By Dr Suzanne Culshaw

At the end of June, the UK AECED team had the opportunity to lead a workshop at the Creative Research Methods conference at the University of Hertfordshire (UH).

The conference had been designed to be an accessible, central point for creative research methods and featured inspiring ideas, guidance, and examples of innovative and successful creative, arts-based and embodied methods of doing, communicating and exploiting research.  Specifically the conference aimed to:

  • enthuse researchers to increase the reach of their research;
  • generate more skills in arts-based research methods and disseminating/creating impact;
  • enable researchers at UH to build external connections related to such work;
  • create routes for collaboration and exchange with researchers and research users;
  • support the careers of researchers.

The one-day conference kicked off with an inspiring keynote speaker by Professor Dawn Mannay and ended with a very moving poetry performance by Dr Kate Carruthers Thomas. The programme of sessions in-between was extremely rich, and the AECED interactive workshop was designed as a taster of aesthetic-embodied learning for democracy. The AECED session opened with a brief introduction by our colleague Professor Philip Woods, who shared how we conceptualise democracy-as-becoming. Our colleague, Professor Karen Mpamhanga, led into the expressive activity by introducing the aesthetics of democratic debate, using images of parliamentary architecture as a stimulus for collage and gesture response. Finally, I – Dr Suzanne Culshaw – invited attendees to create a collage to express their response to the images shown and then to express an embodied response, using their hands, to the collage they’d created.

It is always fascinating to observe how people engage with activities such as these, and I personally really enjoy the gentle noises in the room as people rustle through the materials in the collage boxes and think through how to express their response in collage form. The session wasn’t long enough to elicit lots of feedback from those who participated but suffice to say that each collage looked very different; some more literal in terms of re-presenting the shapes of democratic debate in, say, our House of Commons, and others more abstract in terms of expressing a general sense of the flow of interactions within a debate. One thing is for sure: I never fail to be amazed at how differently people express themselves in response to the same question!

I’m always happy to talk with people interested in using collage in research settings, in their teaching and learning and/or for reflection, so don’t hesitate to get in touch and we can arrange a call: s.culshaw@herts.ac.uk

For more detailed information about how we think about collage and gesture response, check out this article:

Woods, P. A., Culshaw, S., Smith, K., Jarvis, J., Payne, H., & Roberts, A. (2023). Nurturing change: Processes and outcomes of workshops using collage and gesture to foster aesthetic qualities and capabilities for distributed leadership. Professional Development in Education, 1-20.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19415257.2023.2187432

If you’re interested in finding out more about the AECED research, then check this AECED website regularly for updates, and/or follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aecedhorizon/