Conversations between Artists and Teachers
Seminar by David Jenkins at Kings College London, March 9th 2010
1. Why an interest in conversations between artists and teachers?
2. Inductive v. deductive method and the role of 'theory' in research
3. Weak v. strong grounded theory (and coding issues in ATLASti)
4. Critical discourse analysis: problems and possibilities.
5. Rhetorical criticism (metaphor and 'fantasy theme')
6. Research and evaluation, dichotomy or continuum?
ATLASti as interpretation supporting software
A general introduction to ATLASti as a knowledge workbench is available online at < is a powerful workbench for the qualitative analysis of large bodies of textual, graphical, audio and video data. It is described as offering‘a variety of tools for accomplishing the tasks associated with any systematic approach to ‘soft’ data – i.e. material which cannot be properly analyzed by formalized statistical approaches’.
Our decision to use ATLASti in this research also arose from a decision to approach our research questions in part through an analysis of ‘primary documents’. Working with ATLASti involves a basic logical sequence, although subsequent iteration is possible. The first task is to assigning primary documents, from which quotations (segments) are created. The quotations are then ‘coded’ (i.e. given a conceptual tag) using one of several methods for doings so (in vivo, open, axial or selective coding). Subsequently annotations and/or theoretical memos can be added. Memos are similar to codes but their main purpose is to capture analytical thoughts associated with particular coded segments of text either in isolation or hyperlinked to other codes. The codes need to be continuously refined, edited and amalgamated, and the codes, memos and annotations (which together make up a class designated as ‘objects’) are eventually sorted into ‘families’.
The task is then to take the analytical stage further. To allow the emergence of complicated phenomena hidden in text and multimedia data through a theory building framework, the software offers a number of ‘visualisation tools’ that can be organised through the Network View Manager. In particular relationships between nodes can be presented as conceptual maps. All this is accomplished within a single space known as a ‘Hermeneutic Unit’ (HU). The term ‘hermeneutics’, of course, began life as a systematic approach to resolving conflicting interpretations of sacred texts, but has long since migrated to deal with similar issues in interpreting social and cultural life, often deploying the intellectual trick of treating them as ‘text’ (Ricoeur, 1981). The purpose of the hermeneutic unit is both to put a ‘boundary’ around the case (Adelman et al 1980) and to specify the data set for the programme. In principle, if would have been possible to have designed the research with two HUs, one for TAPP and one for Eastfeast. We chose to run with a single one.
For the Mediated Conversations research we were able to set up ATLASti in a mode that allowed an exchange of the latest version of the Hermeneutic Unit via the freeware of the FTP surfer, allowing collaboration among the research team. But as previously indicated, ATLASti was brought into this research as an important plank in an eclectic methodology, not as the main method. Following some initial analysis, the results are taken forward and merged with other data to form Chapter 9 on The Language of TAPP and Eastfeast and the Conclusion.
In taking a stance on the social construction of professional subjectivities, a critically important vantage point to bring to this research, we draw upon a number of traditions. All broadly take a phenomenological perspective in the sociology of knowledge (Berger and Luckmann 1966). Ernst Cassirer in Language and Myth (translation 1946) and The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (English translation 1957) argued that symbolic forms construct reality. They are not ‘imitations’ of reality but ‘organs’ of reality since ‘it is solely by their agency that anything becomes an object of intellectual apprehension’.
Within the same broad theoretical framework similar arguments were put forward by Vygotsky in his attempt to provide an account of learning and development as mediated processes. In subsequent accounts, particularly those advanced under the heading of ‘situated learning’ (Lave, 1991) more emphasis is placed on the analysis of the material conditions of actual participation and the ways in which individuals function in learning communities, which can be regarded as sites of performance (Alexander etal, 2005). In activity theory, ‘it is joint-mediated activity that takes the centre stage in the analysis’ (Daniels et al, 2007). The underpinning idea is that communities of practice are emergent and dynamic ‘speech communities’ that activate knowledge through a process of cultural acculturation, dialogue and re-interpretation.
An equally pertinent theoretical framework for our purposes is Ernst Bormann’s version of rhetorical criticism that goes under the slightly awkward title of ‘fantasy theme’ (Foss, 1996). A ‘fantasy theme’ is an imagined meta-narrative that allows actors to place themselves in a constructed drama of events that involves other people as well as themselves. It is essentially a method of looking at groups exploring a shared world view, based on symbolic convergence theory. The assumptions of fantasy theme rhetorical criticism are that communication is epistemic, creating ‘reality’; that in small groups (or campaigns or social movements) accounts will converge; and that attitudes and emotions are wrapped up with cognition (so that factors other than arguments will determine outcomes). This convergence is the more remarkable in the present examples because it comes in the teeth of standard occupational myths about teachers and artists and their alleged differential approach to self identity and risk.
One of our tactical hypotheses in this research has been that teachers and artists working together will demonstrate Bormann’s ‘convergence theory’ and develop a shared agreed narrative.As can be seen in subsequent chapters, this appears to have been the case in many of the TAPP and Eastfeast partnerships, although it falls short of being a universal truth.
The intellectual roots of critical discourse analysis go back to ‘western Marxism’, Antonio Gramsci and the FrankfurtSchool including Jurgen Habermas and Theodore Adorno (Bowles and Gintis, 1976; Darder et al, 2003). A central idea is that linguistic signs are the material of ideology (i.e. ways of representing events are chosen to fit in with ideological beliefs) and can be analysed for ‘ideological positioning’. The purpose of critical discourse analysis is to look at social interaction which takes a linguistic (or partly linguistic) form. It assumes ‘a dialectical relationship between discourse (as social practice) and the institutions and social structures that frame it’.
In the revised order for the second cohort this became Session 6 and as well as considering various kinds of risk introduced past TAPP partnership models by way of encouraging example. For the second cohort this session took place at Stratford Circus. ‘Creative risk taking’ is one of the TAPP standard collocations and is important because of its roots in a romantic view of the artist[1] and also because different types of risk can be isolated for analytical purposes but actual risk tends to migrate across the borders.
Tony Fegan introduced the relevant categories of risk as curricular, institutional and organisational, personal, social, economic and other; we can avoid political risks by being ‘canny’ but risks attendant on securing ‘maximum freedom’ are always worth taking.Following the standard TAPP shared process of students filling in the offered categories from their own experience and reflecting generally on the nature of creative risk taking, Graham pulled the discussion together, bringing in some of the relevant literature, including his own. The discourse around risk, he argued, needs to take into account a number of diverse arguments, not least the following:
- The professional identities and mythologies of artists as inspirational catalysts of a kind that might pose problems to a classroom manager.
- The artist as an oppositional agent, challenging the system (e.g. aspects of the knowledge economy, the cultural industries etc.).
- Ways of thinking about arts education – the transmission model v liberal individualist models v social democratic models.
- The need to realise that principles are rarely pure and that the discourses around creativity and the arts in education are ‘fractured’.
Graham is adept and rather impressive at this kind of thing, but TAPP being TAPP this brief teaching intervention was represented as a summary of the student views.
Once again a number of ideological markers are laid down, with Tony making reference to ‘rapacious global capitalism’ as attacking our ‘cultural roots’. One of the students responded immediately suggesting that TAPP students can in their own way ‘be culturally subversive, attacking the crisis that is effecting our definitions of merit’.
We return to the idea of creative risk later in this report when we consider the partnership projects in the schools.
Nevertheless transcripts of tutorial conversations reveal considerable differences in mode. In TAPP, face-to-face tutorial support became a lottery between three distinctive approaches, depending on the allocation of tutors. The variations in practice were observable in three main areas: the balance drawn between the conflicting claims of support and challenge,the degrees of willingness to spoon-feed weak candidates, and in discourse terms the competing claims of theory, methodology, reflection and imaginative curriculum development as the core task of the research tutorial. A further deep paradox emerged; the transcripts made it clear that TAPP tutors, presumably with the Institute of Education requirements in mind, felt forced to compromise their ‘participant-centred’ approach in the tutorials where the proportion of tutor to student talk was unacceptably high, in several instances over 90%.
Sainsbury Centre
Held significantly at the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, the Eastfeast session on research methodology was in many ways brilliantly conceived and imaginative, but it is probably important to begin with an account of what it did not attempt. It made no attempt to address how appropriate research methods might be chosen or to introduce the methodological map from which they might be selected, so different styles of qualitative enquiry were not defined against each other, and there was no discussion of potential threats to the reliability or validity of findings associated with qualitative methods. If the recommended background reading was any guide (the two texts which stood out were Ellis and Bocher’s (1996)Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing and Goodson and Sykes’ (2001)Life History Research) the emphasis was to be on ‘the examined life’ and beyond that to ‘ways of articulating understanding’. It was at this point that the reason for the choice of location became clear.
A sequence of tasks unfolded that began with the return of some journal material that had been completed over the summer holiday. These had been commented on rigorously in a way that offended a few of the students whom previous contact had encouraged to expected an exchange of unearned tokens of esteem, but the double role of teacher and assessor has always had its awkwardness. The rest of the morning was largely given over to ‘navigating the space’ and ‘constructing ways of looking’ from ‘haphazard encounters’ with the permanent collection. The gallery had become what was called ‘a prompt for enquiry’. So the students headed off with their sketch books and cameras to haphazardly encounter.
The discussion on their return to the mezzanine level was lively with some nice insights from UEA tutor Veronica Secules. It was particularly interesting to learn that historically the collection was at first antithetical to children (not allowed in) with the showcases still at adult viewing height, although the Centre now has an educational wing. Veronica also gave fascinating insights into the tension between intuitively understanding a piece of African art (what Clifford Geertz called ‘found in translation’) and the wealth of contextual knowledge required by an academic cultural anthropologist. The task of explaining a collection to the general public was also rendered problematic: at UEA there seemed undue emphasis on the Sainsbury family and their beneficence.
All this might have worked fine had it been made clear that the cultural anthropology of art is just one interesting example of method from which general truths might be gleaned, but any connections to their own situation were left to students in small open-ended groups, and I must say the three I sat in on appeared rudderless [writes DJ].
The final twist in the tail was that when it came to ‘ways of articulating understanding’ the suggestion was that students should form tactical groups based on ‘shared interests or differences’ and present a multi-media installation that reflected their collaborative enquiry. If the implication is that the natural product of research is an installation or any other ‘piece’ of artwork then the corollary must also be true, that what we mean by ‘method’ is the working practices of the artist. This implicit argument was never fully articulated but carried forward to the Eastfeast assessment submissions, many of which determinedly aspired to being aesthetic objects.
To some extent this may be a matter for congratulation. Why should academically approved research in the arts always be about the arts rather than accepting the idioms of inquiry and capacity to make meaning of the art forms themselves?
What of the ‘installations’? We had music played from an overhead location, zombies with cardboard boxes over their head, a game with distorting mirrors and the obligatory washing line decked with quotations. And as a bonus, there was a quite brilliant parody by Ken Farquar’s group giving an alternative ‘naughty boy’s’ exposition of a section of the permanent collection, that physically mishandled the objects and was both grotesquely ill-informed and risqué. It acted helpfully as the missing input on the problems of reliability and validity.
Siobhan O’Shea and Cath Greenwood
An Investigation into the ways in which collaboration between teacher and artist can act as a catalyst for learning and pedagogical change [SO’S]
Siobhan, an art teacher in a comprehensive school, reports on her partnership with TIE practitioner Cath Greenwood, undertaken in part because she wanted to ‘be a learner’ and extend her skills as a teacher. The task was to explore the TAPP model of partnership in support of experiential learning by bringing role play into the pedagogy of the visual arts. There was general agreement, shared by the evaluators, that the experiment was a huge success [see video] and both the video documentation and a rerun of the method in workshop settings has kept it in the forefront of the TAPP narrative. Several second cohort students have cited it as an inspiration.
We have only space to deal with the tour de force at the heart of this artistic intervention. The point of contact with the visual art syllabus was Picasso’s Guernicaas ‘political art’ and an imaginative way was derived to stimulate interest in it and reconstruct its historical meaning, seen as having resonance with the London WW2 bombings. The role play centred on a artist, played by Siobhan, whose art has dried up and who is refusing to communicate, instead being obsessed with Picasso’s painting. Cath played her sister, trying to cajole her into meeting the promises she has made to her gallery. Children are pulled into the scenario with interesting consequences. One boy refuses to tear up his teacher’s painting although given ‘permission’ in the role play (‘I found it really hard to rip up her work. You need a reason’).
The subsequent student discussion was lively, with some nicely intuitive responses, as Siobhan and Cath probed how reflection can tackle emotional issues as well, drawing on their experiences. The following lesson was an oil pastel experiment that made parallel technical inroads into the theme, but both agreed that the role play had broken barriers, allowing them to ‘model playfulness’.
The dissertation was one of the few set up strictly within an action research paradigm and carried some interesting reflections. Siobhan had initially sought security in prescriptive planning but learned from Cath that if you have a strong thematic overview you can safely trust the art form, in this case methods drawn from a hybrid of forum theatre (Boal, 1979) and teacher-in-role (see Neelands, 2000). The unexpected profundity of the children’s responses was seen as validating the exercise. There was also a double interest in theory, with both Siobhan and Cath interrogating their ideas surrounding intuition as a cognitive goal and on the technical side going with Dorothy Heathcote’s view that teachers-in-role do not simply retell stories but allow contained confrontations between individuals, thereby offering a safe space in which to take controlled risks.
A selected issue
- This partnership highlighted the value of mutual learning and an exchange of skills, although the exchange was across art forms (forum theatre/theatre-in-education juxtaposed with the visual arts) rather than between partners who defined themselves as predominantly an ‘artist’ or a ‘teacher’. TAPP enabled both to explore aspects of their professional identities that crossed the divide. There work also went beyond a piece of imaginative curriculum development by making a contribution to curriculum research.
Siobhan O’Shea and Cath Greenwood