Presentation for the ECER 2015. Fernando Hernández-Hernández, Juana M. Sancho, Rachel Fendler. University of Barcelona.

1. Visual biographical narratives as living
inquiring process
Fernando Hernández-Hernández,
Juana Maria Sancho & Rachel Fendler
University of Barcelona
European Conference on Educational Research
Network: 02. Vocational Education and Training (VETNET)

2. • Visual biographical narratives
• Living inquiry as research.

3. Digital biographical narratives
• Story telling.
• Digital Vocational Narratives
• Digital Vocational Biographies.
• Vocational Biography Design.
• Visual Biographical Narratives.
• (…)

4. • Images (photographs and
visual documents) youth
produce, exemplify
diverse strategies for
documenting their lives
experiencies and capture
some this multi-faceted
manner of seeing,
representing, reflecting
and interpreting.
(Hernández-Hernández,
2013; Abakerli Baptista,
2014).
Irene Jerez

5. A visual narrative
accounts many
different stories at the
same time as they mix
and match multiple
images.
(Denzin & Lincoln, 2000)

6. The basic features of a visual narrative are: composition
(available elements), the presence of a story, the characters, the
techniques of representation and the means in which it is
shared. (Pimenta & Poovaiah, 2010).

7. VNs can be expressed using moving images or a fixed
image and in recent times with an advancement of
technology a combination of both. (Pimenta & Poovaiah,
2010).

8. Research from a visual narrative is an intentional, thoughtful
and, active process in which researchers and participants
explore and make sense of their experiences, both visually
and narratively. (Hedy Bach, 2007: 281)

9. Living Inquiry

10. • Merleau-Ponty (1962) conceived research as
an enactive space of living inquiry.
• In a/r/tography, “living inquiry is an aesthetic
encounter, where the process of meaning
making and being are inextricably connected
to an awareness and understanding of art”
(Springgay, Irwin, & Kind, 2005: 902).

11. • Living inquiry ties to action research.
• An effective framework for opening-up
research beyond the academy, by
acknowledging that everyone is an expert of
her/his own lived experience.

12. • “Show your Own Gold” is offering to the
youth the opportunity of being engage in a
living inquiry experience as “an embodied
encounter constituted through visual and
textual understandings and experiences rather
than mere visual and textual representations”
(Springgay, Irwin, & Kind, 2005: 902).

13. • It describes the process through which we
may adopt “an attitude of inquiry” (Marshall
& Reason, 2008, p. 61) towards our lives, or in
this case, youth biographical trajectories.

14. • Living inquiry is a framework that allowed us
to respond to the challenge of finding ways to
bring the youth experiences into a broader,
ongoing conversation.
• Our aim is build out from practice,
contextualizing young people’s experiences so
that they may interact with other
contributions within VAT research.

15. • ... ways of behaving which encourage [us] to
treat little as fixed, finished, clear-cut... living
continually in process, adjusting, seeing what
emerges, bringing things into question...
attempting to open to continually question
what [we] know, feel, do and want, and
finding ways to engage actively in this
questioning and process its stages. (Judi
Marshall, 1999: pp. 156–157)

16. • Living inquiry provides a space for young
people to openly explore and begin to
understand their own relationship with the
world and, in doing so, conceivably push back
the notion that they are always already
determined and fated by it (Meyer, 2010, p.
88).

17. • We are able to offer youth the possibility of
visualizing their biographical experiences and
reflecting on new personal and professional
alternatives for their vocational trajectories.
• This means that the process promoting by this
project could promote “a disruption of
established ways of knowing, through learning
events” (Atkinson, 2012: 10).

18. Andrea García Gómez
Thank You!!!

20. • Joanne Rappaport (2008) reminds us that
when carrying out collaborative
ethnographies, “what happens in the field is
much more than data collection” (p. 7). Our
experience testifies to this. Our open-ended
research proposal allowed each of the five
research groups to embark on reflexive
qualitative research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005),
investing in processes of “living, relating and
working through questioning and reflexivity”

21. • We invite young people to participate not as
informants but as researchers who use their
own experience to contribute to the project.
young people contributed with their
knowledge-in-practice.
• to develop knowledge-of-practice, and expand
our understanding of youth living experiences
(Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle,
2001),

22. • Living inquiry recognizes that research is not
merely a means to an end, placing value on
the journey and on the transition inquirers
(and the inquiry itself) go though between the
start and the finish. From this perspective, the
group dynamic becomes a focal point to our
process.

23. • Living inquiry encourages us to ask questions
and critique what we know.
• Adopting an inquiring attitude reconfigures
our identity as learners, pushing us into the
active role of producer (researcher).
• The relational space of our collaborative
project is the context where this
transformation could take place.

24. • Video curriculum:
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fabDpTOf
Kns
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxIVBqb
DsaA