Collecting Data Through Performative Inquiry: A Tug on the Sleeve

Abstract

Performative inquiry offers practitioners and researchers a way of engaging in research that attends to critical moments that emerge through creative action. A tug on the sleeve introduces the reader to how we might engage in performative inquiry and how individual moments may be understood as embodied data that through reflection inform our practices and learning in the arts and education.

Acknowledgments

I would like to heartfully thank Clark and Logan, the two boys who “stopped” me for the gift of learning they offered me, and Dr. Patrick Verriour whose work in role drama (Tarlington and Verriour 1991) introduced me to a way of being present and deeply engaged in inquiry and play that is research.

Notes

¹At the time I conceptualized and articulated performative inquiry (Fels 1998, 1999), I was unaware of the use of the term by anyone else. Initially, I sought to theorize drama as research, and I chose the term performative inquiry for specific reasons based on the etymological meaning of performance and its relationship to complexity theory. Recently, the term performative inquiry has been used by others as an umbrella term embracing other forms of theatre-based research, such as ethnodrama, ethnotheatre, research-based theatre, or performance ethnography (see Butler-Kisber 2010); it has also been referred to as a generic term when discussing performance, embodiment, and inquiry (see Pelias 2008).

²Performative inquiry need not be restricted only to research through drama and theatre. Performative inquiry may be engaged in any of the arts—dance, music, multimedia, visual and performing arts—and indeed, as a way to consider the stops in our everyday lives, in terms of how we perform and are performed by our environment, our roles, our contexts, our relationships with others and the “scripts” that we create, and what is revealed in those stop moments, the embodied data, that call us to attention.

³Among the pioneers in arts-based research were those in dance who recognized movement as a form of inquiry (see Bagley and Cancienne 2001). As dancer and arts education researcher Celeste Snowber writes, “The body knows” (2001, 26).

⁴The term interstanding was coined by philosophers Taylor and Saarinen. They write, “Understanding has become impossible because nothing stands under. Interstanding has become unavoidable because everything stands between” (1994, Interstanding 2). The term proposes that meaning making is created through interaction between individuals.

⁵Madeline Grumet, in a talk at University of British Columbia, cautioned her audience to “tread lightly, oh so lightly.” Attendance by author. Date unknown.

⁶I am thankful to Dr. Karen Meyer for these questions and my son, Marshall Fels Elliott, who as a fifth-grade student shouted out from the back of the class, “Who cares?” when Karen was asking students for questions that a scientist might ask. We have not yet determined if his intonation included a question mark or an exclamation mark when he offered “Who cares” as a possibility.

⁷University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where I undertook my doctoral studies.

⁸In this article, I refer to stops that arose during drama activities that explored fairytales. “Jack and Jill and the Beanstalk” was part of a fairytale unit that was being taught by the teacher who requested that I work with her. However, I have experienced stops when engaging in role dramas exploring issues in a variety of topics, ranging from codfishing in Newfoundland, air pressure, and small-town land development, among others. And of course, others who use performative inquiry as their research methodology speak to stops that occur in a variety of areas from those that occur when working with individuals diagnosed with mental illness to those experienced in one's own creative process as an artist.

⁹Interestingly, when I share this story with my undergraduates, many of my students are unfamiliar with this fairytale. The increased diversity of today's classroom means that students are exposed to a variety of literature, stories, and media that are not necessarily shared in common. The challenge we have as educators teaching curriculum through the arts is to attend to what is relevant, resonant, and valuable to a child's learning and life experience. (See Fels and Belliveau 2009).