by Emily Dowdeswell and Sarah Huxley

When we were asked to write something about our presentations, we thought about conventions of academic representation, and of ways to elicit fun in our own process of reflecting upon the experience of presenting with/in a digital conference. Focusing on the conference title “Research Re(imagined)”, how could our writing be a provocative contribution for change and growth (Koro-Ljungberg & Maclure, 2013)? A part of wider conversations in progress around the need to reimagine academic conference in a time of intersecting pandemic and climate crises.

Being with/in digital presentation

How might we convey the lived experience of doing digital presentations. This is different from the fixed content of the presentation itself. Whilst completing her doctoral research, India Amos of the School of Health and Society at the University of Salford, explored ways to ‘carry forward’ human experience if human experience is conceptualised as ‘more than words can say’ (Amos, 2019). She adopted found poetry to bring the meaning of her research experience alive. Poetry can capture complexity, heighten creativity and invite reflexivity (Pithouse-Morgan et al., 2014). Monica Prendergast, professor of drama and theatre education at the University of Victoria, advocates for poetic inquiry, and particularly found poetry (e.g. Prendergast, 2006), as a way of doing qualitative research differently. So, could found poetry be created from presentation texts as an arts-based approach to describing the complexity of doing digital presentations? In order to discover and communicate that experience in a multidimensional, evocative and more accessible way (Cahnmann, 2003).

Chop-chop, Cut-cut

Found poetry is created by taking words and phrases from other sources and reframing them to convey a different meaning to the reader. Sometimes described as literary or poetic collage, it also references the dadaism of Marcel Duchamp, and reimagines the communication of meaning in ways that are unexpected. Natalie Franks has a very useful account here if you are interested in having a go. Creating poetry to represent research experience is a non-linear process that involves physically or electronically cutting and pasting selected words and phrases together (Pithouse-Morgan et al., 2014). The process itself reframes research presentation away from a description of fixed findings, towards the unfolding of ambiguity, tension and precarity. The process highlights that our understanding is always partial, contingent and subject to change (Pithouse-Morgan et al., 2014).

Photo 1: In blue, words/phrases from Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, and in orange, text from Sarah’s PowerPoint.

So, having discussed our approach, Sarah went off and scribbled, chopped, and collaged. We had agreed our theme: the lived experience of digital presentations, and her focus was to find a poem that represented her experience of ‘disassociation and reconnection’. A quick search surfaced several articles about dissociating as an embodied response to significant trauma. It’s a serious condition, and some common signs of being in a dissociate state can be: mind wandering; a sense of the world not being real; and watching yourself from seemingly outside of your body.

Whilst we most certainly did not experience a trauma induced experience of disassociation during our digital presentations, we did jostle alongside some of these sensations. We share a vignette of Sarah’s memories as an example of what we mean:

“I recall saying ‘Um’ – a sound I too frequently use to hold the space, as I search for the verbalisation of my thoughts. Immediately I became aware of my self-critic: the sound reverberated, and I was suddenly watching myself give the presentation. As someone behind – looking at the body present, and then, the digital screen. This sensory moment was transitory, and I was soon drawn back into re-connecting with the movement to the next slide, drawn into the digital visualisation of text and colour. Slides – a packaged extension of thoughts being shared with others, all neatly placed on a digital screen. It felt good. I was re-plugged back into the virtual experience”.

In reworking our presentations, through remembered sensations, and poetry that resonates with our experience, we rethink digital presentation as “something more complex and creative, even agentic” (Banerjee & Blaise, 2018). “A digital hokey cokey”, created by Sarah from her slide presentations, sensations and the poem ‘The Whole Self – by Naomi Shihab Nye’, seeks to carry forward our experience of doing presentations. In drawing on poetic inquiry, we intentionally adopt a method that is partial, serious, playful and imperfect (Banerjee & Blaise, 2018).

Photo 2: Bringing different possible versions of the found poem together.

Figure 1: A digital hokey cokey by Sarah Huxley

[Audio] recording of the poem, read aloud by Sarah Huxley

Moments of Re(connection)

We were curious to understand more about the potential for collective poetic inquiry to engage with the polyvocality (Pithouse-Morgan et al., 2014) within our educational conference space. We have (re)presented our digital presentations using found poetry, in order to share our experience as a poetic performance, evoking the diverse voices of body, wire, screen, key, soundboard, pixel, text and image. Did we succeed in carrying forward the collective, multifaceted aspects of digital conferencing? Did our approach capture the risk we feel as we move away from familiar forms of conference presentation?  As argued forcefully before, poetic inquiry can push us “to the precarious point of confronting and publicly revealing ambiguities in what and how we come to know” (Pithouse-Morgan et al., 2014, 167). Our approach to representing our research is a risk, a provocation to reimagine how research experience can be shared, which we hope aligns with the goals of the conference itself. It is an approach that also seeks to disrupt conceptualisations of digital presentation as known, familiar and inert (Koro-Ljundberg & Maclure, 2013). We have paused to wonder what is possible if we reconfigure and reimagine our digital presentation experiences differently. We now are left to wonder what might be possible if we make room for fun to entangle readers in different and unknowable ways (Banerjee & Blaise, 2018)?

References

Amos, I. (2019). “That’s what they talk about when they talk about epiphanies”: An invitation to engage with the process of developing found poetry to illuminate exceptional human experience. Counselling & Psychotherapy Research 19(1), pp.16-24.

Banerjee, B. & Blaise, M. (2018). An unapologetic feminist response. Research in Education 101(1), pp.17-24.

Cahnmann, M. (2003). The craft, practice, and possibility of poetry in educational research. Educational Researcher, 32(3), pp. 29-36.

Dowdeswell, E. (2021). (Re)imagining learning and research: invitations to create and reflect. WELS Postgraduate Researchers Conference. Research re(imagined): (post)pandemic perspectives. 20^th March 2021.

Huxley, S. (2021). Changing method: how I shifted from a ‘blended’ to fully online ethnography. WELS Postgraduate Researchers Conference. Research re(imagined): (post)pandemic perspectives. 20^th March 2021.

Huxley, S. (2021). A digital hokey cokey.

Shihab Nye, N. (1995). The Whole Self. From Words Under Words – Selected Poems. 4^th Edition.

Koro-Ljungberg, M. & Maclure, M. (eds) (2013). Special issue: Data. Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies 13(4), pp. 219–372.

Pithouse-Morgan, K., Naicker, I., Chikoko, V., Pillay, D., Morojele, P., & Hlao, T. (2014). Entering an ambiguous space: Evoking polyvocality in educational research through collective poetic inquiry. Perspectives in Education 32(4), pp. 149-170.

By Sarah Huxley

Can you understand what an ice cream is without eating it, but by only looking at it and describing it? Without experiencing its texture, taste, coldness, flavour, smell, and examining the multi-faceted and layered sensory experience that is all part of the process of eating an ice cream. This process is in its own way a celebration of sensory experience, movement and being. The process of eating an ice cream is a blog post in itself, but I won’t digress.

Source: Unsplash @Foodism360

For my research on exploring fun and learning, I understand ‘fun’ to be an ice cream of sorts. This may also be partly because I am writing this blog in 32-degree heat, but the metaphor stands.

Fun is an ambiguous concept, which has different connotations in different cultures and deserves to be better understood alongside learning processes.  This is the premise upon which my thesis is based. I am looking at what fun is, does and why it may be important with a sport for social change organisation called Coaches Across Continents (CAC) https://coachesacrosscontinents.org/.

Source: Coaches Across Continents (CAC)

For the purposes of this post, I want to acknowledge and focus on the work of the anthropologist Tim Ingold, in particular, his joyful book “Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description” (2011). Here he sets the case for his beliefs that “it is by moving that we know… a being that moves, knows and describes must be observant…[and] is being alive to the world” (Ingold, 2011: xii). Ingold does not like binaries: the mind is not a separate entity to the body (drawing from Merleu Ponty), nor is the world we inhabit a separate entity to humanity. For him ‘wayfaring’ is the rhythmic patterning of how people contribute alongside “through their movements to its [the worlds] ongoing formation” (p.44).

Ingold (2011) reminds sensory researchers of the bias of “head over heels”, and that the sense of touch, especially via feet and its wayfaring with the ground, especially in Western research practices is often ignored. Actually, there is much to be learnt as a researcher from his call to focus on the movement of intransitive and haptic experiences: not from the “accumulation of knowledge through successive points of rest”, but rather to consider that “for the most part we do not perceive things from a single vantage point, but rather by walking around them” (p.45).

As I am starting to build and prepare my methods using sensory ethnography, and this will mean participating and observing the ‘on-pitch’ games that CAC develop and use with their partners and children across the globe. Ingold’s work, therefore, reminds me to not lose grounding with my feet and embodied experiences, and to not simply focus on what I see at certain points. Rather examine if and how my sense of touch and movement throughout can communicate a reality about how fun and learning are understood through the play-based games of CAC.

Source: Ramesh Iyer

By the way, my favourite ice cream is pistachio: it’s not just about the vivid colour, or the visual audacity of it – I love the crunchiness of the nuts alongside the creamy texture, and it’s almost almond taste. It reminds me to be grateful for being alive.

To learn more about my PhD research or discuss your ice cream preferences you can follow me here: @AidHoover or write to me at: sarah.huxley@open.ac.uk

The interactive workshop “complexities of responding to children and their rights” was organised by PhD and EdD students  in WELS- ECYS on the 19th of November 2019

The event was held at the Children’s Research Centre of Open University UK.

Linda Plowright presented her work about “Moving towards an agent child-guided research methodology”; and introduced core research-choice methods

Lucy Rodriguez Leon introduced her work about “Exploring children’s understanding of text through mediated dialogue”; and described ethnographic methods.

Petra Vackova  discussed  her research study about  “Felt, lively, embodied explorations of social inclusion around early-years art making in the Czech Republic”; and  explained response-able methods

The event was very engaging, fun and interactive with discussion, brainstorming, post-its mind-maps including activities in groups and also with the plenary.

The event received participants from WELS and other faculties including supervisors, early carrier researchers, lecturers, senior fellows, professors and new PhD students.

An important report was also launched,  celebrating the OU’s 50 anniversary.

Chamberlain, L., Afroze, J., Cooper, V. & Collins, T. (2019) Representing children’s rights from discussion through to illustration and interpretation, Milton Keynes, The Open University Children’s Research Centre and Amnesty UK International

download: https://wels.open.ac.uk/sites/wels.open.ac.uk/files/files/Rep_childrens_rights_Res_Report_Nov_2019.pdf