). At the same time, Jill had been exploring the use of mindfulness in her daily yoga practice, as a tool for helping her to deal with the challenges of her administrative role, as well as personal challenges presented after the sudden death of her husband. The shared dialogue and arts-based research that was undertaken during that time led to our latest study, Mindfully Journeying Toward Researcher Reflexivity in Dissertation Advising and Graduate Education: A Visual-Narrative Inquiry, a paper presented at the Eighth Annual Conference of The Qualitative Report. This collaboration and the renewed synergy created during our working sessions served as a catalyst for the decision to have Jill return with Carter as co-instructor of record for the delivery of the Colloquium.

The Journey of Our Living Theory Continues

In reflecting on our journey, we are reminded of Barone and Eisner’s eloquent words, “the place of the artistic and the aesthetic in the process and product of social research has indeed been illuminated and expanded” and “artistry in the social research process is nothing new” (Barone and Eisner 2012, p. x). As collaborative self-study researchers utilizing a combined methodological approach to our research and practice, we have engaged in the implementation of art-making and reflexive pedagogies to unpack the transformation of our practice and, in turn, brought these devices into the classroom for the purposes of engaging our graduate students in understanding and reflecting upon their respective practices. We believe our use of arts-based devices lets a broader audience “read” our research and participate in our experiences as researchers and practitioners and helps to make these methods more available/accessible for consumption and adaptation by our students and colleagues. The rhizome-like influences evidenced by our learning and the explanations of our educational influence on others in our academic community have been strengthened by our deliberate choice of an arts-based self-study approach as both our methodological and pedagogical approach. Our engagement in the research process of self-study while utilizing arts-based methods at all stages has allowed us to explore and unpack our practices with a depth and richness not available through more traditional research paradigms. We believe that our journey into the “how” and “who” and “why” of self-study (De Lange and Grossi 2009) – specifically through the integration of an aesthetic approach to both the construction and analysis of data – may prove fruitful to a wider community of educational researchers who similarly envision an artistic approach to research that extends beyond artistic or visual modes of representation (Weber and Mitchell 2004) within self-study.

Cross-References