Students Researching Inequality: Perplexities and Potentialities of Arts-Informed Research Methods for Students-as-Researchers

Abstract

Enacting research with the arts has been argued to unsettle, materialise and validate knowledge creation beyond familiar and numerical, verbal and linguistic modes of knowing and communicating. This chapter discusses the work of a students-as-researchers group (the Youth Advisory Council, or YAC) which worked with arts-informed modes of inquiry, inspired by feminist activist materialisms. We invited primary and secondary school students to consider adapting arts-informed and/or hybrid approaches in their own research generation, in response to their emerging questions and issues of concern. This chapter explores some of the possibilities, but also ambivalences, of attempting to move beyond a focus on conventional linguistic methods and the individual subject when encouraging students to use arts-informed methods in their own research. During the year, some of the perplexities of participatory work with students at schools were disclosed—including issues surrounding the default reliance on verbal and linguistic methods in student-led research, and the default privileging of summative student research presentations, even when attempting to work differently. Amidst these perplexities, moments of luminous insight and new relationalities also emerged unexpectedly. We draw out three da(r)ta moments that are suggestive of some of these ambivalences and possibilities.

Introduction

In the past 30 years, research with young people has broadened dramatically in scope, from research on young people to research inquiries with and by young people (Kellett, 2010). Young people may be positioned as ‘data sources’ for researchers, ‘active respondents’ to adults’ research questions, ‘co-researchers’ with adults and ‘researchers’ (Bragg & Fielding, 2005). As ‘active researchers’ (Kellett, 2010), young people are positioned as theorists of their own lives and school communities. In these modes of research, adults support young people through enabling them the time to pursue their research, offering training in research methods and ethical principles; this mode of research is argued to work with and extend young people’s skills and knowledge (Berriman et al., 2018).

Notwithstanding the possibilities of student-led research for generating new knowledge from students’ embodied experiences, previous accounts of students-as-researchers work have identified a number of methodological and ethical challenges (e.g. see Bradbury-Jones & Taylor, 2015; Daelman et al., 2020). When adults seek to ‘empower’ young people to be heard by adults in the public sphere through student-led research (e.g. to influence policy), verbal and linguistic research methods and modes of dissemination can be privileged in order for students’ research to be legible to adults as ‘research’—for example, the use of surveys and semi-structured qualitative interviews, written final reports and verbal research presentations (e.g. Kellett et al., 2004). It may not only be educators who gravitate towards conventional methods in order to enable students to be ‘heard’ by adults; these conventional methods may also be most familiar to students. Students may have previously created, used and analysed surveys for school assignments, and participated in surveys as part of institutional ‘student voice’ processes, and so may be drawn to use these in their own research as ‘default’ methods. However, when students conduct their own research with such default, ‘school-like’ methods, students-as-researchers work may be most accessible and achievable to students whose school is already serving well and who already ‘do’ school well (Mayes et al., 2019). Such modes of students-as-researchers work may, inadvertently, perpetuate problematic hierarchies between young people, and suppress ‘dark funds of knowledge’ that cannot be easily articulated verbally (Zipin, 2009). Student-led research that relies on verbal and written language and conventional qualitative methods may thus reinforce school-like hierarchies where the confident, articulate, ‘good’ student becomes the ‘ideal’ student researcher (Mayes et al., 2019). Inadvertently, such practices may reinforce processes of subjectification that are already at work in schools—that is, the production of atomised, individual subjects through language.

Using the arts in research with children and young people, and by children and young people, has been argued to jolt and shift established ways of knowing and seeing the world and existing habits of thought and ways of researching (e.g. Hickey-Moody et al., 2019; Leavy, 2017). Arts-informed research, across age categories (with children and young people, as well as adults), works with the arts as a ‘means to increase attention to complexity, feeling, and new ways of seeing’ (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2018, p. 1), creating unexpected insights and responses to everyday experiences and emerging research problematics (Page, 2018), and giving ‘form to speculative possibilities’ and ‘speculative new futures’ (Hickey-Moody et al., 2019, p. 201). Enacting research with the arts has been argued to unsettle, materialise and validate knowledge creation beyond familiar and numerical, verbal and linguistic modes of knowing and communicating (Leavy, 2017). Specifically, this chapter thinks with creative arts-informed methodologies associated with feminist activist materialisms across age categorisations (Ringrose et al., 2018; Strom et al., 2019). The use of the arts in these methodologies is not about doing something ‘different’ with children and young people as ‘others’ (which would reinforce deficit conceptions) (Daelman et al., 2020; Punch, 2002). In Renold and Ringrose’s (2019) terms, in feminist activist materialist arts-informed practices, bodies who participate in these encounters are ‘productively working with becoming more-than the problem’ (para. 48). This mode of research is also not about ‘deploying pre-conceived arts-based methods for “data” that is waiting to be captured’ (Renold & Ivinson, 2019, p. 3). Instead, enfolding materiality and affectivity into research seeks to destabilise taken-for-granted binary categorisations (e.g. student/adult, male/female, researcher/participant, human/non-human, words/ things), exceed previous deficit conceptions of individuals, schools and communities, and ‘experiment with what else art might enable for the not-yet of experience’ (Renold & Ivinson, 2019, p. 3). Research practices are radically reoriented from patterns of data ‘collection’—which assume extractive colonialist logics that do not necessarily serve communities or work with situated knowledges and embodied relations—towards the production of material forms of data; research becomes creation (Manning, 2016; Springgay & Rotas, 2015). The knowledge produced in such research encounters thinks ‘the social with the material’ (Page, 2018, p. 82), in embodied, affectively charged, material, relational and multivalent forms. These ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway, 2016) are entangled with their conditions of production—including the affective, spatial and material configurations of spoken accounts and collective material products of research. Affect includes but exceeds embodied feelings: it includes the felt transition between states across and in-between human and non-human bodies (affectus), as well as the residual impacts left on those affected (affectio) (Deleuze, 1988, p. 49).

Renold (2018) has coined the term da(r)ta for the ‘data’ collaboratively generated in arts-informed research encounters, which may then be moved from the environments where they were created, carrying ‘feelings of [the] crafted experience into new places and spaces’ (Renold & Ringrose, 2019, para. 6). As an example of such use of da(r)ta, in Renold and Ringrose’s (2019) gender activism research, young people wrote on small pieces of paper messages ‘explicitly created through and for political change’ relating to gender (with messages aimed at the research funder and the general public) and stuck these messages in decorated glass jars (para. 35). These jars were later re-assembled (with battery-powered tea-lights) at a public dissemination event—to ‘affect those who ostensibly hold decision-making powers and to connect them to the ever-widening gulf of young people’s experiences’ (Renold & Ringrose, 2019, para. 35). Other recent examples of the creation of da(r)ta which actively intervene into lived inequalities and perplexities include the use of veils (Zarabadi & Ringrose, 2018), paint and collage (Hickey-Moody et al., 2019), Sharpie pens and rulers (Renold, 2018), and movement (Ivinson & Renold, 2020). While these activities may resemble, at times, work in visual arts classrooms, these research projects were extra-curricular, mobilising the arts with young people for political purposes. This chapter is in dialogue with these previous discussions of how material da(r)ta carry ‘powerful affects’ (Renold, 2018, p. 46) that can intervene ‘into the live political ecology of education’ (Renold & Ringrose, 2019, para. 5).

The Youth Advisory Council

In this chapter, we discuss the work of a students-as-researchers group which aimed to use creative and arts-informed methodologies inspired by feminist activist materialisms. The Deakin Engagement and Access Program (DEAP) Youth Advisory Council (YAC), established in 2016, is a group of approximately students from primary and secondary schools in the Geelong region of Victoria, Australia. DEAP is funded through the Australian Federal government’s Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP). Schools were invited to be part of the YAC on the basis of already being part of DEAP; DEAP works with schools with an Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) value under 1000. According to the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), ICSEA is set at an average of 1000. Students at schools with an ICSEA value below 1000 are considered to be relatively disadvantaged; students at schools with an ICSEA value above 1000 are considered to be relatively advantaged (ACARA, 2015). Here, we do not specify the ICSEA values for the participating schools, in order to avoid identifying them. In 2019, 22 students from four primary schools (two public primary and two Catholic systemic primary) and two public secondary schools in Geelong met, at monthly meetings throughout the year, with a support staff member from their schools, two academic partners (the authors), two Partnerships Officers and a tertiary student mentor from Deakin University. The professional role of the staff member supporting the YAC students varied between schools—this staff member could be a teacher, a welfare staff member and/or a senior executive teacher. Five out of six of these schools were located in the suburbs most dramatically impacted by the vicissitudes of de-industrialisation in recent years, and where new migrant communities and support services are based. These suburbs are frequently represented in deficit terms—for example, as characterised by ‘despair and disadvantage’ (Geelong Advertiser Opinion, 9 April 2019, para. 7). The role of the YAC is to explore issues that affect education for young people—in particular, young people attending schools whose communities are minoritised. We use the term ‘minoritised’ after Māori scholar Russell Bishop (2011); according to Bishop, those ‘minoritised’ are ‘not necessarily in the numerical minority’ but ‘treated as if one’s position and perspective are of less worth’ (p. 110). Within minoritised and residualised school communities, young people can be subjected to ‘reform’ interventions that strip back creative and critical pedagogies in favour of (so-called) back-to-basics forms of teaching, as attempts to ‘close’ equity ‘gaps’. Young people’s embodied sense of their current capacities, and their vision of their potential future, may be stifled by such representations and ‘reform’ interventions. The YAC sought to provide a forum, during school time but outside and across school environments, where young people could craft and create other modes of knowing in and about their lives, schools and communities, engaging with shared matters of ‘fervent concern’ (Mayes & Holdsworth, 2020), in ‘problematic-based’ (Zipin, 2017) modes of inquiry.

During the year, groups of students formulated a research inquiry into a matter of shared concern and were supported to devise, conduct, analyse and disseminate their research work in their school contexts. Over the course of 2019, the YAC met seven times; each meeting ran for two hours, and meeting locations rotated between schools. Working in-between schools, the university and community, the YAC sought to reposition students-as-researchers and to challenge the tendency of students-as-researchers work to rely on verbal and linguistic research methods. To disrupt prior perceptions of research paradigms, we (the authors) introduced the participating students to arts-informed modes of inquiry as agile, expansive ways through which to research a problem and inform data generation/creation in response to their emerging questions and issues of concern (see below for details). We invited them to consider adapting arts-informed and/or hybrid approaches in their own research generation.

Yet, working in this way has not been without its ambivalences and perplexities. This chapter explores some of the ambivalences and perplexities of attempting to move beyond a focus on conventional linguistic methods and the individual subject through encouraging students to use arts-informed methods in their own research. During the year, some of the perplexities of participatory work with students at schools were disclosed—including issues surrounding the default reliance on verbal and linguistic methods (surveys and interviews) in student-led research, and the default privileging of summative student research ‘presentations’, even when attempting to work differently. Amidst these perplexities, moments of luminous insight and new relationalities also emerged unexpectedly.

In what follows, we contextualise the work of the YAC and give a brief account of its processes in 2019. We then draw out three da(r)ta moments that are suggestive of some of these ambivalences and possibilities. Our discussion includes photographs of artefacts from different stages of this project during the year, as well as transcribed spoken accounts from students and support adults. These transcripts come from formal focus groups and interviews with students and support adults towards the end of the YAC. The intention of these formal focus groups and interviews was to evaluate the YAC’s work to inform the future work of DEAP. After the 2019 YAC presentation, Eve Mayes conducted two formal focus groups with six students who were part of the YAC (ranging in age from 11 to 13 years old), and interviews with six key teachers/school support staff, two DEAP staff and the tertiary student mentor. This research project received ethics approval from Deakin University’s Human Research Ethics Committee (2019-091), the VicDET (2019-004025) and Catholic Education Melbourne (0870). Participation in these final focus groups and interviews required the completion of a separate consent form (including a parental/guardian consent form for students). A total number of 15 people participated in these focus groups and interviews. Focus groups were approximately 30–45 minutes in length; these focus groups were held on the same day as the final YAC presentation at Deakin University’s Waterfront campus. Interviews with adults were approximately 10–20 minutes in length and were conducted either on the same day as the student focus groups or via phone at another negotiated time. Topics explored included the benefits of students conducting their own research inquiries, highlights from the year, enabling supports for students conducting their own research inquiries, challenges of students conducting their own research inquiries and recommendations for future student researchers. Synthesised accounts of students’ research work, generated in these summative focus groups and interviews, were compiled into an unpublished research report for the evaluation purposes of DEAP (Mayes, 2020). In writing this chapter, we worked with transcripts from these focus groups and interviews, as well as with photographs of de-identified da(r)ta (Renold, 2018) created throughout the year of the YAC. Students and teachers might not have experienced these da(r)ta in the way in which we narrate them here; our discussion of these da(r)ta and what was happening is speculative rather than definitive. While we explore some of the ‘artful modalities of expression’ (Renold & Ivinson, 2019, p. 2) that emerged in this students-as-researchers project, we also consider some of the ambivalences of working with arts-informed methods in student-led research that seeks to make a difference in and with the world. In what follows, we give a retrospective account of what happened at each meeting in 2019, to contextualise three da(r)ta moments. All names are pseudonyms.

Meeting 1: Identifying Issues of Shared Concern

The first meeting was intended to build initial rapport and trust between the school groups, Deakin staff, student mentor and academics, and to prompt students to consider their research interests. Through a range of embodied activities during the initial session (including beach balls and cards), students came to account for what was ‘shared’ and ‘unique’ amongst themselves, and to begin to consider the question: ‘What are some of the issues that affect education for young people?’ Early insights about issues affecting education for young people emerged in the flow of conversation and notes jotted down. Collective summaries of each group’s key ideas, concepts, phrases and statements of issues affecting young people in their schools were recorded and collated to form a fertile springboard for the next session. These 63 written words and phrases included ‘judgement’, ‘racism’, ‘school and social politics’, ‘feeling unwelcome’, ‘homophobia and transphobia’, ‘less opportunities’ and ‘lack of creativity’.

Meeting 2: Negotiating an Issue of Shared Concern

The aim of the second meeting was to unsettle students’ pre-conceptions about research and to refine and negotiate an area of shared concern across the school groups. In groups, students considered one of three photographs: one of a scientist in a laboratory (in white lab coat, surrounded by test tubes), one of the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski sitting with four men on the Trobriand Islands, and one of a participatory action research focus group from the Canadian Native Youth Sexual Health Network (in this publicly available photo, a group of students sit in a circle on the floor of a gymnasium, arranging a series of cards on the floor). In groups, students considered a range of questions (see Table 4.1), which aimed to attune them to different research paradigms: research that might aim to predict (positivist), to understand (interpretivist) and to change (critical, emancipatory and participatory) (adapted from Lather, 2006). Sharing insights across the groups, students discussed research that ‘observes’ and ‘takes’ sacred objects from people (as some of the Pacific Islander and Māori students interpreted the photograph of Malinowski), and research where the researchers take action on issues of shared concern through their research—discussing how this third photo initially did not appear to them to constitute ‘research’.

Table 4.1 Meeting 2: Questions about photographs of ‘research’

Later in this meeting, each group was provided with a mixed bag of printed words, ideas and phrases, as well as a series of coloured felt circles. These had been sourced from Meeting 1’s summarised list of 63 issues identified by the students. In school-based groups, students clustered these words into categories (and created a name for these categories), used felt circles to group words (see Fig. 4.1 for an example), and then identified the issue of greatest significance for their school community that they considered important for further research (see Fig. 4.2 for an example). Students listened carefully to the different opinions and points of view of each member of their team as they discussed, reconfigured, revised and/or deleted ideas in an effort to arrive at a potential research concept, problem or question.

Fig. 4.1

Meeting 2: Categorising issues of concern

Fig. 4.2

Meeting 2: Beginning to formulate research questions

These refined ideas and possibilities were shared and discussed across the groups, with three overarching categories that mattered across the groups emerging: ‘discrimination’, ‘inequality’ and ‘fairness’. However, we sensed that these words were perhaps differently articulated by differently positioned individuals. For some of the younger students, ‘inequality’ and ‘discrimination’ were articulated in terms of ‘bullying’ or challenges with ‘teamwork’. Other students articulated these themes in terms of ‘climate inequality’, unequal access to ‘resources’ and the inequitable effects of segregating one class as an academic stream from the rest of the cohort. ‘Discrimination’, ‘inequality’ and ‘fairness’, while collaboratively agreed upon as shared concerns, meant different things to different people. After considerable discussion in small groups and as a larger group, the students agreed on the overarching theme of ‘inequality’ as the focus of the 2019 YAC research—even as the specific questions and forms that this focus might take varied across the schools.

Meeting 3: Experiencing Research Methods

In Meeting 3, we sought to offer the YAC members experiences of a range of creative research methods to interrogate the concept of ‘inequality’, experience alternative arts-informed research methods and stimulate further ideas for designing their own hybrid arts-informed methods for their own research (which included, as we discuss below, the creation of beeswax wraps). Students moved through a series of research ‘provocation’ stations with detailed instructions for facilitators. We briefly introduce them here; one (Word hack) will be elaborated below. Research provocations included:

Reading inequality through images: Choosing from a selection of laminated images (e.g. see Fig. 4.3) as prompts to create and tell a narrative ‘behind’ the image (including a discussion of representation and semiotics);

Fig. 4.3

Meeting 3: Reading inequality through images

Things overheard in the classroom: Making finger puppets (from newspaper and sticky tape) to become characters in a narrative creation of something overheard in the classroom;

Playing with objects: Arranging a collection of multiple, non-representational objects which range in colour, shape, form and scale (coloured blocks) to tell a story about inequality;

Word hack: Arranging (with scissors and glue) single words hacked (from poetry, newspapers, definitions, as well as from the issues students raised in Meeting 2) into a sentence/slogan/story exploring ideas of inequality, discrimination and fairness, adding their own words (with text) where desired. The word hack provocation is explored further below, as a first da(r)ta moment.

At the end of each provocation, students wrote their thoughts and feelings about each of these methods onto sticky notes, grouping these on large sheets of paper.

Meeting 4: Planning for Research

At Meeting 4, students were given structured time in their school groups to plan their own research inquiry—considering the question or issue that they wished to explore, and how they would explore it. Each group was given a list of research planning prompt questions (see Table 4.2). They discussed each prompt for an allocated time, considering the specifics and practicalities of their proposed methods, and documenting their responses. They then glued their emerging description of their research methods onto coloured paper to form an agreed research plan (see Fig. 4.4 for an example). The academic partners (the authors) discussed ethical principles of respect, beneficence and justice, and specific issues relating to confidentiality, informed consent and data management, before students considered the ethical dimensions of their proposed research methods.

Table 4.2 Meeting 4: Student research planning prompts

Fig. 4.4

One of the school group’s research plans

In many ways, this was the most school-like of the meetings—there were high literacy demands for students in writing down concrete plans, time pressures to make decisions about their research, adult exhortations for students to complete their data generation before the following meeting and a checklist at the end of the meeting. Later, we discuss some of the perplexities associated with these school-like demands.

Meeting 5: Analysing Data

Meeting 5 was planned to be devoted to the analysis of data, but the challenge was that the majority of school groups had only partially completed their research, and one school group had withdrawn from the YAC (see below). After debriefing and discussing the challenges facing different school groups (with some of the school groups still deciding on their research focus and methods, and others already having undertaken their research), plans were made for one of the academics or professional staff members to visit individual schools to support the students in situ. The meeting itself then turned to exploration of interesting ways in which research can be presented, working with the skills of individuals in the group, including the use of props, art, role play and video. Students also considered who they would like to invite to the final presentation. This shift of the meeting’s focus from analysis to presentation may have reinforced a sense of the importance of the final presentation—with ambivalences explored further below. Between this meeting and the sixth meeting, one of the academic or professional staff members met with and worked with each of the school groups to support them in analysing their data.

Meeting 6: Planning the Research Presentation

At Meeting 6, students arrived with their research data/da(r)ta and a draft presentation. After a time where groups debriefed and shared their research experiences with each other, students ran through their presentations, as a dress rehearsal for the formal presentation the following week. Students provided affirmative feedback to each other via written slips and verbal feedback after all the presentations. At this stage, there seemed to be an air of anticipation and excitement about the presentation. The collective YAC group also planned what activities should follow the group presentations, as ways to speak further with audience members.

Presenting Their Research

The final research presentation was conducted in a lecture theatre at Deakin University. The morning included a formal acknowledgement of Country, a brief address from Deakin University’s Chief Operating Officer and a councillor from the City of Greater Geelong, the school groups’ research presentations, breakout small groups of audience members with the school groups and a morning tea. The five presentations considered a range of topics, including micro-aggressions (public secondary school), bullying (Catholic primary), discrimination (public primary), inequitable access to sporting opportunities (Catholic primary) and ‘inequality of the environment’ (public primary school). One of the public secondary schools withdrew from the YAC before the final presentation, and their research (on students’ perceptions of the school’s academic streaming system) was not presented. Our second da(r)ta moment, discussed below, explores further some of the ambivalences associated with the imperative to present their research, while the third da(r)ta moment signals other potentialities simultaneously at work.

Three Da(r)ta Moments

Word Hack

Our first da(r)ta moment evokes some of the potentialities of arts-informed methods to prompt new ways of thinking about research methods among the students. We focus on one of the provocations from Meeting 3: Word hacks. This provocation was adapted from the ‘Dada’ cut-up technique featured in the Manifesto of Tristan Tzara, co-creator of the avant-garde Dada Movement (c.1916–1924) (see Tzara, 1971/2007). Initially emerging in parts of Europe and New York, Dadaists felt compelled to respond to, critique and subvert the irrational logics and conditions of modernity which had risen up in and through the horrors and aftermath of World War I. Resisting the conventions and foundations of rational thought and the artistic style in and of their times, they experimented with a range of anti-art methods, tools, techniques and tactics to jolt and stir habitual ways of knowing.

Appropriating elements from Tzara’s cut-up techniques, small bags of cut-up laminated strips were prepared for each group. These were shaken up by the students and randomly cast onto the surface of a table or floor. The words and phrases on the strips included those previously raised by the students in Meeting 2, as well as additional words hacked from poetry, rap and other texts alluding to inequality. Scissors, glue, markers (with the option to add their own additional words), Blutak and paper were also provided. As the strips lay scattered on various surfaces, dislocated from their initial contexts, students playfully undid, re-assembled, re-ordered and re-imagined these strips to make something new and unexpected. Students mined, combined and re-worked the strips, including the spaces in between words. Each variation was photographed and revisited as the students set out to reimagine alternative configurations of words and things (see Fig. 4.5). For example, some chose to leave the sequences of words and phrases randomly placed through chance. Others preferred to experiment with embodied processes of placing/replacing, manipulating, layering up, adding to with felt pen or extracting from the re/configurations. Others set out to curate sentences with phrases reminiscent of activist slogans. The tone of each statement varied—from declarations of difficulty (Inequality between students causes anxiety and stress), to statements of desire (I want to hope and trust at school), to propositions for anticipated futures (Someday difference will inspire change).

Fig. 4.5

Examples of word hack configurations

These creative experiments with and beyond words were not intended to ‘elicit’ students’ ‘personal voices’ and experiences (which can reinscribe deficit narratives). These hacked words were deliberately de-contextualised from their original contexts; they were not students’ ‘own’ words (but rather, were hacked and borrowed) and were not (necessarily) their own experiences―even if they may have gestured towards something collectively felt in the act of their re/configuring (cf. Mayes, 2016). The words were suggestive, but not sufficient; non-specific, but perhaps indicative of felt experiences. Groups shared their sentence with each other and they murmured in appreciation at each sentence’s creativity and invention. We could argue, like Renold (2018), that these methods enabled what was ‘felt corporeally’ but ‘too painful to talk about’ to be expressed (p. 45), but it may well have also been the case that students were just playing with hacked words that did not necessarily resonate with their experiences. In contrast, the second set of da(r)ta emerged with the imperative for students to speak their research before others―for their words narrating their research experiences to be matched with their faces.

Absences

An unresolved tension throughout the process of the YAC was the institutional desire for a final presentation where students would share their research. While the final presentation was intended to ‘empower’ students and to enable their research to reach a wider audience (including local organisations, school principals, parents, city councillors and university staff) to ‘make an impact’, and while many students described feeling ‘proud’ and ‘happy’ to be part of this final presentation in the summative research focus group, there were ambivalences and unintended consequences of this presentation event. The second moment that we discuss is the absence of two of the students from one of the primary schools on the day of the final presentation, and the withdrawal and absence of one of the secondary school groups (four students) from the last meeting of the YAC and the final presentation. We draw attention to these material, embodied absences rather than just who and what was present (and what was presented) deliberately in order to explore these ambivalences. While such absences are typically not attended to in summative accounts of arts-informed and students-as-researcher work, we engage these absences for their productive potentiality, as da(r)ta.

The two primary school students who were absent on the day of the presentation had been seemingly engaged at all previous meetings—one of these students had folded a series of paper-manipulation games (‘chatterboxes’) for audience engagement during the presentation; the other student had been closely involved in creating visual representations of their school group’s initial survey results. Their support teacher speculated about why they did not attend on the final day: according to this teacher, the first of the students

has got a bit of anxiety; and he’s not too keen about getting up and talking in front of people. And I think that’s probably why he didn’t come today [for the YAC presentations], despite the fact that he did well last week in the practice run. (Teacher, public primary school)

According to the same teacher, the second absent student had called in ‘sick’ that morning without further explanation. The secondary school group who withdrew from the YAC had similarly seemed highly engaged in earlier YAC meetings, with fervent identification of the issue of inequitable material opportunities for the academic-streamed classes in comparison to other ‘mixed-ability’ classes at their school (e.g. access to lockers only for the academic-streamed classes). These students had already designed and enacted a series of video interviews with students across year levels. Their support adult spoke about how the workload became re-distributed as the YAC moved towards the final presentation, leading to interpersonal tensions:

[The] last meeting we attended – one of the … students got really upset in the meeting because everything was getting put on her, and being able to push the others to actually get engaged and do the right thing … If we were going to continue, she would be the one who would have to present; and she would be the one because the others just were not – and to get two of them to that last meeting that we attended – they fought me all the way to the car. But not for any particular reason; not because they hated the group, by any means; they just weren’t engaging at the time. (Support adult, public secondary school)

While we have included the spoken speculations of their teachers explaining their absences and acknowledge that we did not have the opportunity to ask these students themselves about their absences, here we seek to sit in these absences and listen to their material force (cf. Mazzei, 2007). If we were to gloss over these absences, we might ‘reduce, confine, or obliterate perplexity in the name of successful participation’; to not acknowledge the perplexity and unknowability of these absences ‘washes out the ability of different collectives to judge the world [and the experience of students-as-researchers work] differently’ (Kelty, 2019, p. 25). We resist interpreting why each of these students did not ‘show up’ on the presentation day―each may have different reasons and lived circumstances; the reader might have their own ideas or speculations. Kelty (2019) posits some possible reasons for non-participation: a person may be ‘giving voice by not speaking up’ or enacting ‘refusal, giving voice by not answering’; it may be a case of ‘simple apathy’, or ‘malingering’ (p. 33), or actual material and embodied circumstances that have nothing to do with previous enjoyment of participation. Perhaps these students felt the imperative to participate as invasive and exposing and refused to be subjected to the gaze of others (Tuck & Yang, 2014). Perhaps these students experienced the YAC, particularly the drive towards a research ‘product’, as school-like and subjectificating, compelling students to ‘giv[e] an account of [themselves]’ (Butler, 2005), despite the YAC’s efforts to exceed school-like methods. Notwithstanding their embodied reasons and circumstances, these absences as da(r)ta disclose the power relations at work in narrating the ‘experience’ of participation after the event; there is always already ‘soft part of the social fossil’ of what is experienced across bodies in space and time that has ‘decayed or disappeared’ (Kelty, 2019, p. 9)―and that may not even be consciously articulable.

Beeswax

The final da(r)ta that we share is a series of beeswax wraps created by a student (Mary) and her mother, gifted as ‘lucky seat’ prizes during the final presentation. These beeswax wraps were part of the research processes and products of one of the public primary schools. One of the students from this school (Joseph) described, in a focus group, how they decided on their topic:

We decided to do ‘inequality of the environment’; because one of [the YAC members, Tracey] was recently in, like, an art play/installation kind of thing about the environment and it was kind of fresh in our minds. (Joseph, student focus group, public primary school)

This group of students initially did brief interviews with students in the corridor, asking ‘How can we help save the environment?’ and ‘What needs to change?’ They wrote students’ answers on a clipboard, and then typed up their verbal responses to become visual Wordle depictions in the shape of a turtle (see Fig. 4.6) and a flower.

Fig. 4.6

Wordle created by one of the public primary school YAC groups to represent student responses to the question: ‘How can we help save the environment?’

Seeking to act on these student responses, the YAC members designed and enacted multiple research activities and actions, with arts-informed methods working as both process and product of their research, drawing on their respective interests and skills:

[Tom] is more of the organised one and note-taker; making sure things get done. And [Joseph] is a more public speaker. And then [Tracey] kind of just backed everyone else up … Someone had mentioned ‘beeswax wrap’, and [Mary] was, like, ‘Oh, can I try and make some?’ … [Mary] had a laptop there and she was Googling it [beeswax wrap] and she’s, like, ‘That’s so cool. I want to make it’ … They came up with four ideas altogether and each one of them did the idea. (Support teacher, public primary school)

The research actions taken by the students included the initial interviews and Wordles; designing and painting a mural with other students (drawing on the skills and interests of students beyond the YAC); advocating and then organising to have Earth Hour at their school; and creating, teaching and sharing with other students how to make beeswax wraps as an alternative to packaging. The support teacher described how the students had to work out the costs and sources for the arts materials (for the wraps: fabric, an iron, baking paper, beeswax). Mary then worked on the wraps, at first in the support teacher’s office, with the teacher and Mary making one together, having printed out the instructions (see Fig. 4.7):

The beeswax wrap was a huge hit [laughs] … People [at school] were, like, ‘Whoa’ because they watched [Mary], like, through all the stages; like, grading the wax. Her teachers all made the effort to come in and see what she was doing. (Support teacher, public primary school)

Fig. 4.7

Beeswax wrap creation (a slide from the school group’s final PowerPoint presentation)

Mary then took the instruction sheet and materials home and, according to the teacher, ‘Her and her mum made some at home in their own time’ (Support teacher, public primary school). These wraps generated a mobility to the YAC students’ research―their re/creative energy spanned school and home, enfolding Mary’s mother into the research creation process as a co-constructor.

These wraps were shared at a school assembly, with instructions, and a few gifted to students as lucky seat prizes. Later, during the final YAC presentation, a further two beeswax wraps were gifted to unsuspecting audience members. In the midst of their presentation, describing their research actions, Mary invited the audience to look under their seat for a paper gold star stuck there. The YAC members then gave these two ‘lucky seat’ audience members a beeswax wrap made by Mary. There was a buzz in the room in these moments of giving and receiving and afterwards. These wraps seemed to carry and create potent affects (cf. Renold, 2018); created with bees, human hands (student, teacher, parent), baking paper, fabric, iron; travelling beyond the school to the home and then to the formal university ‘presentation’, and finally to the recipients’ homes.

We (the authors) are reminded of artist Tim Purves’ (2014) discussion of ‘unexpected’ gifts where the giver subverts established expectations, expecting nothing in return (p. 49). We do not think that Mary or the other students were necessarily deliberately intending to subvert the final presentation’s mode of students ‘performing’ for adults—a mode possibly evaded by the absent students. Rather than giving an account of herself to an audience, Mary gave material products that she created with others—wraps that conceal and that preserve food. The wraps drew attention away from Mary’s lived experiences and opinions (that could be too revealing and subjectivating to share in this public forum); instead, the audience’s attention was focused on the aesthetic attractiveness and practical utility of what she had created. We are reminded of the children’s phrase: Mind your own beeswax. The wraps created distance from the personal and the individual, but connections formed between individuals through the performed collective gifting (via the lucky seat prize) at the final presentation (cf. Renold & Ringrose, 2019). The space between the student researchers and the adults who received these wraps as gifts shrunk as the wraps passed between hands; there was an ‘extra-personal, transindividual vitality’ (Renold & Ringrose, 2019, para. 36) in their transfer through hands; they blurred the lines of with whom and where ‘participation’ occurs. They evaded the subjectivating gaze (that, perhaps, the students in the second set of da(r)ta sought to escape), but also created new connections that crossed spatial and embodied boundaries.

Perplexities and Potentialities of Arts-Informed Students-as-Researchers Work

In this chapter, we have given an account of some of the challenges and possibilities of working with arts-informed methods in students-as-researchers work. Inspired by feminist activist materialisms, we have attempted to think ‘the social with the material’ (Page, 2018, p. 82) in making sense of the default reliance on verbal and linguistic methods even in research generated by students. Our aim, as we worked with the student researchers and a range of materials, was to interrupt the perpetuation of conventional modes of inquiry so often associated with researching on young people. Yet, even when explicitly seeking to work with students, arts, affect and matter, it proved difficult to shift established linguistic, verbal and summative forms of thinking about and enacting research. These challenges co-extend with contemporary challenges for schools―for example, the prioritising of linguistic and verbal modes of knowing, escalating performative demands on teachers and students, and the imperative to showcase the products and outcomes of curricular and extra-curricular work.

Notwithstanding these challenges, there were moments of potential amidst, in and through these perplexities—where there was a transition between states (affectus) that could be sensed. In this chapter, we have marked these moments of transition as they sedimented around two particular moments where da(r)ta was produced, and one moment where it was absent―clusters of words hacked and stuck onto paper, beeswax wraps crafted and gifted, and absences of human bodies and their unspoken words. In these particular clusters of da(r)ta, feelings sediment, gesturing to other possibilities, even as much escapes and exceeds the creative artefacts and later discursive accounts. We argue for the ethical imperative of attending to the material residue of students-as-researchers work—for honouring the research work that students create, as well as for attending to what cannot be articulated. We have sought to provoke reflection―for student researchers and adult supporters seeking to enact students-as-researchers work―on the compulsion for students to ‘giv[e] an account of [themselves]’ (Butler, 2005), and particularly the compulsion for students to give accounts of the experience of becoming researchers. Working with the productive possibilities of the beeswax wraps, we have gestured towards the possibilities for rethinking research to escape the subjectivating gaze and to disrupt deficit accounts. Researchers who seek to support students to co-compose their own research might slow down and seek to listen to what these da(r)ta might tell us about the possible futures of arts-informed students-as-researchers work.