Educator hat: Elements guiding inquiry processes .1 Arts-based inquiry

reflexive research. The methods assemblage is located with the school-going learner in South African urban space and their experiences of environmental learning. The assemblage is informed by reflexive educator-researcher practice, arts-based inquiry and Reggio Emelia inspired deep listening to what emerges in our encounters.

3.3 Educator hat: Elements guiding inquiry processes

conceptualisation that misrepresents the nature of educational encounters completely. It is a discourse established through the need to maintain a place for arts in neoliberal educational policy that privileges the sciences and mathematics. However, as expressed by Gaztambide- Fernandez (2013, p. 214):

Such arguments have painted our commitments into an educational corner by using a rhetoric of effects that discursively construes the arts as things in themselves, as elixirs that can be injected to transform educational situation and guarantee particular outcomes.

The notion that arts themselves do something in particular makes it challenging to study the actual experience of the arts (which can most certainly be benign). Moving to the discourse of cultural production enables us to resist Eurocentric and predefined conceptions of the arts and embrace a more multi-dimensional conceptualisation of education as a cultural practice in and of itself. Developing the work of Rancier, Lewis (2012) drew a similar conclusion that education is already a process that is aesthetically engaged (covertly and overtly) and this is one of the ways we engage with the politics of education.

This conclusion resonates with the rhetoric of arts as cultural production that “art is something people do” rather than art doing something to people.

This conceptual shift to cultural practice acknowledges that it is actual people, under real social circumstances, in particular cultural contexts, and within specific material and symbolic relations that have experiences involving symbolic materials and forms of cultural production. (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013, p. 226)

With this in mind, it is important to differentiate critical arts-based research from the larger pool of arts-based work to make explicit the use of “arts in a project of social and political resistance to achieve social justice” (Finley, 2017, p. 561). Darder and McKenna (2011, p.

670) wrote that working with and theorising the arts is important to counter the “enormous pedagogical power of the corporate entertainment state”. In this way, art names a variety of activities in which we can experiment and enact creative acts for reshaping the world. In this sense arts-based practices need to be accompanied by critical consciousness and forms of socio-political analysis (Baxter and Low, 2017). This problematisation of the arts in education accompanies this study on questions of the work that multiple modes do in the process of learning.

Reading the literature in arts-based inquiry helped me to make sense and name processes from my own experiences in applied theatre work. I consider this pedagogical method as a space maker, a way of making space with more than text for others to take up, and to bring forth new beginnings and to join the inquiry or dialogue. So thinking with the phases of surfacing experience, raising questions, engaging with media and information, re-presenting answers, and creating short scenes, we worked across modes of telling stories, improvising skits, drawing dreams, rehearsing scenes, information seeking, and discussing. All these activities contributed towards an experience-based, socially, historically and culturally located inquiry into water.

3.3.2 Emergence and curriculum making

My role, together with the co-educators’ role, in accordance with the understanding of an

‘epistemology of emergence’ (Osberg, Biesta and Cilliers, 2017), could be conceptualised as creating a platform on which learners could respond by engaging with educational artifacts through their own “agency, intentionality and spontaneity” (Bhaskar, 2016). This platform, aligning with non-instrumentalist views of the arts and method, is about “jumping off points rather than authoritative endings” (Ellingson, 2017, p. 4). It is useful to explicate the

substance of sensibilities that need to be developed to support emergent educational

processes. It is not the same, as is sometimes mistakenly interpreted, as doing nothing and the intention that ‘learners lead’ the process is not enough to guarantee that it happens.

Emergent educational encounters do not operate in a vacuum but in a space with socio- cultural ‘rules’ about what goes with education encounters so the project of enabling emergence is partly about small acts or resistance or refusal (Nxumalo, Vintimilla and Nelson, 2018, p. 436). If we do not explicitly situate our emergent curriculum practice in relation to “late capitalism”, “racist structuring” and “extractive consumerism”, then we are allowing it to exist implicitly in our engagements (2018, p. 436). At this point, the role of the critical educator is interpreting “learning processes” in terms of the “psychological,

sociological, and ideological effects” at play (Kincheloe, McLaren and Steinberg, 2010, p. 166). In this sense, there are multiple elements that may be guiding the inquiry and paying attention to this is the reflexive responsibility of the educator.

The backdrop described above endorses that in emergent inquiry the educator plays an active role. It involves planning content and engagement processes and adapting these plans as the inquiry unfolds. It involves being open to changes of plan and changes of place. Partly it

involves power in terms of making ‘difficult decisions’ about what gets taken up and what gets left out of the inquiry (Nxumalo, Vintimilla and Nelson, 2018). This is guided by the matter of concern and the dialogical expressions and framings of that concern. This work moves into the realm of the pedagogista and relates to active reflection for thinking about both cultivating and sustaining emergence of a collective inquiry that is made of the creativity and curiosity of those involved.

3.4 Pedagogista and educator in dialogue: Listening to educational encounters