Exploring a Performative Approach to Felting Wool: An autoethnography for two?

Abstract

This text treats the author’s imagined research design based on her artistic research and pedagogical views. She tentatively call this arts based approach an autoethnography for two. The starting point of this approach is her critical view on a certain confine pedagogy in teacher education and a desire to walk away from being the object of a research project. She aspires for a teacher education in the arts subject that recognizes and values the working process as a significant part of creative processes, also within school contexts. Furthermore, she wants to join the multiple identities that compose the identity of many actors in school settings, which comprise the artist, the teacher and the researcher. The ambition of this text is to articulate a plausible research design that can inspire others in their quest when embarking with arts based research in their artistic work and/or educational work. Her research in this text relates to her re-turning to the ancestral technique of hand felting wool. She questions and approaches this traditional technique by adopting a performative approach to the making. This approach suggests that making sense (as knowledge production) is intimately connected to the making (of felting wool in this case). By inviting peers in an autoethnography for two, to share impressions and reflections, this research design can elicit diffractively, a working process.