A Collective Collage Poem Research Falling Out of Colorful Pages Onto Paper: Collage Inquiry (original) (raw)
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As a visual artist undertaking doctoral studies in education, the author required a research method that integrated her studio practice into her research process, giving equal weight to the visual and the linguistic. Her process of finding such a method is outlined in this article, which touches on arts-based research and practice-led research, and her ultimate approach of choice, collage. Collage, a versatile art form that accommodates multiple texts and visuals in a single work, has been proposed as a model for a "borderlands epistemology": one that values multiple distinctive understandings and that deliberately incorporates nondominant modes of knowing, such as visual arts. As such, collage is par- ticularly suited to a feminist, postmodern, postcolonial inquiry. This article offers a preliminary theoriz- ing of collage as a method and is illustrated with images from the author's research/visual practice.
London Review of Education, 2019
This article reports on the methodological approach taken in a doctoral study that explores what it means to be struggling as a teacher. Participants were established and experienced teachers and leaders in the secondary school system in England. A particular form of collage – where materials are placed rather than stuck – was used within the context of a research interview. Arts-based methods such as collage are gaining in popularity as they stimulate visual rather than linguistic thinking and offer the opportunity to express experiences as holistic, non-linear metaphors. Collage also has revelatory potential as it helps uncover that which participants cannot necessarily express in words alone. The author presents the analytical challenges of intermingling the verbal and visual data in her study by discussing the collages created by two participants. An analysis of those collages shows that factors influencing struggling can be both internal and external. Struggling was found to be...
Conflict and Contradiction: The Politics of Collage
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This thesis deals with notions of collage conceptually. To avoid an all inclusive definition of collage, certain boundaries must be defined. The hybrid must be considered collage conceptually, as it reveals its sources within its even composition. On the other hand an integrated object reveals no trace of its disparate origins. Although collage’s roots lie in the vernacular, the history of fine art collage begins the early twentieth century. It was originally used as a formal device, but it quickly became an important conceptual tool for artists, particularly the Dadaists. The bases for this new medium certainly lay beyond the art sphere. Collage entered the artists’ vocabulary at the time of the First World War and its influence has spread since. The availability of materials and techniques had developed over the previous century and a half, but the suddenness of its spread and development detonated at a particular juncture of politics and economy. Leon Trotsky’s Law of Uneven Development helps explain the pitched struggle of advancing capitalist competition that created the conditions for the First World War. It can also explain the advent of self- contradictory modes of visual communication. The key to collage is this contradiction. Through the combination of two or more disparate real-world objects it creates new meaning. This is the Hegelian dialectic made visible. The totality of the objects contains a new meaning comprised of the existence of the two or more disparate objects. The possible meaning depends on the signs that comprise the dialectic of collage. A sign contains a real and implied history and a contemporary construction of meaning which, in combination with additional signs, imbues collage with layers of meaning. This totality of meaning also fundamentally undermines narrative structures. Meaning is conveyed almost instantly with collage, thus arming it with the radical power of the subversion of traditional linear thought and narrative. The political potential of collage also depends on its use of real-world objects as signs. Not only has the presence of found-objects in the art world led to an important rethinking of the role of the artist and challenged the very definition of art, the found-object must be understood as signifier and signified. Today the political significance of collage has been greatly eroded as it is more frequently viewed in television and marketing than in the art sphere. Yet, significant innovations in the medium continue to manifest. Artists like Laila Curtis, Mike Nelson, Thomas Hirschhorn, etc. continue to advance collage. The material conditions that gave way to collage still exist. In fact, its political and economic grounds are in a more pronounced state of contradiction and crisis. If the origins of collage were first seen in vernacular combinations and collections, perhaps the future of collage can be seen in today’s colloquial object and image making.
In this paper “bead collage,” an arts-based research method that invites participants to reflect, communicate and construct their experience through the manipulation beads and found objects is explained. Emphasizing the significance of one’s personal biography and experiences as a researcher, I discuss how my background as an artist and art therapist influenced the development of this approach. I propose several pedagogical applications of “bead collage,” offer questions for consideration, and suggest future directions for this method. I invite others to explore this, or similar approaches drawn from their own experiences, to develop what Eisner (1995) and Bressler (2006) describe as “artistically-crafted” and “aesthetically based” research.
We are junior, tenure-line faculty at a research-intensive institution in the Southwestern United States. Most of our responsibilities lie with mentoring and advising graduate students who are practicing teachers in local schools. As such, one of our major goals is to bring together our research interests in New Literacies (New London Group, 1996) into our work as mentors and advisors. We determined that we would benefit from a multimodal method for supporting our thinking together with our teachers, together with each other, and separately. By multimodal, we mean that we were utilizing multiple modes, including image, print text, or spatial arrangement (Jewitt & Kress, 2003) across our work. Even images themselves are multimodal (Duncum, 2014), specifically taking mode of color and spatiality into account (Jewitt and Kress; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001). Among the strategies we came to use with our students is collage (combining images, words, and other symbols and icons purposely on a page). The purpose of this study was to examine our uses of collage as a multimodal method of supporting graduate student teachers and to reflect on and improve our practice as teacher educators (LaBoskey, 2004). In our state, there are large populations of English learners with Hispanic/Latino and/or Native American/American Indian heritage who need intensive language and literacy support. Teachers in our state are among the lowest paid nationwide making turnover an issue. Graduation rates, although they are improving, are low. Thus, it is critical for our state to improve literacy instruction, but given our context, the work is also challenging. Our literacy program is part of an interdisciplinary department that mostly awards graduate degrees and offers some undergraduate service courses. We want our students who are teaching in schools to see a graduate degree as a way to feel sustained and empowered in their work with children. Collage became one avenue of several we tinkered with for doing and reflecting on our work in this context.
Researching oneself through the collage
This paper will present a methodological reflection on how some artistic techniques can became for the individuals the opportunity to think of themselves in an auto-biographical way. In particular, this paper will focus on the collage. Collage is a technique based on a mixing of images, verbal text and other elements that starts with the analysis of an existing state of affairs, proceeds to deconstruct it, and finally to construct a new product juxtaposing different languages. In this sense, making a collage of the learning process engage the authors in a self-narrative process with the potential to enhance reflexivity. First, this paper will underline the role of collage in the artistic background of our contemporary era, in order to explain how the artistic work can be a way to create and tell the own life story. At another level, using selected examples of researching and training experiences conducted by the authors in some educational contexts (as university, primary and high schools), this paper will show how the collage can become a techniques for constructing and eliciting meanings held by the subjects that would not be accessible by other means and that are important to define themselves, especially for adolescents and young adults involved in the difficult construction process of their identities. In light of the complexity of the topic, it is hoped that this paper will contribute to advancing understanding of the potential of arts as learning strategy in educational contexts. Keywords: Collage, art education, qualitative research, autobiography