Arts Based Research

Painting, like other areas of the visual arts, is a complex field that defies any single method or style. In the visual arts, we are taught and we learn that there is never a true answer to the problems that we face. Each of us must find our own way. Unlike other traditional subject matter there are no manuals or directives to aid the painter in devising a teaching curriculum. Few artists have written about how to teach art. Although some have written rich narratives about their teaching experiences, they offer little advice to artists who want to teach. We must rely upon our own knowledge and experience as we enter into the studio classroom. We must also learn how to translate that which we know into something that can others can learn. The aim of this arts-based research is to create a bridge between the practice of the artist and the practice of the teacher, constructing a dialectic relationship between the two. It is an exploration into artistic knowledge, artistic process and t...

What happens when focus groups are conducted in challenging situations across languages, cultures, and educational settings? What adjustments might need to be made? How can adaptations be made while still maintaining the integrity of the research? Drawing on a multi-year study of gender and schooling in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, this article brings together researcher data from (1) informal discussion occurring after each focus group between the researchers, (2) reflections and observations from notes written during the research process, and (3) individual reflexivity on the topic of conducting focus groups in multicultural contexts written retrospectively. Using a practical iterative framework, this work adds an important contribution to the qualitative research literature by leading the reader through our processes, considerations, and lessons learned for improving culturally relevant and inclusive focus groups in multicultural educational contexts.

Arts-based methods are well-placed to enable disruptions to normative positioning of researcher, respondent and subject. This chapter draws on the author's reflections of opening the research processes to the possibilities of methodological ir/responsibility. It focuses on a selection of mixed-method projects where a significant contribution to the validity of the empirical research emerged from the arts-based methods employed, including the use of journal writing, story-telling, metaphoric and visual imagery. The discussion is structured around the validity of the methods for the purposes of generating data to inform the evaluation of and research on that which is often difficult and elusive to analyse in higher education. A particular contribution of the chapter is the discussion of how the construction of research participants informed both the data generation processes, and the analytic approach to the texts they authored. An argument is made for the importance of establishing conditions which enable the possibilities of participants' agency.

Önmagunk, társaink megismerése, a körülöttünk zajló élet és élettelen megtapasztalása érzékelésünk összetettségén alapszik. A művészetek gyakorlása és fogadása teret ad az emberi lét és érzékelés sokféleségének megélésére. Ebből fakadóan a művészetek misztikus világa a tudományos megismerés tekintetében is érdekes lehet, hiszen az hozzájárulhat a megismerés dimenzióinak tágításához, a pontosabbnak vélt tudás előállításához. Ezért a művészet által megélt élményekhez kapcsolódó és azt a megismerés egyik eszközeként alkalmazó kutatások egyre elterjedtebbek, azzal együtt, hogy a fogalmak használatában, a művészeti eszközök alkalmazásaiban sok bizonytalanság érzékelhető. A tanulmány célja, hogy elméleti összegzést biztosítson a művészetalapú kutatásokról és hozzájáruljon azok további terjedéséhez. Elsőként bemutatja a művészetalapú kutatások fogalmát, határát és típusait, alkalmazási területeit, majd az alkalmazás célját, lehetőségeit és előnyét, végül a művészetalapú kutatási folyamat egy-egy kiemelten jellegzetes elemét.

If sentience is defined as the capacity of living beings to experience sense, cognition and feelings, then the concept of sentient empathy can be described as the direct identification with, understanding of, and affection to another animal's situation, feelings, and motives. As a pressing social issue, can an awareness of animal testing within universities elicit sentient empathy among a wider public? This thesis explores this question by analysing the findings from interviews with three ‘open rescue’ activists. It then examines the possibilities of utilizing Research-informed Theatre (RIT) for sharing the interview findings, with a view toward eliciting sentient empathy among the public.

Using the arts as integrative tools for knowledge generation and appraisal is nearly always viewed as standard practice within Canadian elementary schools and preferred practice within Canadian secondary schools. Research into curriculum integration benefits professional practitioners, policy-makers, teacher educators and researchers interested in strengthening the intellectual vitality of the curriculum and particularly interdisciplinary work within the curriculum (see Irwin & Chalmers, in press). We live in a creative knowledge-based economy in which intellectually rigourous consumers and creators are needed to make strong connections within and across ways of knowing. This economy will dominate our economic system during the twenty-first century. Education is the foundation for ensuring our society can rise to the challenge of creating robust learning communities that can stimulate strong intellectual connections, which in turn can help students make well-informed, critical, and creative judgements.

Children's literature has been analyzed through a number of different theoretical lenses, including critical literacy, feminism, and multiculturalism. Yet, given the prominence that image plays in such literature, little if any work in literacy has analyzed children's literature from the perspective of art theory. This study first theorized how and why artists render visual representations as they do. It then used this theory to analyze images in Caldecott award-winning literature. Three findings emerged from the analysis: (a) image types cut across time, culture, and artists' rendering; (b) images embody stable representations of culture; and (c) images tend to render visual binaries and invite oppositional readings. Implications are discussed for developing and using a theory for the close reading of visual imagery in children's literature.

The future of the arts in higher education--writ large--requires the examination, analysis, and synthesization of many central and peripheral issues if arts education is to be successfully sustained. Present-day and future leadership must not rely upon traditional and legacy-grounded knowledge in order to grow and improve our creative disciplines. This report is just the first of many that outlines certain issues in axiomatic and easily digestible form. Vol.1 focuses on the visual arts.

This article explores the author's experiences of serving 011 dissertation committees in wlzich a primary methodology is art-basrd. Experiences at two diffrrrnt universities, Olli' a state university in the United Stairs and one 1111 intematimzal graduatr school in Europe, rrveal both challrnges and opportunities discovrred in working with thesr new nzrtlwdologirs. Tlze author reflects 011 lzer experiences with thr student rrsearchers, with faculty colleagues, with the instituti011al cultures of the wziversitirs, mzd with the author's own struggles to !ram new ways of thinking about the world of researclzrrs conducting narrativr, ritual, nzoveii1C'I1t, musical, performative, poetic and visual forms of enquiry.

This autoethnographic duet is an artful inquiry about the tragedy of a beginning music teacher. A painful story about a music teacher and sexual allegations from an adolescent female, our composition blends music and story to transform understandings through creative engagement and push the boundaries to evoke visceral and emotional responses regarding suicide. Sociocultural issues draw deep re ection about wider political issues that arise for teachers who display di culties with moral issues and misguided choices. The epiphany-epiphony (Gouzouasis, 2013) through story and music reveals the cultural irony of ideology and secrecy in professional misconduct. Unfortunately, in this circumstance, the outcome was catastrophic.

There are currently over 65 million displaced people across the world. Refugee women present a unique subset of those displaced. These women often struggle with “triple trauma,” but these complex issues can go unvoiced and unaddressed as the women work to hold their families together in the midst of shifting landscapes and shifting gender roles and cultural norms. The following study demonstrates how the arts can offer refugee women an opportunity to express themselves and process complex issues in effective, creative, accessible, therapeutic, and cross-cultural ways. It details the process and explores the impact of an art-based participatory action research study conducted with a small group of refugee women from Burma resettled in Orange County, North Carolina. Throughout the four-month data collection period, the refugee women were able to explores issues of importance to them and determine how to best address these issues. An arts-based, public narrative process enabled the ref...

Leggo, C., Sinner, A., Irwin, R. L., Pantaleo, K., Gouzouasis, P., & Grauer, K. (2010). Lingering in liminal spaces: A/r/tography as living inquiry in a language arts class. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 24(2), 239-256.

In recent years, researchers have increasingly adopted innovative techniques – such as slideshows, animation, and infographics – to present their work in meaningful and impressive ways. But one informational medium remains gallingly neglected: sound. A single piece of music contains multiple vectors operating simultaneously (pitch, duration, instrumentation, etc.), upon each of which a specific parameter can be encoded. Because music is a temporal form, it can dramatically represent the dynamic changes and contrasts both between elements or of a single element over time.
Drawing on Arts-based Education Research (ABER) methods, this presentation covers an experimental method of aural data analysis to investigate group interactions and participation. The data consist of over 30 videos of 2-hour group meetings collected during a 4-year SSHRC-funded study into a collaborative teacher professional learning network.
Each speaker was assigned an instrumental “voice.” The word count of each speech event determined the voice’s rhythmic duration (one word corresponding to one eighth-note), while the speech event’s time in seconds determined the pitch (the longer the time, the lower the pitch).
After a brief overview of ABER methods and their implications for data processing, the authors will provide a description of the methodology. The audience will then be invited to listen to the data to interpret the teachers' participation in the collaborative learning community over time. In closing, the floor will be open for discussion on this particular method of data analysis and dissemination.

In this paper, I blur the edges between quantitative and qualitative research through an arts-based investigation of pedagogy, praxis, and epistemological inquiries in a 200-student, undergraduate art and society class. The need for developing creative and innovative educational practices within learner-centered college environments is also addressed. Informed by the author’s lived experiences as teacher, designer, artist, and researcher, the paper expands on frameworks that address critical pedagogy, epistemologies, and assessment, as well as belief systems and motivation of 21st century students. Emerging theory from the researcher’s mixed model comparative dissertation study is applied, conceptualizing a balance of creativity, critical thinking, and practical skills in relation to pedagogic practice. This paper reports on the effects of learner-centered instruction on students’ qualities of thinking and ideas about their learning at the undergraduate level, further  expanding upon balanced intelligence frameworks, It is hypothesized that students’ qualities of thinking and engagement in arts classrooms—even very large classes—are enhanced when operationalized through inquiry, ambiguity, and meaningful connection-making. Focusing on lived experience and empirical data collection, a hermeneutical phenomenological research framework is initiated through inquiry, data collection, further inquiry, leading to deeper understanding and new ideas.

Being and Becoming: A Photographic Inquiry with Bahá’í men into Cultures of Peace is doctoral research that asks how Bahá’í men know, experience and perform their own masculinities as told through their stories and photographs. Within the spiritual context of the Bahá’í sacred tenet of equality of the sexes it sought new knowledge about how participants negotiate and transform their masculinities to facilitate rather than thwart the building of cultures of peace. Using photographic, art-based methods it asked: What is it to be a man today and attempt to construct a new understanding of masculinity? How is this process evident in practice? What are the stories of resistance and/or negotiation with negative cultural norms of masculinity? The study is upheld by three theoretical guy-wires: Bourdieu’s habitus, the Magic Mirror of visual introspection through photography, and Sacred Relationship a core Bahá'í and Indigenous lens into power, equality and accountability to all our relations. The study used PhotoSophia (a new photo- elicitation method), with a bundle of six methodological practices incorporating arts-based visual methods: Interview, PhotoSophia, group study and discussion, inscription, Photovoice and public exhibit. These methods were designed to seek deep reflection into masculine identity formation. The study concluded with a public exhibit of the photographs and inscriptions created by the researcher and participants opening the process to outside input through anonymous questionnaires. Findings include the agency the self-reflective PhotoSophia method itself as illumination into the shadows of masculinity. Primary findings are: willing vulnerability as a form of moral courage; ambiguity as a state of learning and resisting; the need for examples, a standard for a new masculinity; authenticity to be one’s true self in alignment with the Creator, and all our relations, and finally practicing sacred spiritual relationships in shoulder to shoulder service with women and others. This study has both methodological and theoretical significance to Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) theory by providing new knowledge about the masculine qualities that best facilitate the building of cultures of peace, equality and human oneness. Access dissertation here: http://hdl.handle.net/1993/34847

The first recorded instance of whole-body-mapping for research purposes is a comparison of women's identity and the concept of the reproductive system in rural Jamaica and the UK. It was later developed in a structured workshop process in South Africa to give voice to the experiences of HIV positive individuals, decrease stigma, and advocate for provision of antiretroviral medication. Whole-body mapping involves tracing around a person's body to create a life-sized outline, which is filled in during a creative and reflective process, producing an image representing multiple aspects of their embodied experience. Body-mapping holds promise as a qualitative, participatory research method to produce and disseminate knowledge. However, it is unclear how it is being used, by whom, and in what context. This article presents the findings of a systematic review of body-mapping in the published literature. The review identifies various implementations of body-mapping in research, ther...

In this paper, we argue, that the issue of children in armed conflict ought not only to be recognized as a global issue but also moved to centre stage of curriculum thinking and development. Informed by a series of presentations to youth workers and teachers in different venues and cities last summer, the paper emerges as a response to the cry for more information relating to the subject. Therefore, the issues regarding children affected by war and more specifically child soldiers are outlined along with the legal mechanisms in place to protect children. The paper also provides related curricular resources for teaching and learning in Grades 9-12.

The Aboriginal people of Australia have a rich connection to land, country and spirit. This comes through in their stories about the "Dreamtime", or period of creation. Dreamtime stories are popular in Australia today and are rich sources for teaching and learning. While the presentation draws upon using one example of the Dreamtime story of Tiddalik, a greedy frog, this paper focuses on two research projects conducted on arts-based pedagogy. It explores how arts-based methods, such as drawing, painting, drama, movement, music and literature, can be used to teach both curriculum subjects and general capabilities. In this paper, we focus on the teaching of mathematics and social and emotional wellbeing, as prototypes for teaching using arts-based methods. It is based on two action research projects, where the story form model and the arts were implemented to engage students in learning and to develop their mathematical understandings and social/emotional wellbeing.

The historic neighbourhood of Raval, in Barcelona presents a multicultural urban landscape. It contains a sense of both tangible and intangible identities influenced by a high level of social mobility arising from migration, tourism and urban gentrification processes. In April 2018 we led an exploratory workshop with neighbourhood residents, our objective was to observe the multisensorial nature of this urban landscape with locally-based participants. Through an arts-based residency we explored body-site relations by drawing attention to the body, human movement in space and its relation to and reflection of the urban landscape. Our methodology involved a five-day movement workshop with 14 participants in site-based movement experimentation through which we explored urban affects, engagement, familiarity, and senses of belonging to space. We focused our attention on the creation of emotional and sensorial landscapes through our bodies, using site-specific movement explorations in space and experimental modes of cartography in which we 'mapped' the neighbourhood according to our experiences, senses and emotions. We considered the communicative role of the body as a producer of non-verbal and non-representative language that expressed experiences of the sites in which we moved. The mapping of urban space through the body enabled us to understand the participants' subjective engagement with space (feelings, emotions, rhythms, movements, intensities, memories, wishes, visions). We explored landscape as an active and predicative creation arising from subjective and vital experience, conscious, cognitive and sensorially filtered and shaped by memories, emotions, narratives and perceptions. Through sharing experiences and "co-mapping" bodies and urban sites we explored the intra-active nature of these engagements through New Materialist lenses, spatial theory and discourses of urban flow and mobility.

This short Commentary imagines law and humanities not as a “canon” per se, but as a “field without a canon”; or a canon that resists canonization. Arts-based practices utilized in legal research and teaching expose the law and humanities “canon” to its dual (and somewhat contradictory) nature: ever straining toward a preestablished archive, it must also leap ahead fearlessly to properly defy disciplinary boundaries and move the field beyond siloed thinking, which is one of the preliminary aims of law and humanities scholarship and pedagogy. Arts-based practices consist not of a stable collection of set texts but instead signify a process of experimentation that is ever in flux and alive to possibility. It is this process of discovering new arts-based practices that ensures law and humanities remains a vibrant, yet ever-changing, field for years to come. To that end, this Commentary surveys a sampling of outsider approaches to law and humanities scholarship and pedagogy, those more c...

This article seeks to contribute to an unfortunate decline in literature that explores the importance of the arts and humanities to social work practice, education and research through an exploration of the role of poetry in social work. The authors explore the metaphor of the poet/practitioner, identifying what practitioners can learn from the poet. Second, the authors explore the use of poetry in therapeutic settings, identifying the strengths of using this tool in clinical practice. Third, the authors address the use of poetry within the context ...

The author offers a reflexive recount of an ethnography conducted at a tourist heritage site. Inspired by critical writings on the aesthetics of (social) scientific practices and texts, the author examines ethnographic practices that take place in the conjoined coercive contexts of tourism and national commemoration. A number of affinities between ethnographic, touristic, and commemoration practices are highlighted, and so are the epistemologies on which they rest and types of knowledge(s) that they help produce. These affinities include the role of authenticity and unmediated encounters, collecting and documenting practices, and lastly practices involved in presentation of artifacts (data vs. souvenirs). The narrative account/recount that the author offers involves visual images, and an examination of the technologies that produce and process them. These present the centrality if visuality in both contexts of tourism (photography, gaze, seeing) and contemporary ethnographic practices and the ways that visual images tell and conceal stories concerning the production of knowledge in social science research.

Arts-based learning activities are gaining popularity and acceptance within leadership programmes around the globe. While dance as a learning method is still emerging as a practice within leadership education, we argue that dance-making can open up new possibilities and understandings for organizational management. More than simply using dance as a metaphor, the concepts of embodiary and embodied leadership explore how the moving body can be a key site for individual and collective creative realizations and communications. Following a grounded theory approach, within this article we draw on the perspectives of dance academics, artists and leadership academics engaged in arts-based learning. Through reviews of Leadership and Dance Studies literature and qualitative, semi-structured interviews, we identify key themes related to how and why dance is being used within leadership education. These themes prompt critical reflections on the use of dance as an experiential learning method to...

Culp, Edwin. “Directing Actors for Non-Directors: Creative Research Strategies for Fiction Films” in Maria Dora Mourão, Stanislav Semerdjiev, Cecília Mello and Alan Taylor (eds.) The 21st. Century Film, TV, and Media School. Vol. 2, Directing the Future. Sofia: The International Association of Film and Television Schools - CILECT, 2019, pp. 184-198. ISBN: 9786197358087. Throughout film history, many famous scenes and even entire films have been devised with actors improvising on certain general parameters that ultimately depict a character, often vaguely portrayed. These turns to improvisation and narrative experimentation tend to come forward every time filmmakers propose a new rupture, frequently accompanied by technological changes that have made the filmmaking process cheaper or more immediate. From their uncomfortable pauses, mumbled dialogues and candid unawareness, fresh emotional intentions emerge in filmmaking every certain time as refreshing new waves. Digital technologies have recently furthered the issue, as they allow filmmakers to make cheaper and more immediate productions that rely heavily on the work of actors and their ability to react to unexpected circumstances. Despite being one of the most creative resources readily available to young emerging filmmakers, a didactic approach to actor-director tools as a creative research approach is rarely taken into account in Filmmaking courses and curriculums. Even more uncommon is for these courses to go beyond the training of directors to efficiently obtain a specific result from an actor. To devise an improvisational mechanism that embraces the mistake, the accident and the error in a film school environment usually focused on virtuosity is not a minor challenge. In this paper, I argue that by using acting techniques and improvisation strategies to impregnate the whole film production and learning process, directors —and also cinematographers, art directors, image and sound editors— can devise an experimentation space to explore creative aspects of fiction filmmaking. Firstly, I will go over the main points where the techniques for Directing Actors can be useful for filmmaking students (and professionals alike). Then, I will present two exercises that I have used in my own teaching experience.

In diesem Beitrag leisten wir eine kollaborative Autoethnografie zweier tanzbasierter Forschungsprojekte. Wir verfolgten mit diesen Projekten zwei Ziele: 1. die Produktion von Erkenntnissen jenseits des dominanten westlichen Wissenschaftsverstandnisses und 2. eine Uberprufung unseres Wissensstandes aus vorangegangenen Forschungsarbeiten zu selbstverletzendem Handeln. Aus unserem kollaborativen Ansatz resultierten neue Dilemmata und unerwartete Beziehungsverlaufe. Tanz und gemeinsames Schreiben sensibilisierten uns fur eine Vulnerabilitat, die dominantes Wissen infrage stellte. Als relationale Praxis konvergierte unser Schreiben dahingehend, dass es zu einer kritischen Reflexion der jeweiligen Perspektiven verhalf und zu einem Mehr an sozialer Gerechtigkeit beitrug. URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs170216

For use by the Visual Arts at Research-1/RUVH Universities when the need arises to present "Creative Activity" in terms more easily understood by other research scholars. I created this for a university art department at which I'm assisting with a faculty development seminar on 01-08-2018. If you should use this, please drop me a note!

This research aims to examine the effect of applying art-based learning model to the learning outcomes of effective teaching behavior of students in microteaching classes. The research design used a quasi-experimental design of non-equivalent control group design. Participants were students' microteaching classes in the Department of Islamic Studies, Universitas Islam Malang academic year 2018/2019. The subjects of this study were 103 pre-service teacher students consisting of 4 classes (2 experimental classes and 2 control classes, (54) in the experimental group, (49) in the control class). The experimental classes are taught art-based learning models and control classes are taught by practice-based models. The data tools used teacher observation instrument connecting descriptions of how effective teaching was. Research data were analyzed by independent sample t-test. It was found that pre-service teacher students' outcomes in the form of effective teaching behavior produce...

Big Paintings Club was an after school program designed for students to explore the act of large format painting unencumbered by the constraints and practices of traditional art room settings. Fifth graders engaged in the painting process free from school art conventions such as exemplars, templates, rubrics, and teacher-direction instruction on materials and techniques. The club met for an hour each Friday afternoon over the course of six consecutive weeks. Each student was supplied with a 4 by 4 foot section of heavyweight double-sized paper, one 4 by 4 foot hardboard panel, a variety of brushes, rollers, putty knives, pencils, markers, commercial latex house paint and school grade tempera paint. Photographic and video evidence of the processes as well as the final products were used to examine the effects of artistic agency on the large format paintings of elementary school children. This study sought to answer the question: What type of artwork will students produce and how will they go about their creative processes in a self-directed studio environment?
The online interactive version of this article may be found here: http://vokeart.org/rufo/

Do you remember boom-boxes with two decks so a personalized playlist could be recorded onto a cassette tape? Perhaps you received a playlist from a friend, family member, or lover? In this project, 14 colleagues first compiled and shared their curriculum playlists-their favorite texts/performances about curriculum including some of their own texts/performances. Then, they composed responses, expressed in music, dance, poetry, narrative, ruminations, and drama, that annotate, trouble, riff on, and respond to one another's playlists in order to investigate how the art of (re)mixing offers metaphorical possibilities for artfully making curriculum (poiesis). How might the art of mixing be a way of mediating understandings of scholarly lives contingent on histories, politics, and psychologies of knowledge? The connection between what we believe as real/true and how those beliefs shape our actions is difficult to apprehend (Hofer, 2002). Thus, with a view to pursuing alternatives of curriculum knowledge, our scholarly collective has carefully attended to the structures that have potentially confined our thinking on the ways curriculum is being archived and distributed as a body of knowledge. Our collaborative play and our processes of mixing and remixing invite new ways of thinking about and contributing to the development of North American curriculum studies. Hyde (1983) says "The way we treat a thing … change[s] its nature" (p. xiii). Aesthetic work is a means of disrupting the merely material, objective entity of the body. In our work of mixing and remixing, we have employed multiple representational forms to access, provoke, shift, and share our aesthetic experiences of curriculum knowledge. With Cixous (1993) we believe that what we "have learned cannot be generalized, but it can be shared" (p. 7), and like Pinar (2011) we understand that "aesthetic experience provides passages between subjectivity and sociality, as it traverses the space between public and private" (p. 96). At the interstice of the personal and social are hermeneutic curricular inquiries (Jardine, 1992), and in the continuous expansion and synopsis of such inquiries (Schubert, 2010), we have located our playlists, seeking in them metaphorical possibilities for play, passion, and profession.

El objetivo principal de esta investigación es mostrar las influencias que aporta un artista cuando realiza una residencia durante un curso en una escuela de educación primaria, en el proyecto Espacio C. En este programa el artista tiene un taller artístico dentro la escuela, el cual comparte y gestiona con los niños y niñas del centro. La investigación busca sugerir nuevas perspectivas en relación el aprendizaje a través del arte, analizando y haciendo visibles los cambios que la presencia del artista provoca en el aprendizaje de los niños y niñas, el cual deviene más autónomo, significativo y creativo. En la investigación hemos utilizado herramientas cualitativas, -básicamente observaciones de sesiones en el taller y entrevistas a los artistas, niños y niñas y maestras-, para obtener datos que hemos analizado y utilizado a través de métodos de Investigación Educativa basada en las Artes Visuales. Si queremos investigar y reflexionar sobre el impacto de crear vínculos entre escuela...

Arts-based approaches to research have emerged as an integral component of current scholarship in the social sciences, education, health research, and humanities. Integrating arts-based methods and methodologies with research generates possibilities for fresh approaches for creating, translating, and exchanging knowledge (

diorama they created to express empathy with victims and survivors of the Holocaust and outrage at the continued prevalence of anti-Semitism provoked by Holocaust deniers (see Figure 23.1). A large white box papered in "White Pride" propaganda, the diorama included cutouts through which recreated scenes from the book could be seen. In their presentation about their project to the larger group, one of the youth described these holes as representing "the holes in [Holocaust deniers'] stories. They are kind of making up facts, and it's not really true at all." Another student described the inside of the box as their attempt to portray "what actually happened in the Holocaust. It's supposed to be a scene in just like a regular town in Poland, and how the Holocaust affected it." These scenes portrayed suffering experienced by Polish Jews, constructed with paper, velum, paint, collage, and cardboard: figures of Jews depicted as mice hanging in a public square or huddled in an attic crawl space, hiding from Nazi soldiers. Critical collaborative inquiries can generate the empathy, solidarity, and activist responses intended by writers such as Spiegelman (1986), who share their difficult histories in literary works. One student noted, "I had learned about the Holocaust before, but what I got out of this project was how emotionally connected people were." Another student emphasized the impact of intergenerational collaboration: "I liked working with the teacher candidates because it's good to hear input not only from people your age but also from people who are older." One of the teachers noted, "I appreciated the risk the students took in the projects that they did. It was great to see what learners are capable of doing when given the chance."