organised and planned structure of school. In one sense I was acutely aware of my ‘useless-ness’in the classroom, and yet on the other it was precisely this lack of obvious purpose and ambiguity that gave me time to listen to children and my genuine interest in their objects meant they had an interested other person to hear them.
The final idea from artography that I would like to highlight is Relationality Stephanie Springgay talks about communities that form through the process of
of practice documentation.
Until now, I have talked about the artist, teacher and researcher as separate things, but documentation is central to how the three can be brought together. I recently completed a Creative Partnership funded project working with two Sure Start Centres which, while problematic in some ways, provided me with an opportunity to try to integrate my researcher self, with my teacher self and my artist self. Also, my Guest Editorship of Practice.ie presented an opportunity to explore ways of integrating these identities Artography: I am now trying use the practice/theory from an arts based movement that comes from Canada called a/r/tography: “Drawing attention to a/r/t (artist/researcher/teacher) is not intended to single one identity out, rather it is an encounter between bodies that releases something from each” (Springgay, 2008: 159) At the heart is the practice of documentation rather than observation. Documentation is the‘graphy’of a/r/tography: it not only lends itself to interpretation but it is itself interpretation (Rinaldi 2001:86) It is an artefactual process.
Education is seen as a “relational place”. Meanings that we give to events do not prescribe what we should do, but they point us towards many possible directions. Documentation helps us map the relationality at the heart of both our, and children’s, learning paths and processes. While an individual practitioner may be motivated by their personal interests, they are always aware that these are positioned alongside the interests of others. It is through this relationship that an ethical dimension plays out, because you are always balancing your own interests and position in relation to the wider cohesiveness and interests of the group. Stopping to linger and reflect on documentation may open up spaces for us to talk about things that are often left unsaid. Rather than avoiding difficulty and failure, discussion can give us the confidence to proceed through a process of trial and error. This is an edited version of an original presentation by Christina MacRae, entitled, ‘Art practice as research; shifting paradigms in documentation practices.’ For a full version of this presentation, point your QR enabled mobile device at this code or visit: http://www.practice.ie/interviewarticlepage/26
As an artefact it is has a material and physical presence and can be returned to and re-read. At the same time as bearing the trace of the event that it records, it also carries the trace of the person who made that recording. It is in the documenting that a space is created that has the potential to be reflective and creative. One of the first things that drew me to a/r/tography was that it insists that theory is not separate from practice, but rather that they are mutually entangled. So it is through process that knowledge is constructed, in the in-between spaces that lie between people, culture and things. In my current project I am using documentation as the focus for dialogue with practitioners as well as with children to create a form of“visible listening”. It is the staff who document what happens when children engage with materials and objects, and this has the effect of drawing our attention to the small things, often the things that happen all the time. In this way, documentation can be a way of heightening awareness of everyday moments, to see the “extraordinary in the ordinary” (Strozzi, 2001:58).
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