Arts based and creative methods for DEdCPsy Dr Jessica bradley, november 2022

Introduction, pre-workshop readings and creative task

This interactive session is based on Jessica Bradley's recent AHRC OWRI-funded research in linguistic landscapes, which uses arts-based research methods to explore understandings of language/s/ing with young people. In the session we will be talking more about arts-based methods and collage, discussing thematic links between your findings, contextualising these within the existing research and considering processes of analysis. You will consider how these might be embedded within your own area of interest and in your own research. The project website is here, activity worksheets created for the project are available here, and you can read more about the work in the following publications (available in the library):

• Bradley, J., Moore, E., Simpson, J. & Atkinson, L. (2018). Translanguaging space and creative activity: Theorising collaborative arts-based learning. Language and Intercultural Communication, Special Edition, Bridging across languages and cultures in everyday lives: new roles for changing scenarios, 18(1), pp. 54-73. [StarPlus link here].
• Bradley, J. & Atkinson, L. (2020). Translanguaging beyond bricolage: Meaning making and collaborative ethnography in community arts. In E. Moore, J. Bradley & J. Simpson (Eds). Translanguaging as transformation: The collaborative construction of new linguistic realities. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 135-154. [StarPlus link here].
• Bradley, J. "[un]public spaces and the ethnographic [un]imagination," in PanMeMic, 28/06/2020, https://panmemic.hypotheses.org/534.

This materials on this Adobe Express webpage include some pre-workshop tasks, which I'd like you to complete ahead of the teaching. These include: pre-reading and a creative activity. In the workshop itself we'll be thinking more about creative methods, the different affordances, how we might articulate what we do through/with creative practice and how they might be used in your own research.

Pre-reading

• Barone, T. & Eisner. E.W. (2012) Chapter 1: What is and what is not arts based research? In Barone, T. & Eisner, E.W. Arts Based Research, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. [StarPlus link here].
• Leavy, P. (2018) Introduction to Arts-Based Research. In Leavy, P. (ed) Handbook of arts-based research. New York, NY: The Guildford Press. [StarPlus link here].

Pre-workshop creative task

Materials needed: Phone or similar to take photographs with; background paper (e.g. white A3 paper); coloured paper; pens; magazines/newspapers/fliers etc; glue / scissors

1. Take a series of photographs around the area in which you live and/or work, or generally spend time. The photographs might reflect language and / or linguistic diversity, or they could reflect other topics which relate to your own research interests. It's up to you! They might be indoor spaces or outdoor spaces - again, up to you! You could even explore online spaces, or a mixture. You can use your phone for this.
2. Select 5-10 images that best represent the idea of language and / or linguistic diversity (or your chosen focus).
3. Using a sheet of paper as the background (can be white, or can be any colour, should be around A3 size).
4. Cut up coloured paper, newspaper or magazines to recreate shapes and colours from the photographs. You can also cut out lettering.
5. You can also use coloured pens if you wish to write words that you find in the photographs.
6. Your image can be an amalgamation of all of the photographs combined, a number of photographs together or one image.
7. When you have finished your collage, write a short paragraph explaining your process in terms of: a) Selection of images; b) Chosen image(s) for the collage; c) The collage itself and decisions about media (e.g. pens/coloured paper/newspaper); d) Types of language(s) represented, e.g. different kinds of signage, levels of temporality, audiences, etc.
8. You can either submit images of your collages and text online (see instructions that follow) or you can bring your collage and text to the workshop. Using this Google Drive folder link, make a folder with your name (SURNAME_NAME). Add a photograph of your collage, your notes and a selection of your photographs. Please use the following file naming convention: surname_name_image and surname_name_text. Please do this by the class on Tuesday 22nd November 2022. Please note you will need to be logged on with your student ID to access and edit the folder.

In the workshop we will be working collaboratively to consider the themes emerging from your preparatory work and analyse your collages. It is an exploratory workshop, and these collages are working documents or ‘sketches’. We don’t expect polished artworks and we are certainly not assessing artistic quality!

Workshop background and summary

In this interactive session we will explore creative inquiry and how researchers might engage with different 'creative' and 'artistic' approaches to research. The examples I will draw on are from from the context of researching young people's embodied experiences languages in public space, building on a recent AHRC OWRI funded research project, 'Multilingual Streets: Translating and Curating the Linguistic Landscape'. Researching how languages are visibly present in public space is often referred to as 'Linguistic Landscapes', and the context is explained later on in these materials. In this session we will use some of the creative methods and approaches from the project and discuss the affordances of creative and art-based approaches to research.

Workshop guiding questions

Our overarching question for the workshop is as follows: What are the affordances of creative inquiry in research?

• Why do researchers use arts-based methods?
• What might they bring to our research and understandings?
• How might we use arts-based methods with our participants?
• What are the challenges and potential issues, particular in thinking about ethics and ethical implications of our work?

Background: 'Everyday' engagements with language(s) in 'everyday' life

As a little bit of background, in this project we explore understandings of language as experienced in everyday life. Creative - and artistic - methods are central to our inquiry and the research team includes researchers in linguistics, education and socially engaged arts. So far we have worked mainly in the city of Manchester in the north of the UK: in Cheetham Hill and Rusholme. Our work is informed by participatory research, and, where possible we work collaboratively with the participants - in this case young people from two secondary schools based in the city. The project shows the blended nature of research with the arts and with the digital. You'll see that some of our outputs are indeed digital and that we are extending the project to incorporate the 'blended' spaces in which we carry out our everyday lives. You can find out more about our current project here. This project sits within a broader intellectual project around 'making the new with / in the everyday', or, in other words, exploring everyday life and the banal (cf. Georges Perec). In my research I am also increasingly engaging with written forms of creative practice, for example poetry, fiction and memoir writing, in particular the idea of 'collective memoir' (cf. Annie Ernaux).

You'll be thinking about these methods in the context of your own research ideas as you develop your own projects for the DEdCPsy. How might you draw on wider engagements with the arts within your research? How might we account for these - as a way to foreground wider lives in the work we do?

A little bit about linguistic landscapes...

The field of 'Linguistic Landscapes' is very broad, but, put simply, researchers are interested in the visible languages in public space - for example street signs, public signage, informal notices, etc. You can find lots of examples of different methodologies used by researchers in this area (see Diggit magazine for an accessible summary). Methods tend to be qualitative and quantitative. However the main methods (see Blommaert (2013) for a good introduction) usually include observation, photography, fieldnotes and interviews, and ethnographic approaches to the study of linguistic landscapes are very common. A number of different apps have been developed to enable researchers – and the general public – to document multilingual signs in public spaces, including the LinguaSnapp app, developed by Yaron Matras at Multilingual Manchester, which enables public audiences to upload multilingual signs and 'tag' them in certain ways. You can download this app and have a play with it to see the kinds of information that researchers are interested in capturing.

The signs in public spaces that are of interest to Linguistic Landscapes researchers change frequently, with Linguistic Landscape research offering what can be described, in Jan Blommaert's terms, as a ‘first line diagnostic’ to researching a particular place, who lives there and works there, and how these places change over time. There are therefore many opportunities for creative development of digital apps, such as LinguaSnapp, to aid research and to give us more insights into particular places, going beyond conventional methods.

During the COVID19 pandemic, researchers have explored the new linguistic landscapes which have emerged (and also, by now, disappeared). Examples include this project by Jackie Jia Lou, which explores community responses to COVID19, and this research by Zhu Hua which sees multilingualism in crisis in the context of information signs and handwritten notices.

Over to you

So, in the Multilingual Streets project we foreground creative methods and see them as integral to our inquiry. Here and here are examples of two of the creative outputs from the project: zines created from images some of the young people we worked with made and data they collected. What are your initial thoughts when looking at this zine? You might read the following publications about our research, including our research articles (Bradley et al., 2018) and our chapter (Bradley & Atkinson, 2020). These publications will give you insights into the ways in which we are bringing artistic methods into our research. In doing this, what we're trying to do is extend the reach of linguistic landscapes research beyond more traditional linguistic research methods. Our work links to theories of dynamic multilingualism (e.g. Garcia & Li, 2014) and spatial repertoires (e.g. Pennycook & Otsuji, 2014), as well as the creative turn in applied linguistics (e.g. Bradley & Harvey, 2019). Although you might not be focusing on 'language', 'multilingualism' specifically, or even on 'languages', it is possible that you will be engaging with ideas of identity, belonging and experiences in everyday life (and language is always part of this). How might some of these ideas inform or be applied to your own research and practice?

Example collages focusing on lived experience of languages and space (used with permission)

(Anne Tiermas) I’m currently working as a PhD researcher at the university. I found only three languages around my working place: Finnish, Swedish and English. I was actually surprised that there were not any others. I used the work in the multilingual elementary school where also for example Somali, Arabic and Estonian were present. The language policy at the university seems to be quite strict and only those three official languages are allowed (actually I am not sure if English is the official one). But on the contrary I participated on Autumn in a course called “Multilingual approach to academic writing”, where all the languages and language skills were encouraged. The audience of these informative texts is mainly students and staff. The texts are short and clear and multimodal elements were used.

(Teresa Poeta) My experience of different languages within my neigbourhood of Leith in Edinburgh goes - in my case unsurprisingly – through experiencing the joys of food! Various cafes and restaurants don’t only visibly show words in various languages on their menus but constitute for me personally a chance to walk in, chat and relate to people in a number of languages I speak or learn (Italian, English, Swahili). I also reflected on what familiarity with a language means in (non) understanding play on words and other messages around us. This is what I tried to capture in my pictures and in the collage. I am also very conscious (having lived in London too) of how this ‘cultural diversity’ of neighborhoods gets commodified and consumed in the process of gentrification which I am undoubtedly part of and I often feel uneasy about. There are definitely many ways in which language dynamics here can be experienced and it can be a distressing experience for many.

Further reading

• Barone, T. & Eisner, E.W. (2012) Arts based research. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Butler-Kisber, L. (2010) Qualitative Inquiry: Thematic , Narrative and Arts-Informed Perspectives. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. [StarPlus link here].
• Chamberlain, K., McGuigan, K., Anstiss, D. & Marshall, K. (2018) A change of view: arts-based research and psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 15(2-3), pp. 131-139. [StarPlus link here].
• Coemans, S. & Hannes, K. (2017) Researchers under the spell of the arts: Two decades of using arts-based method in community-based inquiry with vulnerable populations. Educational Research Review, 22, pp. 34-49. [StarPlus link here].
• Harvey, L., Tordzro, G. & Bradley, J. (Eds). (2022). Beyond and besides language: Intercultural communication and creative practice. Language and Intercultural Communication Special Issue. [link to Special Issue here]
• Leavy, P. (2020) Method meets art: Arts based research practice. New York, NY: The Guildford Press. [StarPlus link here]. 
• Leigh, J. & Brown, N. (2021) Embodied Inquiry. London: Bloomsbury. [Ordered for library].

Contact details

Dr Jessica Bradley, Lecturer in Literacies, School of Education, University of Sheffield (Jessica.bradley@sheffield.ac.uk)