SECOND PHASE: FORMING A METHODOLOGY FOR ANALYSIS

Data analysis procedure: Art-based research and art-based educational research

5.4: The range of potential methodologies

According to the view of Biggs and Karlson (2011) that ‘imagination’ is part of the Jungian concept of ‘active imagination’, and that ‘knowledge’ is the reflection of the

‘active imagination’ experience as a two-line analysis, a phenomenological mindful inquiry would seem to form the basis of a qualitative research methodology that can span both ‘imagination and knowledge’. Bentz & Shapiro (1998, p.6) state that their own model of ‘Mindful Enquiry’ ‘…is a synthesis of four intellectual traditions:

Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Critical Social Science and Buddhism’. Biggs and Karlson (2011, p.335) describe artistic research such as Art Based Research (ABR) and Art Based Education Research (ABER) as ‘experience-based knowledge’. They present two questions for the researcher: ‘How could the chosen methodology be described?’ and,

169 secondly, ‘How does the domain of visual – or any other form of – art necessitate the specific autonomous research?’ Biggs and Karlson (2011, p.337) state that: ‘Artistic researchers seem to deploy such methodology of a streaming two-line mode of analysis dealing with the two interacting lines or domains of activation of imagination and knowledge production.’ (Eisner, 2011 in Biggs and Karlson, 2011) indicates that both ABER and ABR experiences might be perceived through what is sensed by

phenomenological and mindful research methods that attune to primary cortex sensate experience through expressive creative processes of ABR. When Arts Based Research is applied to educational research, it becomes Arts Based Educational Research. This ABER enquiry into the role of art in educational practice and human development tells us that research is conducted in and through the making of art, and brings experiential knowing into the research process. Likewise, Cahnmann-Taylor and Siegesmund (2008, p10) describe ABER as ‘Using experiences during education fieldwork to create pieces of art that capture the essence of their findings in emotionally penetrating ways.’ In ABER, therefore, experiential content is grounded in, and part of, the data collection and analysis process.

On 21 July 2013, I attended an art-based research (ABR) conference at the University of Bradford and discussed with Carla Rice and Eliza Chandler about their use of art-based research in Canada. Their research sought to re-vision what disability is, and they discussed in their research statements about personal disability and how: ‘stories

encourage reflection on how failure to fit with ablest standards of normal might open up other possibilities’ (pers. comm). I reflected on this exclusive/inclusive ‘failure to fit’ as a two-way process in the context of ASC and NT perception and the ‘fitting in’ to each other’s worlds of communication and understanding in my own research, and I wondered what ‘other possibilities’ might be opened. This conference also gave me insights into how art making was to become a research tool for my project; it helped me to understand the art-making process itself, rather than simply assessing the final product in my capacity as an art teacher as a piece of course work for its use of the art elements (pattern, texture, colour, line, tone, shape, form and use of space).

170 My research, like Rice and Chandler et al.’s (21 July 2013) and LaMarre and Rice’s

(2016, p.1) ‘Digital Story Telling’, sought an ABR method ‘that offers researchers an opportunity to engage deeply with participants, speak back to dominant discourses, and re-imagine bodily (and perceptual) possibilities’. Unlike Rice and Chandler et al.’s (21 July 2013) and LaMarre and Rice’s (2016) ‘Digital Story Telling’, my research dialogue through art was not illustrative, symbolic or pictorial storytelling, but focused on what was held in the art-making process as a live art, an expressive aesthetic held in

Schaverien’s (2000) ‘scapegoat transference’.

The sensed and felt outcomes from ABER and ABR form knowledge as an experiential heuristic understanding research approach, such as the exploration of NT to ASC

perception of experience, as is seen through the aforementioned lens of Minshew et al.’s (1997) and Cozilino’s (2006) neurological findings. They contend that much ASC

perception is through the visual and other primary cortex functions and that these creative art experiences are common in both NT and ASC perception. This experiential way of knowing is expanded upon by Noe (2000), who focuses on perceptual consciousness as a reflective art experience and art as a tool for phenomenological investigation.

A phenomenological approach places experience at the centre of knowledge building.

Arguably, then, this can form a research approach that accesses ASC experience in an NT mindset embedded in phenomenological experience involving visual and other expressive arts and, as such, is heuristic. Noe (2000, p.123) suggests that art can be a visual

phenomenology and an effective tool for research: ‘art can make a needed contribution to the study of perceptual consciousness’. Noe (2000, p.123) writes, ‘to describe experience is to describe the experienced world’, going on to suggest that experience is embedded within its creative and expressive context. He considers ‘conception of experience as a mode of interactive engagement with the environment’ (Noe 2000, p.125). I suggest that a visual/creative/expressive phenomenology can be a method of investigating

visual/creative/expressive experience in both ASC and NT experience.

Fowler (2006, p.175) also speaks about mindfulness in her narrative research in education as, ‘fostering the ability to be present, without judgement, in attentiveness’. She goes on to

171 speak about this experience as ‘the phenomenology of being’ and the ‘poetics of teaching’

(Fowler, 2006, p.175). Fowler (2006) draws on Dewey’s (1980) notion that the expressiveness of experienced things is uncovered through art, in which objects are

ordered in a new experience of life. I suggest that Fowler’s (2006, p.175) ‘phenomenology of being’ or ‘mindfulness’ would seem to place the researcher in the same receptive state as: the expressive arts therapy model (Knill et al., 2005), Jung’s (2000, p.185) ‘active imagination’, Hillman’s (1972) Imaginal Ego, and Heidegger’s (in Mulhall, 1996) ontological question of the nature of reality as that of ‘Being’ in the world without any distinction between the individual and experience. As a result, I am finding that, to experience my need to be a heuristic researcher of ASC perception, an ontological phenomenology of being as a mindful researcher is the appropriate research position.

Nagata’s (2003) mindful inquiry methodology suggests a state of mindful phenomenology concerned with perception and the noticing and harnessing of intuitive association and projection of memories. To be in a place where the researcher is free of their own internal history of memory is difficult, if not impossible. Merleau-Ponty (2002) discusses his encounter of a ship that has run aground and is half submerged in the sand and the surrounding forest. It is all too easy for the observer/researcher to construct or perceive what is not seen by the clues that are visible. Merleau-Ponty (2002, p. 20) states that, ‘I merely felt that the look of the object was on the point of altering.’ We can assume that Merleau-Ponty’s (2002, p.20) ‘felt’ or noticing, rather than projection of assumptions from internal memories, forms part of his phenomenology of perception. This has bearing on what Grandin (2010) cites as ‘inattentional blindness’ in NT thinking, in that NT perception is processed through a bank of EF processing of internal memory archetypes or schemas in the associate cortex that filter and process raw experience. Interior symbols of metaphors are projected on to the exterior subjective world and perceived through this Cartesian split and separating of the individual from experience.

I propose that, for the researcher who seeks a heuristic approach to ASC perception, to

‘notice’ and to be aware of what Fowler (2006, p.175) refers to as the ‘mindfulness’ of being present, without judgement and in attentiveness to what is called for, is enough to make visible what is lost in Grandin’s (2010) concept of NT ‘inattentional blindness’.

Denzin and Lincoln (1996, p.1007) cite Abram’s (2009) adaptation of Merleau-Ponty’s

172 (2002) work, ‘that, humans enter into a participatory relationship with other phenomena through multisensory perception of direct experience’. Grof (2006) suggests that, unlike the Newtonian hierarchical concept of the universe as elementary particles and objects forming value through mechanistic order, it is an organic whole in which everything is meaningfully interconnected. As Merleau-Ponty (2002, p.50) states, separating our originating knowledge through Cartesian and Kantian judgement causes problems in perception: ‘There is an empirical or second-order perception, the one which we exercise at every moment, and which conceals from us the former basic phenomenon, because it is loaded with earlier acquisitions and plays, so to speak, on the surface of being.’

Had Merleau-Ponty (2002) predicted the findings of contemporary neurologists such as Damasio (1994), Fuster (2003), Cozolino (2006), and Ramachandran and Oberman (2007) in the distinction between EF and CC filtering from ‘primary cortex’ and ‘associate

cortex’ brain functions? Grandin’s (2010) term ‘abstractifying’ becomes Merleau-Ponty’s (2002, p.50) ‘second order perception’, which in turn becomes NT processing of a

‘primary cortex’ phenomenological experience through the ‘associate cortex’. So, does phenomenology lie within the raw ‘primary cortex’ experience? And does this raw phenomenological experience lie in the body mind? Abram (2009, p.3) cites Merleau-Ponty as ‘the first phenomenologist to identify the body itself as the conscious subject of experience’. Abram (2009) goes on to say that Merleau-Ponty sensed that there was a unity to the visible-invisible world that had not yet been described in philosophy, that there was a unique ontological structure, a topology of ‘Being’ that was waiting to be realised. I propose that this topology of ‘Being’ is recognised in expressive arts therapy and Jungian ‘active imagination’ and is present within those who dwell in the primary cortex. My research methodology seeks to access these areas of both ASC and NT perception.

5.5: Forming Methodology

The concept of the ‘Body Mind’ has been developed through Dance Movement Therapy (DMT).

Dance Movement Psychotherapy is the psychotherapeutic use of movement and dance through which a person can engage creatively in a process to further their emotional,

173 cognitive, physical and social integration. (The Association for Dance Movement

Psychotherapy (ADMP) UK) http://www.admt.org.uk/[accessed 21 September 2013]

An offshoot of DMT and Drama Therapy is Authentic Movement, which looks towards Merleau-Ponty’s (2002, p.162) view that ‘My body has its world, or understands its world, without having to make use of my symbolic or objectifying function.’ I

endeavoured to understand my own body’s experiential learning through experience of the

‘Body Mind’ over a three-day course of ‘Authentic Movement’ (AM) led by Professor Helen Payne, a four-day workshop with Expressive Arts Therapist Natalie Rogers, a five-day workshop with Tamalpa UK, who work with the multimodal principles of Anna and Daria Halprin, and a six-day workshop with Daria Halprin hosted in Paris by Tamalpa France. In all of this, experiential learning seemed to involve the concept of honing perception and awareness of our own bodies and witnessing others’ body movements in a non-judgemental way. My own experience is that, by engaging in this movement as self, one experiences an unconscious authenticity and congruency of self. When witnessing and dancing for another, one leaves the conscious self behind and channels the experience of the other through dance. There is a common thread of non-judgemental awareness running through AM body mind, as Payne (2006, p.175) states:

AM is a completely self-directed approach in which participants may discover a movement pathway that offers a bridge between the conscious and the unconscious and between the group, the individual and the universal. It can be called the

movement form of active imagination.

Similar to what Payne suggests is a movement form of Jung’s (2000) ‘active imagination’.

Rogers (2000, p.44) calls the ‘creative connection’ that ‘opens us to the universal energy source, bringing us vitality and a sense of oneness’ in an intermodal ‘moving from art form to art form’ way. Halprin (2003, p.87) describes how the unconscious and the imagination form a creative ‘Art life’ experience:

Together the unconscious and imagination form a bridge between our inner life and vision and our outer expression in the world. If the unconscious is the holder of past impressions then it needs imagination to enter the exterior world. Through the

174 imagination, we penetrate the interior world and shape its contents into meaningful and visible forms. Indeed it is imagination that allows us to live as creative beings in the world. (Halprin, 2003, p.87)

So, for all three of these authors there is a form of active imagination in body movement.

As Abram (2009, p.3-22) states, body mindfulness holds as a key aspect in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception: ‘By thus shifting the prime focus of subjectivity from the human intellect to what he called the “body-subject” or the “lived body,”

Merleau-Ponty uncovered the radical extent to which all subjectivity, or awareness, presupposes our inherence in a sensuous, corporeal world.’

Pondering on Merleau-Ponty’s ‘lived body’ statement, Leavy (2009, p.183) suggests and describes the body as a phenomenon that ‘refers to people’s experiential knowledge’, moving on to suggest that ‘the body is a tool through which meaning is created’. Leavy’s (2009) view provokes and holds the thought that a multimodal approach of creative experience and expressive synthesis through the ‘bodymind’ can form research tools that access experiential meaning and heuristic data, about another being. In so doing, this will limit the NT researcher’s ability to project inner assumptions by not filtering data through their associate cortex and allowing an embodied, primary cortex, sensate,

phenomenological experience to flourish.

Siegal (2010, p.46) talks about how mindful ‘interoceptions’ through mindful awareness and engagement with our body as mindfulness meditation, affects neural changes in the right anterior insula of the prefrontal lobes that, in turn, affect perception:

The more we focus our attention towards bodily sensations within our subjective experience in awareness, the more we activate the physical correlate of insula activation and subsequent growth. As we’ll see, the more ‘interoception’ and insula activation, (interoception - the way we have a perception of the interior.) the more capacity we’ll have for attuning to others and being empathetic toward their experience. (Seigal, 2010, p.46).

175 According to Seigel (2010), the ‘Body Mind’ is an experiential and perceiving neural network. Both Abram (1996, 2010) and Totton (2011) extend the notion of the ‘Body Mind’ to include human relational wildness with all aspects of the Earth and its beings, and that through our civilisation we have lost our connection or ‘animal thinking’ with these ‘other than’ human beings.

A shift in perception is needed through mindfulness or phenomenology of perception so that we are not filtering; rather, the NT researcher studying people with autism needs to be mindfully aware of what Grandin (2010) calls NT ‘inattentional blindness’ – NT additive filtering through ‘associate cortex’ CC and EF processing. ABR tools that employ the multimodal approaches from Expressive Art Therapies can equip the NT researcher with a non-additive filtered perception, similar to Merleau-Ponty’s ( 2002, p.20) ‘ship aground’

scenario. This could enable the NT researcher to engage with what is actually there, rather than projecting onto the fragments. That is to say, that NT filtering of sensate experiences projects pre-owned or pre-experienced truths onto raw sensation. A phenomenological state in the NT researcher can be seen to bypass this NT filtering.

5.6: Aesthetics and how they relate to AS perception

To be clear about the purpose of the art object and art experience in relation to Arts Based Research as a research tool, the term aesthetic needs to be contextualised alongside narrative inquiry (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005), narrative forming and autistic perception.

Art is a relational process that is not removed from its initial function as expression of experience. An expressive arts ABR process inquires and forms through a

phenomenological, relational dialogue between creator and viewer. The actual art object is a by-product of this experiential process, in the same way that sound is a residual, yet influential, part of speech as language.

Crowther (2012, p.2) describes this as ‘aesthetic disclosure rather than discursive exposition’, e.g. interpreted through the senses as opposed to through text, the spoken word, or the objectification of experience through language. Crowther (2012) mentions the moment of crystallisation, birth or transformation held in abstract art, which suggests that phenomenology can form a different perception of aesthetics, based on the

experiential rather than objectification through symbol, metaphor or sociocultural

176 discourse. Crowther (2012, p.247) tells us: ‘All pictorial art allows the artist to create and transform visual reality, but abstraction allows the transformatory power to be expressed in more explicit terms’. Moustakas (1994, p.51) likewise affirms what Husserl (1970, p.56) refers to in the word act rather than presentation: ‘Emphasising that the meaning of a phenomenon is in the act experience and not the object. Objects are perceived but not experienced while sensations are experienced but not perceived.’

Dewey (1980) applauds the relational benefit in an aesthetic that focuses on phenomena of experience and not the isolated art object. He notes that the separation of artistic objects from origin and operation in experience builds an ‘opaque wall’ around the experience of human effort and association with materials, forming an aesthetic outside of the art-making experience. He goes on to suggest that: ‘Even a crude experience, if authentically an experience, is more fit to give a clue to the intrinsic nature of aesthetic experience than is an object already set apart from any other mode of experience’ (Dewey, 1980, p.11).

Dewey’s (1980) comments highlight the loss of the whole art experience when an objective reductionist approach is applied to aesthetics. Where aesthetics are in the form of art as object, i.e. by separating the art object as product from the creator’s experience as process, the viewer is to be denied the relational art experience between creator and viewer. In Hans Namuth’s (1951) film of the ‘Action Painter’ Jackson Pollock working on glass, Pollock states, ‘I lost contact with my first painting on glass and I started another one.’ Here, Pollock in Namuth (1951) is affirming his relationship and aesthetic

experience in his painting and conception of art as process, as experience. There are similarities concerning Pollock’s (1951) statement and Dewey’s (1980) aesthetic experience in what Bogdashina (2006, p.106) terms ‘Gestalt Perception’ in people with autism: ‘They are often unable to filter irrelevant details and perceive the whole scene as a single entity… Even the slightest changes in their environment or routine may confuse and upset them.’

This reinforces the neurological position of an unfiltered ‘primary cortex’ experience in people with autism. We might reflect Bogdashina’s (2006) statement regarding ‘sensory gating deficit’ with Grandin’s (2010) aforementioned comments contrasting ASC

‘bottom-up’ thinking, which includes the whole picture as opposed to NT, that she calls

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‘inattentional blindness’ (the processing of raw experience before it allows something into consciousness). The two statements from Bogdashina (2006) and Grandin (2010) are, in fact, the same observation from different – subtractive and additive – dominant perceptive states. The statements provoke questions about the incompatible nature of primary cortex and associate cortex forms of thinking, consciousness, and the geography of neurology and an aesthetic of experience.

Since the event of CT scans, neuroscience has re-opened the debate over the functions of the two hemispheres of the brain, questioning the popularly held notion of the brain’s location of consciousness that, as previously stated in my literature review in Chapter Two p.67, and Chapter Five Methodology, p.166, Cozolino (2006, p.25-26) describes the left-brain hemisphere as the conscious linguistic self that is biased towards the left, and the physical emotional self, biased toward the right.

This forms the beginning of a hypothesis that, if what is sensed and experienced in an expressive arts experience is further processed through the ‘associate cortex’, it forms

This forms the beginning of a hypothesis that, if what is sensed and experienced in an expressive arts experience is further processed through the ‘associate cortex’, it forms