Transforming Data Through Literary Métissage: Learning Science Educators’ Leadership/Followership Style Toward Engagement in Science Education

This presentation focuses on critical arts-based research methodology to explore how science educators’ lead the next generation to become engaged in science. This study entailed analyzing their formative experience, understanding, and practice of engagement in science as well as how they understood socio-political and cultural factors that mediate how science identities are socialized and engaged in relationship to equity or inequity, engagement or disengagement, and leadership/followership. Literary métissage is a qualitative research tool. According to Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers and Leggo (2009), it both describes and interprets the participants’ experiences documented by the researcher. Métissage is an intentional combining of diverse ways of knowing fosters opportunities for critical conversations around difference linked to socio-historical formations (i.e. language, nation), colonization, and globalization. The presentation will focus on methodological processes and provide constructed métissages from the data. I discuss the 4 phases of data generation – individual (life writings) and collective (focus groups) using arts-based methods to illuminate a research strategy for describing, interpreting, and combining science educators’ experiences without erasing difference. I demonstrate weaving textual constructions originating from memory, drawings, image theatre, and story characterize how literary métissage strategic examinations of other factors (i.e. social, political, cultural), make meaning about lived experiences