AED 815 - Action Research in Art Education

                     For this final exploration, I have decided to reflect on one new action that I want to implement in my mini action research study. Since Exploration 1, I have looked at the different ways I could gather data from my ongoing gaming and artmaking practices. At first, I was unsure if action research would be the proper method for me to pursue because I did not see my ongoing practices of gaming and artmaking as “actions” – in the sense that requires an intentional change in action research. The further explorations I engaged in throughout the semester proved me wrong. My perspective towards my ongoing practices has changed, and I learned to look at them through a critical lens. To give an example, in Exploration 3: Narrative Inquiry, I re-visited a distant gaming memory back from my undergraduate years, and I re-interpreted it through comic-style drawings. Going back to that memory and using drawing to narrate it...

       For this exploration, I started by keeping a drawing journal in which I drew my gaming console for a week. So far, I used drawing to reflect on my gaming experience, but I have not yet focused on my gaming console – which is the vessel for my gaming – from an artistic lens. In my problem statement, I have emphasized my gaming console as apparatus from a new materialist perspective of the impact of non-human agency on my self -making. So, during the one week that I have kept drawing my gaming console, I have tried to analyze the ways in which I make kin with it. Even though my first intention was to look at my gaming console as a still life when drawing, I could not help but think about the video games it holds in its body. I cannot see it as still life, my gaming console is also an extension of my avatar selves. My self-making process is not merely abstract but physical because, in a way, the gaming console represents the physical consequences of how I embody...