I have been captivated by Victoria Restler’s dissertation from the moment it was introduced to me and made available. From the opening title and its politic challenge to quantified, metric driven evaluation of educators, I was immersed and ignited by a fresh investigation into  to this severely limited  and problematic attempt to measure and regulate the process of teaching; the process of learning.  It was and is more than just academic research. Dr Restler’s assemblage of media: leaping from the text, referring back to the printed words, or liberated from and definitive on its own without unrequited tether to the text, both answers questions of how art gives meaning to academic work and research, and how it provokes greater investigation into the qualitative aspects of learning and experience.

Even the collection and creation of art that will be purposed in research involves considerations of positionality. Restler invokes Luttrell’s comments on “training” those experiencing multimodal research to have a reflexivity not impeded or influenced by knowledge of the researcher (at first).  Those initial experiences with the work(s) and the meanings conveyed are important, to  be built out through further interaction discussion and reflection within the framework of the study.

One undeveloped thought I have is how we/I still have the paradigm of art and written text as dualities that can be (uneasily?) integrated into research, merely complimentary in their strengths and weaknesses towards a goal of enriching the work. But is that duality only because we are enculturated to  separate the two modalities?  That with greater experience and familiarity, our understanding and expectations will recognize research with a flowing and seamless interplay of art and text, qualification and emotion, towards a more perfect support of thesis?

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.