Bresler on Aesthetics...2

This is a follow-up blog on Liora Bresler's work.  (See Bresler to the right...It is amazing what you can find on Google Images!)

First, some information on where you can find these materials.

Bresler, L. (2006). Embodied Narrative Inquiry: A Methodology of Connection. Research Studies in Music Education, 27, 21-43.

The piece titled "Experiential pedagogies in research education: Drawing on engagement with artworks" will be a chapter in a book edited by Candace Stout which will be released in late 2010.  

This morning I realized that I needed to take more account of what Liora was saying about the differences between textual/visual and auditory/oral.  (Her piece on Embodied Narrative is where she speaks most strongly to this.] This has great importance to what I have been thinking about in terms of "artful computing".  Manufacturing text from interviews and observations is, in and of itself, a process of reducation and visualization.  Visualization has been at the heart of what Qualitative Data Analysis Software is doing.  Even with the new capacities for audio and video, the emphasis in QDAS is still on reduction towards text.  

Bresler draws upon the works of music educator Wayne Bowman and cultural historian Walter Ong in thinking about the nature of sound to illustrate how sound is a uniquely embodied experience, and one that exists in process and change as opposed to the visual which exists in a state of constancy outside of our bodies.  

Why do I say that text is reduction?  Well, it is the beginning of the process of shrinking, leaving out,  condensing, and reduction that makes it possible to transform experience into new sets of symbols and combinations of symbolic meanings that is necessary in qualitative research.  You turn it into text--reduction begins.  You code the text--reduction again.  You play with the codes and create tables or statements or models--reduction again...and juxtaposition.  

Well, there is much good to think with here.  Thanks again.  

Bresler on Aesthetics

Image via Wikipedia

My Journal Project is really percolating along and the outline and ideas are falling into place.  I've contacted several friends to ask for resources and feedback.  Liora Bresler from the University of Illinois sent me three great articles:

"Experiential pedagogies in research education: Drawing on engagement with art works"

"Embodied narrative inquiry: A methodology of connection", and

"Toward connectedness: Aesthetically based research" (this one was published in Studies in Art Education, September 2006). 

What a treat!  And wow were they helpful.

Here is what I am taking away with me:

• Connectedness is something that aesthetics and the arts can lend to qualitative research.  Connectedness in the arts offers a means for us to make sense of our relationship with participants AND the scholarly community.  Connectedness provides a means to fulfill qualitative research's desire for empathic understanding (verstehen) with which we have long struggled.  
• Embodied Narrative Inquiry...by drawing upon arts-based understanding of embodiment to inform qualitative research's use of narrative inquiry we will have access to a much richer conceptualization as researchers.  Embodied Narrative Inquiry allows us to make sense of silence/voice; musical/visual; self/other in new ways that can enlarge qualitative research.  Considering the nature of sound.. the possibilities of musical improvisation...and the characteristics or qualities of musical presentation--all of these offer ways to flesh out the notion of embodied narrative inquiry.  
•  Qualitative Research Instruction:  In "Experiential pedagogies..." Liora shares a wonderful assignment from her qualitative research course.  Students do sustained observations of paintings--one they like and one they dislike.  She shares a large number of the comments made in students' journals or papers and discusses the issues in qualitative research that are raised through this exercise.  I want to do it in my class!  It's a winner.

Thank you Liora...now to integrate all of this good stuff into my arguments.