Visual biographical narratives as living inquiring process

Fernando Hernández-Hernández, Juana Maria Sancho & Rachel Fendler

University of Barcelona

European Conference on Educational Research

Network: 02. Vocational Education and Training (VETNET)

• Visual biographical narratives

• Living inquiry as research.

Digital biographical narratives

• Story telling.

• Digital Vocational Narratives

• Digital Vocational Biographies.

• Vocational Biography Design.

• Visual Biographical Narratives.

• (…)

• Images (photographs and visual documents) youth produce, exemplify diverse strategies for documenting their lives experiencies and capture some this multi-faceted manner of seeing, representing, reflecting and interpreting. (Hernández-Hernández, 2013; Abakerli Baptista, 2014).

Irene Jerez

A visual narrative

accounts many

different stories at the

same time as they mix

and match multiple

images. (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000)

The basic features of a visual narrative are: composition

(available elements), the presence of a story, the characters, the

techniques of representation and the means in which it is

shared. (Pimenta & Poovaiah, 2010).

VNs can be expressed using moving images or a fixed

image and in recent times with an advancement of

technology a combination of both. (Pimenta & Poovaiah,

2010).

Research from a visual narrative is an intentional, thoughtful

and, active process in which researchers and participants

explore and make sense of their experiences, both visually

and narratively. (Hedy Bach, 2007: 281)

Living Inquiry

• Merleau-Ponty (1962) conceived research as an enactive space of living inquiry.

• In a/r/tography, “living inquiry is an aesthetic encounter, where the process of meaning making and being are inextricably connected to an awareness and understanding of art” (Springgay, Irwin, & Kind, 2005: 902).

• Living inquiry ties to action research.

• An effective framework for opening-up research beyond the academy, by acknowledging that everyone is an expert of her/his own lived experience.

• “Show your Own Gold” is offering to the youth the opportunity of being engage in a living inquiry experience as “an embodied encounter constituted through visual and textual understandings and experiences rather than mere visual and textual representations” (Springgay, Irwin, & Kind, 2005: 902).

• It describes the process through which we may adopt “an attitude of inquiry” (Marshall & Reason, 2008, p. 61) towards our lives, or in this case, youth biographical trajectories.

• Living inquiry is a framework that allowed us to respond to the challenge of finding ways to bring the youth experiences into a broader, ongoing conversation.

• Our aim is build out from practice, contextualizing young people’s experiences so that they may interact with other contributions within VAT research.

• ... ways of behaving which encourage [us] to treat little as fixed, finished, clear-cut... living continually in process, adjusting, seeing what emerges, bringing things into question... attempting to open to continually question what [we] know, feel, do and want, and finding ways to engage actively in this questioning and process its stages. (Judi Marshall, 1999: pp. 156–157)

• Living inquiry provides a space for young people to openly explore and begin to understand their own relationship with the world and, in doing so, conceivably push back the notion that they are always already determined and fated by it (Meyer, 2010, p. 88).

• We are able to offer youth the possibility of visualizing their biographical experiences and reflecting on new personal and professional alternatives for their vocational trajectories.

• This means that the process promoting by this project could promote “a disruption of established ways of knowing, through learning events” (Atkinson, 2012: 10).

Andrea García Gómez

Thank You!!!

• Joanne Rappaport (2008) reminds us that when carrying out collaborative ethnographies, “what happens in the field is much more than data collection” (p. 7). Our experience testifies to this. Our open-ended research proposal allowed each of the five research groups to embark on reflexive qualitative research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005), investing in processes of “living, relating and working through questioning and reflexivity” (Marshall, 2011, p. 174). By opening our

• We invite young people to participate not as informants but as researchers who use their own experience to contribute to the project. young people contributed with their knowledge-in-practice.

• to develop knowledge-of-practice, and expand our understanding of youth living experiences (Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle, 2001),

• Living inquiry recognizes that research is not merely a means to an end, placing value on the journey and on the transition inquirers (and the inquiry itself) go though between the start and the finish. From this perspective, the group dynamic becomes a focal point to our process.

• Living inquiry encourages us to ask questions and critique what we know.

• Adopting an inquiring attitude reconfigures our identity as learners, pushing us into the active role of producer (researcher).

• The relational space of our collaborative project is the context where this transformation could take place.

• Video curriculum:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fabDpTOfKns

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxIVBqbDsaA