This book communicates new voices, insights, and possibilities for working with the arts and memory in researching teacher professional learning. The book reveals how, through the arts, teacher-researchers can reimagine and reinvigorate moments of the past as embodied and empowering scholarly experiences. The peer-reviewed chapters were composed from juxtaposing unique "mosaic" pieces written by 21 new and emerging scholars in South Africa and Canada. Their research explores diverse arts-based practices and resources including collage, film, drawing, narrative, poetry, photography, storytelling and television alongside related ethical issues. Critically, Memory Mosaics also demonstrates how artful memory-work can engender agency in professional learning with teacher-researchers taking up pressing issues of social justice such as inclusion and decolonisation. Overall, the book offers a multidimensional, polyvocal exploration of how artful memory-work can bring about future-oriented professional learning enacted as pedagogies of reinvention and productive remembering.
Memory Mosaics: Researching Teacher Professional Learning Through Artful Memory-Work, by Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, Daisy Pillay, and Claudia Mitchell, along with teacher-researchers on two continents, is a ground-breaking book. It models a collaborative approach to arts-based research that melds memory-work, visual and poetic arts, and reflective practice to promote professional learning, personal transformation, decolonisation, and a more just future. Like colourful pebbles and bits of glass, the authors place teachers' self-stories in relation to one another in an artful design, creating thematic coherence that evokes a deep sense of knowing. Judith C. Lapadat, Professor Emeritus, Faculty of Education, University of Lethbridge, Canada
Memory Mosaics: Researching Teacher ProfessionalLearning Through Artful Memory-Workassembles exemplars of professional learning in an intriguing mosaic format. A topic is introduced, followed by memory-pieces; then: discussion and/or creative response. This lively juxtaposition generates momentum for highly productive forms of remembering around social justice issues, even as the reader is invited into an intimate circle of shared concern: for these issues, with these (and other) teacher-researchers. It is a beautiful, original, and practical book. Teresa Strong-Wilson, Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, McGill University, Canada
Doing Visual Research offers an innovative introduction to the use of photography, collaborative video, drawing, objects, multi-media production and installation in research. Claudia Mitchell explains how visual methods can be used as modes of inquiry as well as modes of representation for social research.
The book looks at a range of conceptual and practical approaches to a range of tools and methods, whilst also highlighting the interpretive and ethical issues that arise when engaging in visual research. Claudia Mitchell draws on her own work in the field of visual research throughout to offer extensive examples from a variety of settings and with a variety of populations.
Topics covered include:
o Photographs and memory work studies
o Video and social change
o Participatory archiving with drawings and photos
o Working with images/Writing about images
o Can visual methods make a difference? From practice to policy
Doing Visual Research takes an interdisciplinary approach to the subject of visual research, producing a practical introduction to the subject that will be of great use to students and researchers across the social sciences, and in particular in education, communication, sociology, gender, development, social work and public health.
This book focuses on cellphilming as a participatory visual methodology in arts-based research and teaching. The book aims to advance critical perspectives-and re-visioning-in relation to the co-production of knowledge through cellphilming.
Many of the chapters come out of an international virtual symposium hosted by McGill University in June 2022. It brings together authors working in a variety of interdisciplinary areas and settings including work with Indigenous groups in Canada, girls and women with disabilities in Vietnam, youth in conflict and refugee contexts in Mali, and Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights in Canada, Nigeria, South Africa, and India.
Some of the re-visioning addressed in the collection takes up place as we work in new contexts and situations as we are seeing with the idea of ethnographies at a and in relation to COVID-19. The genres, the place of reflexivity, and even the timing of participatory engagement might vary as a result of using virtual platforms necessitated by distancing. Other re-visioning takes place as a result of work with new communities, or new age populations and aspects of intersectionality, looking across work with very young children and older adults.
This book contributes to further decolonizing cellphilming methodology to support participatory work in new ways, and with underrepresented groups for whom finding new ways for engagement is key. A special feature of the book is its attention to work with International NGOs.
Chapter `Cellphones beyond the workshop: Youth researchers owning gender transformative change through participatory visual research in rural India during COVID-19' is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
