Arts Based
Research and Roots
As an arts based researcher, I engage with exploring visual imagery as a reflection of my research and experiences in the world. I am particularly interested in the relationship between root structures and research approaches and methodologies. I use photographs of root structures and my own drawings and watercolor paintings to reflect and develop research strategies. The drawings and photographs help me to visualize potential questions and ideas that exist in the in between spaces. The roots are used like maps depicting a wide array of influences, questions, and entry points that can be created within new spaces, creating in the middle, between things, between spaces, processes, and practices. In this visual, the ideas spread the surface and have the potential to experience and create connections in many ways.
More recently, I have engaged with poetry writing as a way to reflect on my identity and role as a researcher within the organizational structure of roots and research.
I am simplicity and complexity.
I am Reaching and attending to connections in the invisible spaces.
I am sister, wife, mother
For those visible and invisible, traditional and NON- traditional.
I am introverted and extroverted.
Growing, shaping, adapting to situations. Finding, listening to my voice and using my voice.
I am constructing new knowledge in the presence of others.
I am an insider and an outsider.
Belonging to the majority and on the edges of the non-majority.
I am from the middle and the edges.
I am from water spreading towards available spaces
I am from dirt, solid, planted.
I am in the middle of past, present, and future educators…born from a family of many
I hope for knowing, understanding, changing
I am a researcher allowing research to lead me to new places
listening to the situations and places that exist in the margins
I am simplicity and complexity
I am Reaching and attending to connections in the invisible spaces.
Bruttress Roots
Big Questions and ideas that stabalize the research
Rhizome Roots
Questions- that can send out new ideas and thoughts. If separated, each piece may be able to give rise to a new research idea.
Secondary Roots
Questions and ideas that feed and support the main questions.
