Overview

Expressive writing and exploration of 'what something is like' is more often seen in songs and poetry than research texts, and yet there is so much to be learned in human social life from focused and careful answers to questions of this kind.

Being, seeking, telling explores ways to generate research texts that represent as vividly as possible the world of learning and education practice, so that its texture can be revealed and its experiences and meanings brought to life. It has been written so that readers can have some taste of various educational and learning experiences and be drawn to engage with, critique and possibly seek to modify elements of them. This approach, which is more expressive than explanatory, has relatively recently laid claim to inclusion in the academy. This text explores this claim, its foundations and ways of establishing criteria for this kind of approach.

Aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers working in education and adult education, it seeks to complement more technical/instrumental research discourses concerning human learning and education. Much of this concern for comprehensive accounts and vivid representations can be applied to research into a wide range of human social phenomena as well as learning and education.

Table of Contents

• Forward
  Maxine Greene
• Introduction: Coming to being, seeking and telling
  Peter Willis and Robert Smith

Part One: Methods and genres in portrayal

• Life as research: Reflections on poetry, postpositivist inquiry and professional practice
  Peter Waterhouse
• Expressive and arts-based research: Presenting lived experience in qualitative research
  Peter Willis
• Beyond thinking it: Deeds 'n data to words on a page
  Sue Gelade
• Ethnography, emotion and representation
  Pam Carden
• Crafting an arts-based educational research thesis: Issues of tradition and solipsism
  Maria Piantanida, Noreen Garman and Patricia McMahon
• Heuristic research: With thanks and apologies to Clark Moustakas
  Doug Conlan
• 'It doesn't count because it's subjective!'
  (Re) conceptualising the qualitative researcher role as 'validity' embraces subjectivity
  Robert Smith

Part Two: Foundational questions

• Some Gebserian and Keganesque reflections on academic writing
  Bernie Neville
• The Angel who dictates / the Angel who writes
  Jamie Bradbeer
• Power, speech, love
  Wayne Cristaudo
• Speech ways to Seven
  John West-Sooby
• Teaching 'Power: Love and Evil'
  Wayne Cristaudo and John West-Sooby
• The experiential questions under which the question of 'life' becomes a meaningful question: the case of Leo Tolstoy
  Steven Segal

Part Three: Acts of telling

• Autobiography, imagination and transformative learning
  Alec Nelson
• Letters from the Asylum: Recovering identity through poetry - an unauthorised text?
  John Knight
• In restauro - making the invisible visible
  Rosie McLaren
• With people, passion, paint and palette: Artistic autoethnography
  Karen Scott-Hoy
• Interaction with a grey cat: My personal journey towards an idea
  Tricia McCann
• Bleeding on the page: Passion and process in writing research
  Peta Heywood
• Imagining culture
  Helen Kimberley
• The spiralling journey(s) of living / loving popular theatre
  Warren Linds