We need to find creative ways not just to represent others in our research but also to help these individuals to describe their own experiences. The challenge is to go beyond creating insightful texts about the human condition to moving ourselves and others to action, with the effect of improving lives.

Creativity in Research Methodology and Representation

In “A Self-fashioned Gallery of Aesthetic Practice,” Carol A. Mullen gives an overview of qualitative approaches to arts-based inquiry and educational research, where research findings offer a “critique of socioeducational issues through artistic production.” Arts-based research allows for experimentation (in research methods, data collection and representation, pedagogy, etc.) and engaged participation (between researcher, subject, and audience, blurring the “roles” of each). Creative forms of research representation such as stories and performance (ethnotheatre) can provoke political agency/social transformation by fully engaging participants – putting bodies in motion, “eliciting response” and “demanding attention.”

Armchair Philosopher Vs. Action Practitioner

Arts-based inquiry is concerned with practice, mobilizing audiences to action and new ways of seeing where “the researcher is concerned with issues of community, participation, and positionality (one’s own social location and values).” Action is purposefully a conscious part of the research, and findings should “display the reality-altering impact of the inquiry process.” This emphasis on practice is in line with the educational objectives and methods of LYIA, which employs youths to be peer educators and social marketers, thereby giving them a performative, lead role in the educational process.

Narrative and Performativity

The incorporation of narrative and performance in both methodology and research representation is I think especially pertinent to the objectives of our group project. The classroom learning modules developed by LYIA incorporate many learning activities that involve individual self-expression, sharing of experiences, physical movement (such as trust-building exercises), and role-playing. These types of activities help foster an atmosphere of trust and community, conducive to learning reception, self-expression, and active participation, in addition to motivating peers to extend this knowledge and community outside of the classroom (outreach and activism). They allow youths to become active participants in their own learning processes by becoming critical evaluators of their own experiences and activists with an agenda that is close to their hearts and of which they can greatly contribute, rather than spectators of a lesson plan or text (here, a dimension of feeling is added to thinking, and the personal becomes political). As Mullen points out, performance creates an especially conducive space for inquiry, learning, and expression, where the participant feels an embodied sense of connection to the “open script” being performed; she or he also plays an integral role in the dialogue and interpretation of the given text. Preserving these creative, engaging, and participatory elements of the learning process (indeed this performative ethos) as the classroom curriculum is transformed into an online version, is therefore critical.