Restricted access to the promised land: An action-based aesthetic investigation into leading values-based masters programmes
Margaret Page, University of Bristol
Ann Rippin, University of Bristol
This paper arose from a mutual exploration of the meaning and qualities of experience associated with founding, joining or being members of postgraduate academic programmes which have a set of clearly articulated aims about students' personal development. We are interested in the dilemmas of founding and sustaining 'alternative’ communities of learning and practice in the academy. Our interest comes from direct experience of dilemmas and difficulties that are not widely spoken about or researched, and that when spoken about are likely to be personalised rather than analysed systemically and collectively owned.
We were particularly interested to reflect on our position as women as leaders of programmes which often have significantly high proportions of women students, and to consider the gendered archetypes and stereotypes to which such leadership gave rise. During our inquiry it became clear that the dilemmas we explore are heightened when what is at issue is course leadership rather than being a member of a teaching team. The focus of this paper, then, is course leadership rather than pedagogy, and our conception of leadership includes the unconscious or conscious role modelling of academic leadership for the students.
We genuinely wanted to understand the experiences that we had had individually and on the occasions when we had taught together. We met and talked several times but became ‘stuck’ with regard to writing until we discovered that what really excited us was an aesthetic approach. Therefore our inquiry is emergent and spontaneous rather than planned, pre-structured and designed to test a hypothesis.
Our preliminary discussions about the work led to conversations rich in metaphor and imagery borrowed from art, literature and music, and we felt that we should stay with this experience and make our inquiry through aesthetic means by choosing pictures which encapsulated the thoughts and emotions we were experiencing. The strength of feeling that we both brought to the work made a metaphorical exploration of our experience almost inevitable, and the aesthetic method in turn seemed to transform the data. We also reflect on the potentially gendered nature of this self-storytelling.
In this paper we explore the qualities of the aesthetics-based method that we developed; present and reflect on our inquiry findings; and offer conclusions and recommendations for further research. The paper begins with our individual research questions and we present these in two voices. Then we explore the inquiry process and why it was powerful. We present our findings in two parts; our individual explorations presented again in two voices, followed by our joint reflections. Finally we offer reflections on content and process.