Dancing the Data: (5 Lesley University Series in Arts & Education)

Dancing the Data and its interrelated CD-ROM, Dancing the Data Too, show the ways in which educational research and the visual and performing arts can embrace each other to engender a culture of feeling and meaning and in so doing evoke new ways of knowing, learning, and teaching. It draws on the artistic mediums of dance, collage, poetry, music, and drama and invites the reader to engage with the educational research endeavors of the contributors as they seek to move beyond the traditions of established approaches to represent and reflect on their work in artistic forms. Dancing the Data seeks to open up conversational beginnings with teachers, researchers, and students, and to tempt them to discuss and reflect on the ways in which established methodological and pedagogical boundaries might be crossed and new ways of seeing and doing valued and explored.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Carl Bagley/Mary Beth Cancienne: Educational Research and Intertextual Forms of (Re)Presentation: The Case for Dancing the Data - Celeste Snowber: Bodydance: Enfleshing Soulful Inquiry through Improvisation - Jim Mienczakowski/Lynn Smith/Steve Morgan: Seeing Words - Hearing Feelings: Ethnodrama and the Performance of Data - Dwight Rogers/Paul Frellick/Leslie Babinski: Staging a Study - Performing the Personal and Professional Struggles of Beginning Teachers - Terry Jenoure: Sweeping the Temple: A Performance Collage - Donald S. Blumenfeld-Jones: If I Could Have Said It, I Would Have - G. W. Rasberry: Imagine, Inventing a Data-Dancer - J. Gary Knowles/Suzanne M. Thomas: Artistry, Inquiry, and Sense-of-Place: Secondary School Students Portrayed in Context - Carol A. Mullen/C. T. Patrick Diamond: Showcasing Arts-Based Inquiries - Gene Diaz: Artistic Inquiry: On Lighthouse Hill - Susan Finley: Women Myths: Teacher Self-Images and Socialization to Feminine Stereotypes - Toby Daspit/Morna McDermott: Frameworks of Blood and Bone: An Alchemy of Performative Mapping.

About the Author :
The Editors: Carl Bagley is Director of the Bachelor of Arts Honors Degree (Childhood and the Arts) in the School of Education at the University of Durham, United Kingdom, where he also teaches. His research interests and publications are in the field of qualitative methodology and educational policy and is co-author of the book School Choice and Competition: Markets in the Public Interest? Mary Beth Cancienne teaches in the Creative Arts in Learning Division at Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her research interests and publications are in the fields of curriculum theory, qualitative methodology, and teacher education. She explores movement and dance as a vehicle for theorizing, researching, and teaching.

Review :
Simultaneously splintering and magnifying, this performative collection is compelling, aesthetically and pedagogically. A break-through book in art-based educational inquiry. (William F. Pinar, St. Bernard Parish Alumni Endowed Professor, Louisiana State University) This is a wonderful project - innovative and bold. Richly imaginative, 'Dancing the Data' comes alive in the CD-ROM where the researchers literally dance and perform their interpretive work. This innovative aspect of the work allows the authors to show, and not tell, thereby showing educational researchers how to be artists, dancers, poets, and dramatists. The use of this technology takes qualitative inquiry into a new dimension. (Norman K. Denzin, Professor, Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois) 'Dancing the Data' represents a lively challenge to regnant paradigms in the field of educational research. Utilizing the advances in dramaturgy, ritology, and performance theory, this book 'dances' its talk. At a time when genres of research are becoming more blurred, we are seeing welcomed shifts in empirical approaches to the world of data. This book breathes new life into this endeavor. (Peter McLaren, Professor, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles)