Arts-Based Pedagogy of Qualitative Analysis at the Graduate Level: Dwelling in the Aesthetic

For those who are new to qualitative research, it can be easy to become caught up in the procedural steps and lose sight of the interpretive nature of qualitative analysis. As educators, we need to be mindful about how to teach procedural steps but also engage learners in the interpretive process of qualitative analysis. In fact, we would suggest that a rigorous approach to qualitative analysis involves applying methods in ways that create space for interpretive thinking. Theoretical insights and rich understandings of the data are derived from interpretive and creative analytical thinking often grounded in aesthetics in which we feel and see something and to a certain extent be able to experience it. In this article, we reflect upon and discuss arts-based pedagogy as an approach to teaching and learning qualitative analysis at the graduate level. The focus of this article is to present an aesthetic teaching-learning pedagogy that works at fully engaging the learners’ senses while promoting interpretive approaches to analysis. We specifically discuss pedagogical approaches, such as dance/music, poetry, and painting, used by the instructor and a student in the context of a doctoral-level course. These sorts of art-based pedagogical approaches promote aesthetic engagement while disrupting hegemonic discourse and challenging the habitual nature of positivism and post-positivism engrained in one’s thinking. These arts-based pedagogical approaches benefit graduate students by creating spaces that cultivate interpretive thinking while bringing the fullness of one’s being (the researcher) and their senses into the analytic processes.