Living action research: authoring identities through yaya projects

Abstract

This article examines the authors’ experiences living action research through an art therapy activity known as YaYa that involved creating and sharing visual representations of themselves as beginning researchers. This activity was part of a graduate course on education action research and students in the course found the activity transformative. The article first explores how four students in the course created and presented their YaYas. It goes on to discuss how the activity provided opportunities for students to imagine and re-imagine authored identities in the figured worlds of teaching and research. The role that visual arts play in transforming consciousness is also used to help understand the powerful impact of the YaYa activity. The YaYa as a visual artistic process opened students up to meaning-making and reconstructing identities that involved not only the mind, but also the emotions, body and spirit. The authors claim that learning action research can itself be a process of action research, and that living such practice is about involving and imagining the whole self in multiple figured worlds.