MEDICAMENTOS QUE ACTUAN SOBRE EL SISTEMA NERVIOSO CENTRAL ANALEPTICOS

This study deploys arts-enriched research methods (HEA, 2014). Below is a justification for using these methods in dialogue with the literature on the arts in qualitative research (Knowles and Cole, 2008).

In the first year of this doctoral research I attended two workshops on the link of art and knowledge organised by the Higher Education Academy in the UK, which gave me confidence that combining art and research is plausible, and marked the beginning of my exploration into arts-enriched research methods. The first one was entitled ‘Surprising Spaces: arts-enriched reflection in professional development for academics teaching in the arts and humanities’ (2014) and the second one, ‘Interdisciplinary Drawing Masterclass: collaborative exchange in art and science’ (2014). In the first one we were invited to reflect on practice first via exposition and discussion of poetry and then via producing creative crafts. There was an artist who introduced the different kinds of materials that we could use before we were given the task. The second workshop was more radical. It was held in the School of Art at the University of Ulster in Belfast. The organisers were art lecturers and their art students. The aim of the workshop was to reflect on how to bridge the gap between arts and science. An eye doctor was invited to give a talk about the dry eye disease and after the talk we were all invited to form two teams to discuss how to express our understanding of this disease through art. The art student in our group elicited and wrote our ideas on a flipchart paper to stimulate our imagination before working. The group discussion was focused more on what material to use to represent dryness rather than on whether to draw the eye or how people feel about it, or whether to use abstract art. In my group we discussed using the layers of an onion, using torn fabric,

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specific colours, and so on. An embroidery artist was specially invited to teach us how to incorporate embroidery in our work. Talking with people from other disciplines as well as talking about fabric, colours and materials was a new experience to me, and gave me confidence that exploring arts-enriched methods in my academic English language practitioner-research project could be valuable for the participants involved.

Preoccupied with a realization that language sometimes is not sufficient to express experiences and can even obscure and distort those experiences, this study will deploy mostly though not exclusively art as a methodological tool (Back & Puwar, 2012), arts-enriched methods (HEA, 2014). These methods seem to fit the exploratory, democratic and critical nature of this project well, and will allow the teacher-researcher to gain students’ insights into the learning experience, and the learner participants to develop their criticality. Given that the participants are all international students, with their own idiosyncratic ways of communicating meaning, providing them with varied ways, including art, of expressing themselves seems appropriate. Drawing and making posters could serve as a means to express the nameless, authentic and aesthetic referred to by Wu (2002; 2005).

Arts-enriched research methods (Eisner, 1981, 1998, 2001, 2008; HEA, 2014), specifically, drawings, have been deployed in an attempt to ‘capture the ineffable and hard-to-put-into-words’ (Weber, 2008), to ‘inspire creative thought’ (McNiff, 2008: 32), to ‘challenge […] the dominant, entrenched academic community and its claims to scientific ways of knowing’ (Finley, 2008: 72), and ‘to go beyond a verbal mode of thinking, [which] may help include wider dimensions of experience, which one would perhaps neglect otherwise’ (Bagnoli, 2009: 565), among others (Salvi et al., 2016).

Informed by a pedagogy for autonomy and exploratory practice, I encouraged students to create posters to express what they were learning, and to materialise their thought, ideas and insights gained from exploring topics. I could perceive the potential of putting insights, results, and partial understanding into paper and at the same time I was puzzled by it. In other words, I wondered how creating posters contributed to the students’ meaning making and learning processes.

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Both approaches suggest that posters could be used in the classroom for different purposes (for a list of purposes within EP see Wu, 2002; 2005), some of which include sharing either a plan of work, or the work done and the insights gained from the exploration of a topic, or what needs to be further explored or finalised, with the rest of the class and the lecturer (Dam, 1995). It seemed to me that the posters that the students created in class were often artistic including pictures, colours and drawings. Within EP, both Wu (2002; 2005) and Hanks (2013) have already stressed the need for further research on the functions and content of students’ posters. In my experience of encouraging students to create posters with the purpose of showing and sharing their plans, insights and questions, I had noticed that in the process of making their posters and formalising their thoughts and insights students seemed to exercise and develop skills that seemed resonant with being critical or with characteristics of a critical education. For example, students think and decide what to include in the poster, reflect on what they have learned and how best to represent it, in other words, articulate the thoughts and insights gained from exploring topics. This is also usually done collaboratively, which means that they talk about their work, share understanding and make meaning (Chun, 2015), all of which seem to be actions that involve being critical.

This representation or formalisation of thought (Langan, 1966) is usually both verbal and non-verbal depending on the time available in class. It is usually the case that with courses with many hours of teaching per week there is more space for creativity and non-verbal representations; on the other hand, with two-hour-per-week modules, the use of posters and artful ways of representation is more limited altogether. Another reason why I became interested in arts-enriched methods was that I perceived that there was a link between art or creativity and ‘criticality’ (Johnston et al., 2011), in other words, that art could be a medium for participants to be critical. Thirdly, my assumption was that perhaps through a non-verbal form of communication participants could express different insights from those expressed via verbal communication (Bagnoli, 2009).

Regarding the first motivation to use arts-enriched methods in this project, that is, the fact that I was already using posters in the classroom, plus the need for research on posters, I decided that I would ask participants to reflect on their learning experience through drawing and painting once, twice or three times in the course

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according to the affordances of each provision. This decision was made to ensure that participants’ views on the experience are collected and that this method is used systematically in all cases. Also, some of the posters that the students normally create in the classroom to share a plan of work or the work done and the insights gained from exploring topics will be collected and analysed.

In this project, students’ posters and paintings have been deployed for pedagogic and research purposes. Posters have been used at all times either to brainstorm ideas, to plan work, or to show and share understanding. However, drawing and painting have been used in exceptional moments and have been introduced as a novelty to give students an opportunity to reflect on their learning and research experience in a different way that appeals to the senses, to ‘intuition’ (Knowles & Cole, 2008:61), and to other ways of knowing that can contribute to student development of criticality. Analysing the students’ drawings will shed light onto what aspects of student criticality are fostered via this means of art.

An early proponent of arts-based research was Elliot Eisner in the 1980s in the US (Leavy, 2009). Currently, more than thirty years on, this idea is starting to take on in the social sciences in general as well as in Applied Linguistics in particular, both in the UK and around the world. In the UK in 2014, for example, the 6th ESRC Research Methods Festival, and the ESRC Interdisciplinary Conference and Interactive Workshop on Inequality in Education and Innovation in Methods included artful and innovative research methods.

In a book chapter entitled ‘Art and knowledge’ Eisner (2008) addresses the question of whether the arts enlarge human understanding. He starts his argument by saying that western philosophy has largely been influenced by Plato’s theory of knowledge that regards ‘the sensory systems that were stimulated through the arts’ as misleading. In other words, the separation between science and the arts dates back to Plato’s ideas of knowledge and science (ibid: 4). Eisner argues that it is with Aristotle that there is recognition of the arts as a source of knowing. Aristotle distinguishes three kinds of knowledge: theoretical, practical and productive, the last of which refers to the arts. In a similar light to Back and Puwar (2012), Eisner introduces the edited book Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research (Knowles and Cole, 2008) as ‘an encomium to the use of new forms of representation in the service of improved understanding of the human condition’. When it comes to

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language, he makes a distinction between descriptive and evocative language, and says that ‘art in research puts a premium on evocation, even when it has sections or aspects of it that are descriptive in character’. Eisner argues that in order to influence this philosophical move significantly it is important that researchers from the social sciences work in teams with practitioners of the arts (ibid: 9).

The power of images lies in its ever-lasting potential to evoke memories and for meaning making. What makes arts-informed methods so powerful is their direct accessibility and their being a source of meaning making, creativity, criticality, resonance and imagination. Artful research tools (Back and Puwar, 2012) facilitate accessing thoughts and memories that are either hard to articulate (Knowles and Cole, 2008: 44) or in one’s subconscious, working for mutual development, and expanding opportunities for knowledge production to key actors in the educative enterprise.