Transmediation A/R/T/S: Imagination and Innovation Illuminate Complex Texts in Qualitative Research Courses

Covid-19 rapidly shifted life into a tech-driven state that has educators and researchers searching for real-time answers for challenges in education as the world attempts to continue amid social distancing measures that prevent us from connecting face to face. This distance has amplified academia’s need to develop innovative new methods for teaching and learning complex concepts. Transmediation requires a learner to transmediate prose (i.e., qualitative research texts) to other semiotic systems (poetry, visual art, letters to authors, music, etc.) and is a dynamic tool with benefits in process and product. The theoretical ideas in qualitative research texts are often difficult to grasp. Transforming concepts written in prose to arts-based representations makes these ideas clearer for the learner or “artist” creating the expression and the viewer who later experiences it. This presentation will present examples of student transmediations created to explore Poststructuralist theories and arts-based methods in qualitative research courses. Visual art, poetry, scriptwriting, and performance are just some of the mediums the audience in this visually stimulating session will experience as text is transformed before them. The theories of Deleuze, Foucault, and Butler will come alive through arts-based methods and illuminative explanation. Insight into the power of transmediation for the artist and audience and the reasons why researchers, teachers, and students need to start creating transmediations is revealed through the perspective of an Artist/Researcher/Teacher/Student