My Positionality

within this research I will use my autoethnographic-experience-as-lecturer-and-student as direct research.

Bringing myself very explicitly into the research means even moreso that my-positionality will be very important to reference.

I aim to do this through autoethnography

I need to become clearer about how my positionality is feeding into the motivations of the research and shaping the approaches and methods that I am adopting.

I am currently going through notes from before the PhD begun to start to isolate and define what the critical thoughts and drivers were for me personally:

1. ‘PhD process is a critical object? Reflecting on the trajectory of education whilst pursuing an educational milestone.’

   ‘I feel strongly that a big part of my work should be a critique of the current state of affairs. This critique will come from the perspective of being a member of staff and also of studying.’ ‘It will pull from a lived experience of being excluded and what it potentially means to have new models that give access to things that have been historically gatekept’ 28_11_2023 notes

   • looking at my July 2023 thoughts it’s clear that I want the research to be a critical and provocative work - I would like the research work to bring to life issues faced by educators, and to spark imagination for new approaches. I want to lean on my art and design practice to bring this to life through tangible artifacts and design probes.

2. ‘(it’s about inclusion, it’s about breaking open this idea of education… it’s against elitism, it encourages openness)’ 2_11_2023 notes

   • connected to the sentiments above, it’s clear that I want to make a statement with my research and that I am very concerned with inclusion, whilst simultaneously being aware of the fact that working within academia is fundamentally an exclusionary space (in the sense that you have to pay to be a student) and that historically the realms of higher education were not attainable for the ‘average person’. This connects very directly into my positionality and identity and experience of moving through the world

3. This idea of a ‘playful methodology’ is the key, i am exploring what a ‘playful methodology’ might look like in the future, through employing that very same ‘playful methodology’ in my phd process. The ‘playful methodology’ will encompass different strands of research to inform it (play, embodied learning, speculative design). It’s inspired very much by the idea of the way children us play to learn how to be adults. 2_11_2023 notes

   • connected to the above point, I think that my interest in exploring this playful methods as a way to learn is to challenge the dominant assumptions and practices of educating in a western context. That we can learn incredibly effectively through play is not a new idea and as children this is the way that we learn - I wonder how this idea could shape learning in an adult context. (teaching and learning in an art context does tend lend more to this than perhaps in sciences for example, but it’s something that I want to investigate more)