Arts and Social Sciences, Irving K. Barber Faculty of (Okanagan)
Psychology, Department of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Gomez Velez, Monica Isabel
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
This research investigates the role of the educator, the digital humanities researcher, and the design of the creative learning experience as catalysts of the students’ meaning-making process. Employing an arts-based methodology and a multimodal mixed method research design, digital humanities research tools were used to analyze creative writing outputs from an undergraduate course, in order to generate visualizations and narratives of the students’ learning experience, and gain insight into how the learning affected their mental models, or worldviews. The texts used in this project are narrative inquiries included in creative portfolios and final creative essays from an undergraduate visual design program in Medellin, Colombia. The students’ creative texts were analyzed using the text analysis tools Voyant Tools and the Meaning Extraction Helper to secure validity through triangulation. The research design facilitated the emergence of meaning from the data, and revealed the complexity of the conceptual relationality inherent to meaning making during the learning experience by depicting changes in correlations and distributions of word occurrences related to the course concepts. The thesis concludes with a critical reflection on circumstances and tensions of pedagogical-research practice in the digital context, and proposes creative learning and digital research value-driven strategies for meaningful learning and ethical research.
DATA VISUALIZATIONS OF THE LEARNING EXPERIENCE IN UNDERGRADUATE CREATIVE THINKING ASSIGNMENTS by Monica Isabel Gomez Velez Masters of Education, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, 2018 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Interdisciplinary Studies) (Digital Arts and Humanities) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA Okanagan April 2023 © Monica Isabel Gomez Velez, 2023 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis/dissertation entitled: Data visualizations of the learning experience in undergraduate creative thinking assignments submitted by Monica Isabel Gomez Velez in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Masters of Arts. Dr. Liane Gabora, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Supervisor Dr. Aleksandra Dulic, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Catherine Broom, Faculty of Education Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Robert Campbell, Faculty of Education University Examiner iii Abstract This research investigates the role of the educator, the digital humanities researcher, and the design of the creative learning experience as catalysts of the students’ meaning-making process. Employing an arts-based methodology and a multimodal mixed method research design, digital humanities research tools were used to analyze creative writing outputs from an undergraduate course, in order to generate visualizations and narratives of the students’ learning experience, and gain insight into how the learning affected their mental models, or worldviews. The texts used in this project are narrative inquiries included in creative portfolios and final creative essays from an undergraduate visual design program in Medellin, Colombia. The students’ creative texts were analyzed using the text analysis tools Voyant Tools and the Meaning Extraction Helper to secure validity through triangulation. The research design facilitated the emergence of meaning from the data, and revealed the complexity of the conceptual relationality inherent to meaning making during the learning experience by depicting changes in correlations and distributions of word occurrences related to the course concepts. The thesis concludes with a critical reflection on circumstances and tensions of pedagogical-research practice in the digital context, and proposes creative learning and digital research value-driven strategies for meaningful learning and ethical research. iv Lay Summary This research is an exploration and critical reflection on the use of digital tools for analyzing students’ undergraduate creative written assignments from a visual design program in Medellin, Colombia. I show how these tools through statistical analysis and graphs, can facilitate the detection of patterns in word use and identifying relationships between main concepts studied. I used these results to reconstruct narratives to understand how students engaged with the content proposed for the course. It was evidenced that students’ comprehension of terms became more complex by the identified increment in connections and inclusion of new terms. I explore the implications of these findings for our understanding of changes in students’ ideas, perceptions and emotions in the classroom. Finally, I reflect on the ethical use of digital tools by educators, and propose methods for the integration of values in a creative lesson design. v Preface This thesis is an original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Monica Isabel Gomez Velez. The research protocol for the study reported in this thesis was approved through the UBC Behavioural Research Ethics Board (Certificate # H21-03575) on 12 December 2022. vi Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................... ii Lay Summary ................................................................................................................ iv Preface ........................................................................................................................... v Table of Contents ......................................................................................................... vi List of Tables ................................................................................................................ xi List of Figures ............................................................................................................. xii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... xiii Dedication .................................................................................................................... xv Chapter 1: Introduction .......................................................................................... 1 1.1 Research purpose and question .................................................................... 3 1.2 Research objectives ...................................................................................... 4 Chapter 2: Literature Review ................................................................................. 5 2.1 Creative learning/arts-based pedagogies as meaningful learning experiences .............................................................................................................. 5 2.1.1 Creative thinking and art as learning facilitators ..................................... 6 2.1.2 Researching the creative learning experience ....................................... 8 2.2 Creative thinking and worldviews ................................................................ 11 2.2.1 Worldview ............................................................................................. 11 2.2.2 Creative outputs and meaning-making ................................................. 12 2.3 Digital humanities ........................................................................................ 13 2.3.1 Digital humanities, a space of confluence ............................................ 14 vii 2.3.2 Digital humanities as a transformational experience ............................ 16 2.3.3 Digital humanities as a practical field ................................................... 16 2.4 Summary ..................................................................................................... 17 Chapter 3: Methodology ....................................................................................... 19 3.1 Arts-based methodology.............................................................................. 19 3.2 Research design ......................................................................................... 20 3.3 Multimodal mixed method research design ................................................. 20 3.4 Research ethics ........................................................................................... 22 3.4.1 Data protection and management ........................................................ 23 3.5 Data collection ............................................................................................. 24 3.5.1 Data sample ......................................................................................... 24 3.5.2 Data sampling scheme ......................................................................... 26 3.5.3 Creative assignment descriptions ........................................................ 27 3.5.4 Students’ creative outputs .................................................................... 30 3.6 Quantitative analysis method ...................................................................... 31 3.6.1 Text analysis as a method .................................................................... 32 3.6.1.1 Voyant Tools ................................................................................... 33 3.6.1.2 Meaning Extraction Helper .............................................................. 34 3.6.2. Data processing ................................................................................ 36 3.7 Limitations of the research .......................................................................... 36 3.8 Qualitative analysis method ......................................................................... 38 3.9 Summary ..................................................................................................... 39 Chapter 4: Results....................................................................................................... 41 viii 4.1 Quantitative analysis ........................................................................................ 42 4.1.1 Voyant Tools: Analysis environment for digital texts ............................ 42 4.1.1.1 Visualizing the meaning-making process ............................................. 43 4.1.1.2 Student worldview dynamics ............................................................... 47 4.1.2 Meaning Extraction Helper: A program to help language exploration ... 54 4.2 Securing validity .......................................................................................... 56 4.3 Qualitative analysis of quantitative results ................................................... 57 4.3.1 Concept space/body............................................................................. 57 4.3.2 Concept emotion .................................................................................. 58 4.3.3 Concept objects ................................................................................... 59 4.3.4 Course central concept: Experience design ......................................... 60 4.4 Qualitative results personal academic narratives ........................................ 61 4.5 Summary ..................................................................................................... 62 Chapter 5: Conclusion ................................................................................................ 64 5.1 Learning in the digital context ...................................................................... 66 5.1.1 Understanding students as digital audiences ....................................... 68 5.1.2 Learning interactions ............................................................................ 70 5.2 Digital tools for understanding the meaning ................................................ 72 5.2.1 What about digital justice? ................................................................... 74 5.2.2 Ethical implications of the interaction of meaning-making .................... 75 5.3 Hybrid creative learning experience design ................................................. 77 5.3.1 Accepting ambivalence and uncertainty ............................................... 78 5.3.2 Trusting experience to create ............................................................... 79 ix 5.3.3 Re-tooling assessment ......................................................................... 79 5.3.4 Function as an integral value system ................................................... 80 5.3.5 An instructional design proposal for a hybrid experience ..................... 80 5.4 One last summary reflection ........................................................................ 82 References ................................................................................................................... 85 Appendices .................................................................................................................. 95 Appendix A - Philosophical foundations ........................................................................ 95 Appendix A.1 - A journey to finding my voice: A statement about my positionality ........ 95 Appendix A.1.2 - A reflection about place and locating myself. ..................................... 97 Appendix A.1.3 - Isabel Gomez, the educator and researcher ...................................... 99 Appendix A.2 - A transformative and critical pedagogy epistemology ......................... 102 Appendix A.3 - A relational ontology ........................................................................... 103 Appendix B - Taller V (Design V) planning matrix ....................................................... 104 Appendix C - Voyant Initial Output for the concept of Space-Body ............................. 110 Appendix D - Voyant Initial Output for the concept of Emotions .................................. 111 Appendix E - Voyant Initial Output for the concept of Objects ..................................... 112 Appendix F - Voyant Initial Output for the concept of Experience ............................... 113 Appendix G - Voyant Tools TermsRadio visualization concept Space-Body ............... 114 Appendix H - Voyant Tools TermsRadio visualization concept Emotions ................... 115 Appendix I - Voyant Tools TermsRadio visualization concept Objects ........................ 116 Appendix J - Voyant Tools TermsRadio visualization concept Experience ................. 117 Appendix K - Student, educator, researcher personal data entries ............................. 118 Appendix K.1 - Research as an act of becoming ........................................................ 118 x Appendix K.2 - Spaces and bodies in tension, a story about learning in the digital context ......................................................................................................................... 120 Appendix K.3 - Understanding us: The students as digital audiences ......................... 121 Appendix K4 - The aesthetics of the meaning making ................................................ 123 Appendix K5 - How do you design a critical experience in the digital context? ........... 124 Appendix K6 - Accepting ambivalence and uncertainty .............................................. 126 xi List of Tables Table 1 – Example of student assignment coding for research ..................................... 24 Table 2 - Design V course general information ............................................................. 26 Table 3 - Assigned readings by the theoretical concept ................................................ 29 Table 4 - Word frequency in assigned readings ............................................................ 48 Table 5 - MEH word list ranked by frequency ................................................................ 55 Table 6 - MEH word count concept Emotion ................................................................. 56 xii List of Figures Figure 1 - Research theoretical foundation summary .................................................... 18 Figure 2 - Research questions and theoretical foundations .......................................... 18 Figure 3 - Multimodal mixed method research design ................................................... 22 Figure 4 - Julian M. Olivares's creative output for the concept of space-body .............. 28 Figure 5 - Julian M. Olivares's creative output for the concept of emotion .................... 28 Figure 6 - Julian M. Olivares's creative output for the concept of objects ...................... 29 Figure 7 - Initial Voyant Tools Screen per concept corpora comparison ....................... 44 Figure 8 - Voyant Tools TermsRadio visualization per concept .................................... 50 Figure 9 - Voyant Tools TermsRadio Visualization for student 1 corpus ....................... 51 Figure 10 - Voyant Tools TermsRadio Visualization for student 5 corpus ..................... 52 Figure 11 - Voyant Tools TermsRadio Visualization for assigned readings .................. 53 Figure 12 - Summary of the research findings and critical reflections ........................... 83 Figure 13 - Research as an act of becoming ............................................................... 118 Figure 14 - A dialogue between me and the comp ...................................................... 123 Figure 15 - Self-portrait and research manifesto ......................................................... 125 xiii Glossary Term Definition Creative Learning A form of learning that involves creative expression in the context of academic learning. Digital Tools Interactive website, programs, or online resources. Mediation The way in which information is shaped, transformed, and translated by the nature of its container or medium. Worldview A way of seeing and being in the world that arises from the structure of one’s web of understandings, beliefs, attitudes, habits, and ideas. xiv Acknowledgements I offer my enduring gratitude to the faculty, staff and my fellow students at UBC Okanagan, who have inspired me to continue my work. I owe particular thanks to Dr. Gabora for your knowledge, support and guidance in this research. I am also grateful to my committee members Dr. Catherine Broom and Dr. Aleksandra Dulic for challenging me to expand my thinking. I also want to acknowledge the special support and kindness I received from Dr. Karis Shearer, Laura Prada (Provost Office), Dr. Greg Garrard, Dr. Astrida Neimanis, Dr. Christine Schreyer, Dr. Emily Murphy, Dr. Kyong Yoon, Dr, Jessica Stites Mor, and Dr. Jodey Castricano. A special thanks to Dr. Eva Marie Kovacs-Kowalke for being a source of strength. A special thank you to Madeline (Madi) Donald (Tu humanidad siempre me llena de esperanza). xv Dedication Jose Antonio, Wbeimar y Mami mis amores infinitos y por quienes verdaderamente vale la pena vivir. Esta poética experiencia está dedicada a ustedes, parte integral, el corazón, la fuerza, la emoción, el alma de mis sueños que gracias a ustedes tienen alas tan grandes y fuertes para volar tan alto y tan lejos como me atreva a volar. Thank you, Jose Antonio, for reminding me to take little breaks while doing my eternal homework, and for asking me if I was ok every time, I stopped reading out loud. Thank you, Wbeimar for being the best coach, for not letting me quite, for never doubting and reminding me always that I could do it. Thank you for caring for me. This thesis is also dedicated to my family and my friends, who have supported me throughout my years of education, without your help this would not have been possible. A special dedication to Quinto B, this thesis is about us. I owe you so much. I dedicate this work to my students, who constantly remind me that I am the teacher who makes magic, I am an example of how the learning experience can be a safe space for becoming your most extraordinary self when designed with care, trust, emotion and love. Thank you for always teaching me more than I could imagine. This thesis is inspired and written for you and the new ways of being and seeing what we learned together. ¡Los extraño y los llevo en mi corazón! Finally, this story is inspired and dedicated to the Colombian educators whose teaching philosophies and pedagogical practices have made me the ethically committed educator I am now. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction Creative learning experiences provide valuable research data; they are rich, authentic, evocative, and imaginative. However, the educator-researcher faces several obstacles in the attempt to analyze this data: 1) the analysis is complex and labour-intensive; 2) it can be difficult to clearly articulate what the data reveals about the learning experience; 3) there are ethical issues surrounding the preservation of the voice of participants; and 4) results may be perceived as less valid than those obtained with conventional modes of analysis. Because the cultural output of humanity is continuously migrating towards digital formats, there is a continued need of meaningful integrations of digital technology in the academic context. Although there are strategies for using digital tools in creative learning analysis and its research, it is not possible to assume that they enhance the learning experience. Therefore, it can be valuable to question and redesign pedagogical practices with the potential to integrate digital research methods in the instructional design. The second chapter of this thesis investigates the interdisciplinary intersection between: 1) creative learning and arts-based pedagogies; 2) creative thinking and worldviews; and 3) digital humanities. Exploring the learning experience in this way provides an avenue for addressing the complexity of the arts-based data. This conceptual intersection suggests that students’ assignments reflect representations of worldviews. In particular, these creative products have been demonstrated to provide access to deeper layers of the students’ meaning-making process during immersion in a 2 creative task (Gabora, 2018). I argue that it is possible to imagine ways in which we can trace cognitive processes and the dynamics of worldviews during the learning experience through a deeper look into students’ creative writing assignments. Mediation is needed to facilitate these connections and to support the validity of the research process while attending to the ethical concerns related to arts-based research. This proposed mediation arises from viewing the digital humanities (DH) as a practical field that encompasses many strategies for critical intervention and resistance that, like other media, should understand and represent the context while promoting agency (Becker, 2016). Chapter three outlines the methodology of this research. The research used secondary research data from creative outputs from two assignments: a multimodal creative portfolio and a final creative essay from an undergraduate course on Experience Design. The course was taken by third-year students of the Visual Design program of Fundación Universitaria Bellas Artes in Medellin, Colombia. Using an arts-based methodology, I developed a multimodal mixed method research design (Figure 3) which facilitated the extraction of meaning from data. The results are presented in chapter four. I summarize the patterns and trends about meaning making and worldview dynamics revealed through the process of analyzing data using textual analysis tools’ affordances. The analysis of data visualizations and narratives offers insights into the unique space of the creative learning experience and addresses two research questions: how the tools support visualizing the learning experience and what the data conveys about the students' meaning making and worldview dynamics. The findings are built upon previous 3 research about how people use language and how worldviews are emergent and self-organizing. The goal of the analysis is to show how digital tools represent students engaging with and making sense of new concepts. Visualizing qualitative and quantitative data in this way revealed insights into the learning experience. Finally, in chapter five, I make conclusions about circumstances and tensions of the pedagogical-research practice. This research focuses on the potential for digital tools to transform the learning experience and promote student agency by proposing value driven instructional design strategies. This chapter’s conclusions reflect on the ethical implications of using tools as objects to access comprehension during the creative learning experience and emphasize the importance of the aesthetic of interaction of meaning-making. I conclude by proposing a hybrid instructional design activity that integrates digital tools to facilitate emotional activation, critical reflection, and the embodiment of invisible connections in the creative learning process by promoting active coping strategies. Overall, this research highlights the potential for digital technologies to facilitate meaningful learning experiences and transform worldviews while emphasizing the importance of ethical considerations and critical reflection in their implementation. 1.1 Research purpose and question This project’s purpose is to develop an experimental use for digital humanities research tools, specifically text analysis, to analyze creative outputs from assignments from an undergraduate course in order to explore the meaning-making process and the dynamics of worldviews during the creative learning experience. 4 The research questions guiding this inquiry about the students’ assignments include: • How can digital humanities research tools support visualizing the learning experience from creative assignments? • What do these data visualizations tell us about the students’ meaning-making processes and the dynamics of worldviews in the classroom? • How can a digital humanities critical inquiry support ethical research and learning processes? 1.2 Research objectives The long-term goal of my research is to propose pedagogical strategies that support learners to become creators of other possible worlds. To achieve this goal, I explore the role of the educator/researcher and the design of the creative learning experience as a catalyst of the students’ meaning-making process. More specifically, the study has the following sub-objectives: • To create data visualizations using text analysis tools from students’ creative outputs as art-based data. • Conceptualize the nature of patterns and trends observed in the learning experience. • Discuss pedagogical tensions. • Propose opportunities for integrating digital research tools for hybrid creative learning experiences. 5 Chapter 2: Literature Review This chapter aims to establish the foundations from which the creative classroom can be seen as a space for creating meaning and educational research. Theoretically, this research inhabits an interdisciplinary intersection between: 1) creative learning and arts-based pedagogies, 2) creative thinking and worldviews, and 3) digital humanities. I address some issues identified in creative data analysis and arts-based research. Second, creative thinking and worldviews are explored as a conceptual intersection that suggests that students' creative products reflect representations of their worldviews (Gabora, 2018). Hence, they can give an insight into the meaning-making process during the learning experience. Finally, I develop, from an educational perspective, the idea of digital humanities as a confluence space that allows for an ethical mediation between the other two theoretical areas. This space of ethical confluence is an intersection where digital humanities scholars and creative educators contribute to critically analyzing the configuration of the relations between technology, culture, and society that results in alternate conceptualizations of being. The proposed mediation comes from the practical nature of digital humanities, which encompasses multiple critical intervention strategies. 2.1 Creative learning/arts-based pedagogies as meaningful learning experiences Creative learning and art-based pedagogies provide diverse opportunities for creating meaning in the classroom. Creative learning is a combinatorial and emergent 6 process that derives in creative expressions in the classroom (Beghetto, (2021). For creative learning to occur the experience design has to provide students with opportunities to combine new and existing knowledge, create meaningful interpretations, change their personal understands through connections, have opportunities for expression, evaluate conceptions, assess compatibilities and make novel contributions (Beghetto, 2016). Arts-based pedagogies are human actions resulting from a collaborative, participatory, empowering, and transformative experience that is constructivist and critical. This collective and collabrative learning mechanism, make us of the aesthetic elements to promote critical reflections about tensions and also providing space for finding joint solutions to these problems (Boal, 2009). Therefore, researching the creative learning and arts-based experiences is fundamental for classroom inquiries that delve into how humans construct knowledge and how they make sense of the world. 2.1.1 Creative thinking and art as learning facilitators When creative thinking and art are used as learning facilitators, learning can be an embodied experience that empowers dynamics in which knowledge sharing occurs (Mulvihill & Swaminathan, 2019). The participant in the creative learning experience integrates a new understanding of their world through a cognitive, emotional, and physical act. During this type of experience, meaning is created and negotiated through observation, sensory experiences, contextual knowledge, and recognition of patterns. 7 Creative learning as an educational approach in the academic context is founded on the intimate and sometimes mutually dependent relationship between creativity and learning (Beghetto & Karwowski, 2018). At the individual level, learning combines previous experiences with learning stimuli. Likewise, in the academic context, this learning approach fosters experimentation and feedback during the learning experience. Creative learning is a dynamic action that fosters collaborative spaces that promote student agency. Therefore, it is crucial that instructional practices give life to learning spaces that are conducive to learning in creativity, including spaces for sharing unique contributions, experimenting, and developing insights, and that originate new and personal understandings and contribute to the learning of others (Beghetto & Karwowski, 2018). Providing students with opportunities to tap into and understand their creative thinking is important, as it has the potential to transform our worlds. Thinking creatively helps people see possibilities, create novel responses, and propose solutions to challenges. In particular, classrooms are spaces of significant influence for transforming worldviews, as they are spaces where stories, ideas, and attitudes are shared (Gabora & Unrau, 2019). Classrooms are spaces where dynamic transformations occur through the communal exchange of information that happens when sharing ideas and attitudes with others (Dewey, 2008). As a consequence, classrooms should be spaces to foster new creative trajectories that result from interactions with the educator, instructional design, and facilitation techniques that lead to exploring personal experiences and peer collaboration. Furthermore, assignments should allow for three things to occur so that 8 creativity can be nurtured (Maland & Gabora, 2019). First, they should focus on critical thinking rather than the reproduction of information by fostering building skills that allow contextual focus and associative process. Secondly, activities should transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, as per material reality, where harsh lines of separation do not exist. And thirdly, they should propose questions and challenges that require solitude and reflection to incubate creative outputs that represent personal perspectives on what has been learned. 2.1.2 Researching the creative learning experience From this varied composition of elements that encompasses the creative learning experience, an educator/researcher is left with an array of data in the form of texts, images, conversations, and stories, among others. These elements reflect the relationality, the meaning-making, the knowledge transferability, and the experience itself that occur in the classroom. Therefore, it is important that classroom inquiries delve into the ways humans construct knowledge to understand the inextricable links between these creative outputs. By doing so, educators allow an active research process to occur, where it is possible to appreciate the different ways people make sense of the world. Art-based research consists of innovative inquiries using the arts and creative thinking as ways of seeing and thinking about the world. In education, this type of research is an aesthetic and critical experience that allows non-linear access to new forms of knowledge that will generate new representations and dialogues (Mulvihill & Swaminathan, 2019). There are three types of art-based research (Coemans & Hannes, 9 2017): a) research about art, where the art object itself is the subject of research; b) art as research, where the process of creating art is investigated to understand the art form; and c) art in research, where artistic forms are used in research processes to study social or behavioral phenomena, such as this project. Arts-based research has the following strengths (Chilton & Leavy, 2014). First, it promotes other forms of communication that provide access to deeper layers of the making-sense process. Secondly, it addresses power relations inside and outside the research process as a result of understanding art as a human participatory and transformative experience. Arts-based research is participatory by nature because it creates a space for respectful dialogue. It has a transformative power at a personal, institutional, and contextual level, and it can be empowering through through its impact on well-being, increased confidence, and skills development. Third, art-based data’s particular characteristics, such as its authentic and evocative nature, create enriched meaning-making experiences. In general, this type of research results are more personal and imaginative, illuminating subtleties and promoting diversity and multiplicity of views. In addition, this data has a generative characteristic that leads to other data as a result of experimental and emotional moments that focus on strengths instead of deficits (Dillard & Dixson, 2016). Finally, these methods appeal to participants, since they can be more accessible, comfortable, and diverse, promoting participation as a fundamental basis. Likewise, they can resonate with communities beyond the academy, generating commitments that are produced from emotional attachment and identification with the stories of others. 10 Challenges of art-based research include the need to support researchers in exploring analytical approaches where form is not necessarily considered inferior to academic text (Coemans & Hannes, 2017). There is also an issue of accessibility for researchers, since these methods can be challenging, demanding, and complex to understand and analyze. Therefore, care must be taken with the lack of critical methodological reflection, which is why this type of research should involve establishing a position, arguing for the choice of methods, describing the artistic practices to be used, and stating the relationship between the researcher and the participants. In addition, it is fundamental to recognize the existing ethical tensions to include all research voices during the collection, analysis, reporting, and dissemination of results, which leads to the other grand challenge of data analysis. Furthermore, as a complex process, issues arise about how to tackle the overwhelming amount of data. The diverse and multiple layers have implications for recognizing what should count as data. In addition, conventional modes of analysis are not appropriate for interpreting such data. Therefore, disruptive methods are required to change how we approach knowledge and art in research. Attending to these issues will make it possible to meet the challenge of dialoguing with conventional academic forms, creating frameworks that validate quality and promote varied evaluation criteria such as coherence, generation, aesthetic power, and resonance (Coemans & Hannes, 2017). To respond to these creative learning research needs, we can gain insight from a creative thinking perspective on learning-teaching interactions. In particular, creative thinking can fuel the learning process, and thereby influence worldviews. Further, 11 exploring the learning experience in this way offers an avenue for capturing the complexity of the data. 2.2 Creative thinking and worldviews The foundational point of connection with creative thinking and worldviews, as a conceptual axis, is the proposal in the Honing Theory, a framework of complex systems for creativity beginning with worldviews (Gabora, 2017b). From an educational perspective, Honing Theory is founded on the notion that we learn by assimilation and accommodation. That means getting new information socially or individually and making it part of our web of understanding. In Honing Theory, creative outputs are considered external manifestations of this inner transformation. From a cognitive science perspective and a mathematical approach to quantum physics, Honing Theory demonstrates what a creative worldview looks like (Gabora, 2017a, 2018, 2019). 2.2.1 Worldview Understanding a worldview from the perspective of the Honing Theory requires recognizing it as a way of seeing and being in the world that arises from the structure of one’s web of understandings, beliefs, attitudes, habits, and ideas. From a learning perspective, it is the result of the procedural and declarative knowledge we acquire (Gabora, 2018; Maland & Gabora, 2019). Worldviews are emergent, self-organizing, and self-mending through cognitive processes represented by actions, streams of free associations, critical reflections, and complex behavioural consistencies. The dynamic communal exchange of information with the external world changes the internal state of 12 the worldview. By sharing experiences, ideas, and attitudes, individuals can influence how another worldview forms and transforms. When people directly or indirectly interact with and make impressions of one another, their worldview’s configuration can be passed on by influencing and being imperfectly reconstituted by others. Consequently, particular beliefs or ideas may take on different roles in different individuals due to the experiences and structures unique to that specific individual’s worldview. When students learn and generate creative works, their worldviews are altered, affecting their future perspectives and interactions with their worlds. This suggests that creative learning, in any domain, can be viewed as an internal transformation that affects the knowledge domain and self-organization of the worldview. 2.2.2 Creative outputs and meaning-making Creative outputs are, in a sense, the byproducts of evolving worldviews. Since a worldview cannot be seen, it reveals itself through behavioral consistencies in social interaction and generating creative outputs (Gabora, 2017b, 2017a). For example, when students debate politics or present their art projects to each other, these interactions and outputs are what allow worldviews to regard and shape one another. One of the more prominent implications of applying self-other re-organization theory to cultural evolution is that it is not the creative artifacts or ideas that are evolving, but the worldviews that produce them (Gabora, 2004). Creative outputs are the manifestations of the cultural evolution of the mind that occurs after restructuring one’s worldview. Furthermore, these innovative products are possible points of access to the kind of 13 engagement in a creative task that results in byproducts that reflect the state of the worldview that generated them (Gabora, 2017a). From this point of view, arts-based data are creative outputs that provide access to deeper layers of meaning-making during immersion in a creative task. This conceptual intersection signifies that the arts-based data reflect representations of the student’s worldview. Therefore, it is possible to imagine ways in which we can trace some cognitive processes from the student’s learning experience through a deeper look into their assignments, such as creative texts and essays. Further, it is possible to observe the internal transformation that occurs for the individual as streams of interactions happening during the learning experience, since one of the central processes of creative thinking is combining concepts and words for meaning-making (Kenett et al., 2018). 2.3 Digital humanities This project’s first two theoretical areas, creative learning and creative thinking and worldviews, support the notion that learning is social, emotional, and shaped by culture (Immordino-Yang, 2015). These areas emphasize the need for learning experiences to be embodied and cognitively challenging to provide opportunities for the student to re-interpret their human experience. The generative process of finding points of connection between the two conceptual areas can reveal the enrichment of the critical learning experience by providing a glimpse into students' worldviews and their meaning-making processes. 14 However, a mediation is needed to support the validity of the research process while attending to the ethical concerns related to arts-based research to preserve the authenticity of the data. From the learning experience perspective, the philosophical reflections at the digital humanities' core about society, culture, tools, and technology are central to this proposal. The following ethical reflections at the digital humanities’ center align with this project's intention of attending to the challenges digital humanities and society face. 2.3.1 Digital humanities, a space of confluence Digital humanities is a field being developed and theorized from multiple perspectives. It can be seen as an intersection, a space where core elements society, culture, tools, and technology meet, and through which attempts at signifying the term are made. Most digital humanities definitions result from an approach to the relationship between digital tools and humanities. Along the spectrum of that relationship, some scholars see digital humanities as the discipline in charge of critically understanding the confluence of society, culture, and technology. Others view it as a means of expressing creativity and culture via digital technology through interactive media arts, educational games, digital ethnographies, media anthropology, etc. In contrast, some see digital humanities as simply a more nuanced definition of humanities. From a critical perspective, digital humanities can be seen as a trading zone that should multiply and maximize modes and points of engagement by connecting computation, digital tools, media, and humanities-based inquiry (Risam, 2018). From these definitions, a potential for digital humanities is the deep integration between thinking and making, facilitated by 15 the ability to attend to large projects and methodological challenges that can result in remaking the world. There are arguments that support the notion that humanities have always been multimodal. Such arguments result in definitions of the field related to the application of a technical modifier and the construction of new kinds of objects that lead to new insights. As a result, digital humanities is defined as a natural progression of humanities by including new tools; in this case, technological ones (Sterne, 2015). This definition recognizes a retooling process of humanities through digital media and methods and highlights the transformative impact of the field. The changes brought by digital media to the processes of recording, interpreting, preserving, and engaging as the primary aim of humanities have profoundly impacted the meaning making of the human experience and its records (Brown, 2011). From the learning experience perspective, understanding these different definitions facilitates a critical reflection about learning, where mediations are happening between the core elements of society, technology, and culture. The values embedded in the digital tools create a language of interactions that users integrate as experiences of embodiment during their meaning-making processes. Digital tools (i.e., interfaces, software, and algorithms) act as translators of these interactions, by means of their functionality, intentionality of use, and integrated possibilities for agency. Therefore, when digital tools are used for new ways of learning, usability, access, transparency, intentionality, and collaboration become fundamental values. 16 2.3.2 Digital humanities as a transformational experience Regarding the digital humanities purpose, there seems to be an agreement on the potential for transformation related to the field, especially in the rapid and profound social change currently happening due to the speed of development of digital technologies. This is due to the role of digital humanities in developing and sustaining the digital records of humanity, which in turn affects life and cultural heritage. This indicates the inherent possibilities for the field to be reimagined by exploring knowledge production, allowing new stories to be told, shedding light on counter-stories, and creating spaces for communities to produce and share their knowledge (Risam, 2018). Indeed, emphasizing the notion of the humanities as best equipped to ensure the digital universe enriches everyone’s meaningful experience with information, rather than dehumanizing by silencing its context (Brown, 2011). Further, digital humanities is a way of seeing the world with an essential purpose of supporting communication and adaptability to the contemporary world by striking a balance between the real and the digital world (Anderson et al., 2016). 2.3.3 Digital humanities as a practical field The mediation proposed by this project is founded on an understanding of digital humanities as a space of critical reflection and as a practical field. Some of the digital humanities research tools and their affordances developed for text reading analysis facilitate the possibility of allowing the research data to express its categories while also supporting a research process that is mindful of preserving the voice of the participants. This, in turn, opens the possibility for a more efficient research process. 17 Digital humanities research methods and tools offer the potential to understand the interactions from which our worldviews emerge as a phenomenon of study in the classroom. As we approach new ways of being and relating in the digital world, we can also look at the classroom in ways that were not previously possible. The range of aspects at which we can look, from a digital humanities research methods approach to the classroom and its subsequent learning experience, can be explained through, in Sousanis’s words, “the metaphor of perspective – a seeing through two (or more) eyes – as a means for stepping out of imposed boundaries” (Sousanis, 2015, p. 3). Therefore, educators and digital humanities researchers have the potential to access new possibilities to explore the classroom as a complex and dynamic ecosystem. 2.4 Summary This chapter presented the intersection between the three theoretical areas: creative learning and arts-based pedagogies, creative thinking and worldviews, and digital humanities. This convergence intersection constitutes the foundation for the methodology proposed in the next chapter. The research design uses digital tools to explore students’ worldview dynamics and meaning-making processes from the creative learning outputs. The notion of digital humanities as a transformational and practical space leads to the selected avenues for analyzing arts-based data and educational research. Figure 1 summarizes the theoretical foundations of this research project. Figure 2, shows the relationship of each theoretical section to the research questions. 18 Figure 2 - Research questions and theoretical foundations Figure 1 - Research theoretical foundation summary 19 Chapter 3: Methodology This thesis methodology is grounded in the philosophical foundations outlined in Annex A (positionality, transformative and critical pedagogy epistemology, and relational ontology). The chapter begins by defining arts-based research as a methodology and explaining its key characteristics. It then provides an overview of the mixed methods approach employed in this study, including qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis techniques. Students’ narrative inquiries and creative portfolio assignments analyzed in this research are explained, as well as the digital tools used for text analysis in the quantitative strand. The chapter also details the sample selection process and ethical considerations taken into account during the research. Finally, the chapter discusses the narrative inquiry process used for the research's conclusion by highlighting this approach's strengths. 3.1 Arts-based methodology An arts-based methodology is proposed for this thesis project as an umbrella that covers an eclectic array of epistemological and methodological approaches (Greenwood, 2019). A methodology represents the coherent and logical combination of research elements, such as philosophical and ethical stance, theory, and methods (Kara, 2015). Arts-based methodologies require the recognition of the multiple ways in which the human experience is reflected, using methods that are participatory to empower participants and researchers to notice, engage with, and challenge personal assumptions (Morris & Paris, 2022). Therefore, selecting an arts-based methodology as 20 an umbrella is in alignment with an epistemology that embraces multiple ways of knowing (Mulvihill & Swaminathan, 2019). Creative and artistic methods invite the strategic use of ambiguity as a tool to allow for multiple meanings to be explored, by establishing productive spaces where significant questions and dialogic relations are created (Barone & Eisner, 2021; Leavy, 2017). Hence, arts-based methodologies can serve as catalysts for action, taking the learning experience of the participants and the researcher beyond a cognitive act, so as to overtly include emotional elements that provoke transformations of worldviews. 3.2 Research design To ensure that the methods allow the meaning to emerge from the data, a multimodal mixed method research design was chosen. This approach guided the transformation of qualitative data into an exploration of patterns and trends that became data visualizations, in a quest to reveal deep interpretative insights about the learning experience. 3.3 Multimodal mixed method research design The potential of integrating arts-based inquiries with mixed-method research has been studied previously and considered an innovative merger (Archibald & Gerber, 2018). The fundamental characteristic of mixed methods designs is the careful interaction between qualitative and quantitative methods to answer the research questions (Johnson et al., 2007; Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004; Morgan, 2013). Both qualitative and quantitative strands of this research received equal research priority, 21 meaning that both were given equal attention and weight in the data analysis and interpretation process. The synchronization of methods occurred sequentially by collecting qualitative and quantitative information at different stages of the investigation. Since this study involves text, images, and data visualizations, I used a multimodal mixed-method research design framework (O’Halloran et al., 2018). Figure 3 presents a diagram of the methodological design. This multimodal research design traced meaning-making using elements of narrative inquiry as an arts-based qualitative research method during the data collection and analysis phases. After the initial collection phase, the qualitative data was transformed into quantitative data for visualizations to inform the final qualitative stage. These multilevel visualizations created by the quantitatively modelled interactions support detecting patterns that are difficult to discern through traditional qualitative coding techniques, such as thematic analysis. This interactive transformation of data was to create a series of narratives that emerge from the data in context (Braun & Clarke, 2006; O’Halloran et al., 2018). 22 Figure 3 - Multimodal mixed method research design 3.4 Research ethics This project is considered to have minimal risk ethics since the probability and magnitude of possible harms stemming from the involvement in this inquiry are no greater than those encountered by the participants in those aspects of their everyday life. The study focused on analyzing multimodal creative assignments from an undergraduate course. Students were obligated to submit the assignments for course credit. This data is considered secondary since this research analyzed previously collected data. As the risks of doing this assignment for research are no greater than the risks of doing the assignment for course credit, the study is considered minimal risk. The current project has authorization from Institución Universitaria Fundación Bellas Artes (Medellin – Colombia) and approval by UBC BREB NUMBER H21-03575. 23 3.4.1 Data protection and management In July 2022, permission was requested at Institucion Universitaria Fundación Bellas Artes (FUBA) to allow Isabel Gomez, the principal researcher of this thesis, to be data custodian. In November 2022, permission was granted, and copies of the data were transferred to a One Drive folder hosted by UBC. Shared custody has been maintained with my supervisor, Dr. Gabora. Currently, the data is stored in both the UBC and FUBA cloud data storage systems. Initially, the data had the name of each student as identifying information to secure anonymity. The following procedure was conducted with the files: a) An alphanumeric code was assigned to each participant’s assignment (Table 1). b) Each assignment was reviewed individually and internal mentions of the name of the student were deleted. c) The code is kept in an offline computer, locked and separated from the data folders. Only authorized persons have access. d) Password protection has been activated on both the computer and cloud where information is stored. e) No identifying information about the participants (e.g., names, nicknames, physical descriptions, clues to their location) will be included in any presentations or publications of data, unless direct authorization has been obtained. As the text assignments were anonymized, it was not necessary to reach out to the students individually for their consent. However, I sought and obtained permission from FUBA to secure consent and permission from the students whose complete work I 24 wanted to include in my thesis. Only one student’s portfolio was included as a sample, with the student’s permission to cite them as author of the text and visuals. Assignment Code name Core concept File name example Portfolio entry 1 Task 1 Space/Body 1student_task1 Portfolio entry 2 Task 2 Emotions 1student_task2 Portfolio entry 3 Task 3 Objects 1student_task3 Final Essay Final How to design an experience? 1student_final Table 1 – Example of student assignment coding for research 3.5 Data collection The data collection phase of this project occurred in 2020, when the course was taught. The course's instructional design integrated narrative inquiry and creative portfolios as a method of exploring, gathering, and analyzing information. Using this secondary data aligns with a relational ontology and a transformative critical epistemology, where educators research their practice to transform the learning and research experience. The following subsections explain the data sample and art-based method used in the assignments analyzed within the present research. 3.5.1 Data sample In 2020, I was the lecturer and instructional designer of an Experience Design course for third-year students of the Visual Design Bachelor’s program at Fundación Universitaria Bellas Artes (FUBA). FUBA is a college in Medellin, Colombia, with an integral pedagogical model of research and creation. The formative proposal of FUBA focuses on active pedagogies founded on the Arts and Creation as instigators of reflective, independent, and creative thinking that foster a research attitude and integral 25 professional development (García Valencia & Astwood Campo, 2018). Currently, FUBA offers six undergraduate Bachelor’s programs: Visual Design, Plastic Arts, Photography, Advertising Communication, Music, and Interactive Design. At FUBA, a visual designer receives an excellent social and aesthetic training together with the skills of theoretical and practical work. This strengthens their communicative-visual capacities, the creative and conceptual processes that the contemporary designer requires in the four great categories of the image: fixed, mobile, environmental and digital. The program includes new technologies, intermediary narratives, and systemic thinking as basic foundations for the communicative dynamization of the social and business world (Fundación Universitaria Bellas Artes, n.d.). This thesis's course subject of analysis was officially called Taller V (Workshop V). It consisted of an instructional design for 96 hours of in-person instruction and 96 student-led independent hours, totaling 192 hours over 16 weeks. FUBA’s internal curriculum states the course's general information (Table 2). The instructional design I created consisted of a series of in-class experiential learning activities based on creative learning and arts-based pedagogies as a means to allow students to comprehend the course's core concepts (internal and external spaces, senses, emotions, objects, timing, perception, ritual, design, and context), followed by a required reading. See Appendix B for the course planning matrix. 26 Justification Space within the curriculum where the student assumes the intervention of spaces and environments based on the user experience and brand concept. Conceptual objective Analyze, understand and intervene in spaces based on the generation of experiences consistent with brand, user, context and experience concepts. Procedural objective Develop experiences based on brand, user and context analysis. Attitudinal objective Analytical and propositional Table 2 - Design V course general information 3.5.2 Data sampling scheme A purposive critical case sampling scheme (Collins et al., 2007) was selected to explore and reveal the changes in the dynamics of students’ worldviews during the learning experience. The sample consists of the assignments of ten students that attended the class. Students' ages varied between 19 to 23 years old, and they were at different stages of their undergraduate program, with the majority doing the full-time course load for the third year during Semester 1 of 2020 (January to May). Three core concepts of the course (space-body, emotions, and objects) and their creative responses for the creative portfolio were selected for this project. This selection was made for convenience, to make the research feasible during the research timeline. The boundaries of this research during the collection and analysis phases of the project are related to the availability of data and the importance of using direct assignments from a course rather than a research design experiment. In terms of answering the research questions, using data from a previous learning experience is an 27 ethical stance that speaks of the importance of past datasets and provides, at the same time, an avenue for future research. 3.5.3 Creative assignment descriptions Two course assignments are used as data in this research project: a creative portfolio and a final creative essay. After each in-person session, each student created a portfolio containing a multimodal (text and visual) arts-based entry. The visual aspect of the assignment is considered a participatory method with profound roots in constructivism (Ward & King, 2020). After the class discussion on the assigned reading and the lived experience during class, students were expected to write a short creative narrative text integrating their learnings in a cohesive form. The possibilities of creative portfolios inspire this assignment as a critical reflection on the relational experience of meaning-making (Chilton & Leavy, 2014). Furthermore, the portfolio combines text and visual data creation to enrich comprehension, knowledge creation, and meaning-making process during the learning experience. Figures 4, 5 and 6 present a sample of Julian M. Olivares’s portfolio, one of the students from the course. 28 Figure 4 - Julian M. Olivares's creative output for the concept of space-body Figure 5 - Julian M. Olivares's creative output for the concept of emotion 29 Figure 6 - Julian M. Olivares's creative output for the concept of objects The narrative writing prompt was the same for each concept. Students were expected to write a paragraph of minimum 200 words about the connections between the experiential activity that led to the visual output and their understanding of the assigned readings and class discussions. Table 3 shows the assigned reading for each of the concepts. CONCEPT ASSIGNED READING Author Pages Word count Spanish English Spanish English Espacio - Cuerpo Space - Body Construir, habitar, pensar Building Dwelling Thinking Martin Heidegger 150-163 6,673 Emociones Emotions El gobierno de las emociones The government of emotions Victoria Camps 23-30 2,131 Objectos Objects Estéticas del consumo Aesthetics of consumption Juan Diego Sanin Santamaria 14-19; 25-26; 31-47 5,916 Table 3 - Assigned readings by the theoretical concept 30 The final concept, experience design, was the overarching conceptual element of the instructional design, and it was integrated into a final creative project that consisted of two parts. During the first part, students worked in groups to create an online synchronous experience that elicited an emotion from the audience, incorporating all the individual concepts cohesively explored throughout the term. In the second part, students were asked to independently write a 1000-word minimum creative essay in response to the prompt: "How do you design an experience?" This final project allowed students to demonstrate their understanding of experience design in a meaningful and creative way. Each text written by students is considered a data point for a total of 40 data points (three small texts and one final essay per student). The texts from portfolio entrances ranged from 167 to 469 words, while final essays ranged from 1084 to 2840 words. Additionally, the assigned readings also served as data points. They are included in the analysis to provide a reference point for the new content students encounter during the learning experience. Analyzing the assigned readings in conjunction with the creative outputs allows for a comprehensive review of the student's learning experience and the effectiveness of the instructional design in introducing and reinforcing previous knowledge. 3.5.4 Students’ creative outputs The text assignments analyzed in this project are written responses that take the form of narrative inquiries as a response to particular writing prompts. Arts-based research methods that rely on written language while connecting with different literary 31 genres resemble some qualitative approaches and have had a central place in research in the social sciences (Leavy, 2017). Patricia Leavy explains how researchers have used narrative to tell their own or others’ stories, given the potential of writing to connect, reflect, and convey the complexity of the human experience. These inquiry methods are narratives that seek to express and comprehend part of one’s life experience, connecting to the fundamental nature of storytelling (Leavy, 2020). Stories, as epiphanies, weave narratives that give meaning to the multiplicities and complexities of our lives (Denzin, 2001). Narrative inquiry is considered a type of narrative writing that relies on storytelling and experience. It differs from fiction because it involves accessing and representing multiple points of view while constructing knowledge through reflexive, participatory, and aesthetic processes. The use of narrative inquiry in the form of short stories embeds the data insights into the participants' memories as part of a collective consciousness that emerges as the creative endeavour is fueled and guided by self-expressions and dialogues (Armitage & Ramsay, 2020). There is an intramodality when using mixed media arrangements that facilitates self-reflection and sense-making. This embeds this type of inquiry approach in a Freirean participatory research framework (Giatti, 2019) for the classroom, where experiences are shared in a safe space. 3.6 Quantitative analysis method This research used text analysis to study the narrative sections of the students’ creative portfolios and the final essay via data visualizations and theme extraction. The visual components of the portfolio are regarded as an integral part of the space of 32 critical reflection (Chilton & Leavy, 2014). They represent the initial creative output sparked by the initial students’ comprehension. These visuals, in the forms of drawings or photos taken, represent uniquely created perspectives (Leavy, 2020) of the students’ worldviews regarding the concepts subject to study. Furthermore, for this research, the images support the textual accounts contained in the narrative text rather than having meaning in and of themselves, as this would require the participants’ interpretations (Ward & Shortt, 2013). Recognizing the visual part of the creative portfolios in this way facilitates the preservation of the participants’ voices. 3.6.1 Text analysis as a method This project uses two digital research tools for text analysis to secure validity (Meaning Extraction Helper and Voyant Tools) and to explore meaning from semiotic resources from the learning experience as the space for the manifestation of creative thinking. Text analysis methods are based on the notion that a person’s linguistic pattern is like a fingerprint (R. L. Boyd, 2017). This characterization of a person’s linguistic patterns is possible because of the underlying psychology these patterns reflect by exhibiting relatively static trends over time. Since a worldview is a collection of thoughts, behaviours, and emotions indicative of a person across time and situations (Gabora, 2018), using these tools opens the possibility of uncovering parts of the students’ worldviews by analyzing their written creative outputs. Furthermore, the selected tools facilitate text analysis, topic modelling, language exploration, and visualization, which facilitate the creation of visualizations of the learning experience, meaning-making process, and worldview dynamics. Also, the 33 research tools’ affordances ensure that possible loss of meaning imposed by language translation is avoided, since assignments were written in Spanish. For this, the digital tools have embedded stop lists, lemmatizations (grouping together different forms of the same word), and integrated conversions that can be set to the text's original language. In addition, two digital tools are proposed to achieve concurrent validity by facilitating the review of overlaps between the themes extracted by each tool and confirming the accuracy of identified themes (Taraban et al., 2020). The interactions between the visualizations and extracted themes facilitate triangulation, verification, and open the possibility of a) obtaining convergence or corroboration in the results; b) eliminating and minimizing unreliable key alternatives that can be obtained from the data; and c) elucidating divergent aspects of the phenomenon of study (Tashakkori & Teddlie, 2003). Specifically, using both tools promote the enrichment of semantic analysis, which is fundamental when meaning-making is evaluated using text analysis tools. 3.6.1.1 Voyant Tools Voyant Tools (https://voyant-tools.org/) was used to complete the analysis of the creative texts from students since it allows the user to read, find, analyze, and visualize digital texts (Posthumus & Sinclair, 2014; Sinclair & Rockwell, 2016). This tool considers corpus a fluid concept, and meaning will depend on how the researchers treat the data. The tool can explore and assist interpretative practices, such as noticing details that can lead to constructing compelling interpretations. Since the meaning extracted through 34 Voyant Tools depends on the considerations about the corpus, the reading and analysis is conducted by student (considered the author) and by assignment. Voyant Tools presents a summary on the main interface as an output that reflects the most frequent words in the corpus. At this point, translingual problems are checked, and the stop list and data are updated accordingly. One main advantage of the tool is that it allows the researcher to navigate between macro (distant) and micro (close) views of a text by counting, correlating, and reconfiguring sequences of words. Exploring these tool features supports the creation of visualizations reflecting the text analysis. The visualizations included in this research are Cirrus (relative frequency of terms), Trends (line graphs depicting the distribution of word’s occurrence across a corpus), Bubblelines (visualizations of frequency and distribution of terms in a corpus), Mandala (conceptual visualization that shows the relationship between terms and documents), StreamGraph (visualization of the change of the frequency of words in a corpus) and TermsRadio (visualization of the change of the frequency of words in a corpus). 3.6.1.2 Meaning Extraction Helper The Meaning Extraction Helper (MEH) is a software package created by Ryan L. Boyd to extract themes from text files (https://www.ryanboyd.io/software/meh/). The foundation for this tool is the Meaning Extraction Method (MEM) and the implications of language use regarding our interests, associations, and the attributions we make (R. L. Boyd, 2017; Chung & Pennebaker, 2008; Markowitz, 2021; Taraban et al., 2020). For MEM, from a personality perspective, word factors reflect how people structure their 35 worlds in a more inductive or bottom-up manner that differs from traditional approaches to understanding personality. The language analytic strategy assumes that groups of words naturally co-occur in meaningful ways, congruent with research on latent semantic analysis, computational modelling of semantic spaces, and other explorations of natural language patterns (Worth, 2023). When combined with statistical techniques, patterns in language and relationships with meaningful psychological constructs can be extracted. It has been proposed that the MEM can be used for cross-cultural psychology since language strongly affects how we see the world and is culturally dependent (Posthumus & Sinclair, 2014). This is highly relevant to the present research since the data is written in Spanish. Hence, data can be analyzed in the original language without translating, avoiding changing and losing the original meaning. Finally, Posthumus and Sinclair believe the technique’s use can be expanded to explore other diverse types of text corpora while reducing the amount of time and labour required in traditional qualitative inquiries, which I believe is congruent with ethical educational inquiries and critical digital humanities research such as the one proposed in this project. The tool outputs included in this research analysis are word frequency lists and the binary matrix of word occurrences used on the subsequent Principal Component Analysis (PCA) using SSPS. Through the analysis of these outputs, common emergent themes are analyzed by recognizing high-frequency concepts. 36 3.6.2. Data processing An extra layer of data mediation was required due to the experimental proposal of this research and the choice of using students’ assignments not specifically created for the research project. Assignments were submitted in different formats, therefore needing to be processed before uploaded into the digital analysis environment. In particular, the creative portfolio instructions included creating an experience for the portfolio itself. Since students were from a visual design program, the aesthetic appearance of assignments was an important assessment criterion. This course started at the end of January 2020, and by March, it went from in-person to online synchronous learning due to the pandemic. This impacted the format of the creative portfolios, so they were submitted as PDF files. Some of the texts were handwritten, as this was allowed. Some students scanned their handwritten texts and integrated them with the visual parts of their assignment, while others were created digitally. Part of the research processing time was dedicated to transferring and transcribing, when required, the creative outputs into Word documents and .txt files. No corrections to texts’ spelling mistakes were made. 3.7 Limitations of the research Like any other arts-based inquiry, this research project has certain limitations that must be acknowledged. These limitations include the narrative's perspective, the data sample's limited size, and the need for ongoing methodological reflection. Addressing these limitations secures the valuable insights this research project offers into the relationship between creative learning and meaning making. This research focused on a 37 shared lived experience, as depicted through the narratives of my students’ assignments and my memories. Understanding a worldview is a contextual experience that requires a shared interpretation of meanings. The findings of this research result from a collaboration facilitated by a digital tool to interpret the clues in the texts related to the students’ meaning-making processes. This story of the potential of digital tools as part of the creative learning environment is a story of potentiality, as defined by Dr. Gabora (2017a). Potentiality refers to the lack of knowledge about how an idea will develop and the potential for various outcomes. In other words, a state of potentiality refers to the possibility of manifestation for an unborn idea, with different outcomes representing different aspects of the potentiality. To attend these limitations, detailed descriptions of the art-based research philosophical foundations and methods are included to serve as a stance to highlight the ethical research’s social significance and aesthetic power. By clarifying the philosophical foundations and my positionality, I can provide the necessary background for reflection and support for a critical analysis of the findings. Further, the careful choices of methods guide my quest for understanding deeper layers of meaning and reduce the distance between the students and myself when analyzing their texts removed from the learning experience. In addition, in a critical digital humanities project such as this, it is crucial to make explicit research assumptions and normative claims (Neilson et al., 2018). Although the well-bounded data set is based on the direct use of creative products from the learning experience (Kaplan, 2015) rather than research-specific prompts, the expected generalizations and meta-inferences can only be considered analytical or case-by-case 38 transfers (Collins et al., 2007). The small size of the samples is also a limitation, therefore in this case the small dataset is used for visualizations and testing the relationship between inputs and outputs, following similar digital humanities research experiences (Van Den Berg et al., 2018). Making small datasets more accessible contributes to linking datasets for diverse data analysis and more comprehensive research (Kitchin & Lauriault, 2015). 3.8 Qualitative analysis method For this project, I conducted two qualitative analyses. First, I analyzed the quantitative results obtained from the text analysis tools by creating narratives about students meaning making on course concepts. The second qualitative analysis integrated the quantitative and qualitative results and my arts-based inspired multimodal academic journals. The goal was to build an image, at best kaleidoscopic, that reconstructed the story of the relationship between the students and me as an educator and researcher. The discussion and final phase of the research is the space where the connections were made. In this section, I discuss the circumstances and tensions of the pedagogical research practice while mapping the dynamics of worldviews in creative assignments and their potential for developing future creative formative experiences. For this final chapter of my thesis, I adopt a narrative inquiry method following D. Jean Clandinin’s pragmatic approach of viewing knowledge as situated in relationships and community (2019). This reflects my commitment to the five interrelated dimensions of relational ethics of narrative inquiry (Clandinin et al., 2018). Firstly, I engage with world travelling through imagination and playfulness by inviting the reader into my world 39 and being open about my vulnerability and the ambiguity surrounding this inquiry. Secondly, I listen carefully to my memories to uncover what is being silent and what kinds of narrative context create the experiences lived in the learning spaces upon which I critically reflect. Thirdly, I find meaning in my process by drawing inspiration from my own experiences and reflecting on the circumstances of tension and my choices, letting these stories guide me into imagining a possible future. Fourthly, I embrace the uncertainty of the process, as this is a story about a relationship told only from one side, and I pay attention and care when telling the story of my students. Finally, I recognize the intimate connection between my worldview with that of my students as lived embodiments of “knowledge that are cultural, social, familial, and institutional narratives that we have lived within” (Clandinin, 2019, p. 303), which shape who we are and who we can become. 3.9 Summary This research methodology is a guiding instrument for the ethical use of text analysis tools that resulted in a critical reflection about its integration in instructional design practices. It represents a quest to carefully bring out conceptualization from students’ creative outputs about the nature of the meaning making of course concepts (space-body, emotions, objects, and experience design). The proposed arts-based methodology and mixed method multimodal design attend to the challenges of preserving the voice of participants and small data sets. The affordances of the tools let the meaning emerge from the text themselves, by revealing through quantitative 40 analysis the relationships between word use. The narrative inquiry analysis proposed revealed the meaning making and emergence of worldviews in the form of stories about words patterns and trends. 41 Chapter 4: Results The critical use of the interaction between the researcher and the digital tools leads to many interpretations. These results represent my selections of data visualizations and narratives that lead to a better understanding of the creative learning experience. These visualizations and narratives address two key questions of this research project. The first research question, regarding visualizations of the learning experience, is answered in this chapter by critically reflecting on the individual affordances of text analysis tools (Voyant Tools and Meaning Extraction Helper) and what they facilitate based on usability and limitations. To address the second research question regarding what the data reveals about the students’ meaning making and worldview dynamics, I compare the results by interpreting data narratives. This analysis aims to show how these digital tools represent students engaging with and making sense of new concepts by qualitatively describing the quantitative findings. These findings build upon previous research about how worldviews are emergent, self-organizing, and self-mending. The outcomes of these processes manifest through various forms of creative expression (Gabora, 2018) and demonstrate how people use patterns and constellations of words to express themselves by using language in meaningful clusters that represent windows into their motivations, preoccupations, and emotional states (Boyd, 2017). 42 4.1 Quantitative analysis To respond to the research question regarding visualizations of the learning experience, the following section summarizes the analysis of the quantitative results from the text analysis of creative writing assignments. To describe the affordances of Voyant Tools and MEH, a critical reflection on the possibilities of the tools to reveal students’ meaning-making processes and worldview dynamics is included. 4.1.1 Voyant Tools: Analysis environment for digital texts The environment of Voyant allows uploading corpora in Word or txt files. I explored both options. Only the Word files worked in the online environment by recognizing the accents, which are an integral part of the Spanish written language. The initial analysis consisted of uploading the assigned readings individually and creating different configurations of the data and visualizations to understand the capabilities and usability of the tool. I used this analysis to fine-tune the Spanish stop list of the program since it was not comprehensive enough, and the data returned significant amounts of function words as frequent words even when activated. This issue generates a lot of noise within the data. A more comprehensive stop list with 608 words was added to the tool to refine the result outputs.1 While dozens of different configurations of data visualizations are available, this project focused on a combination of usability options that seek to bring depth and 1 https://github.com/Alir3z4/stop-words/blob/master/spanish.txt 43 richness to the interpretations for revealing meaning-making and worldview dynamics on course concepts. I did not include links to the corpus because the work’s use of Voyant Tools was ephemeral. The corpus is subject to deletion after 30 days of inactivity, which highlights this transitory nature of use. This ephemeral aspect adds a layer of complexity to the analysis and underscores the importance of preserving and safeguarding digital data in educational research. 4.1.1.1 Visualizing the meaning-making process This tool offers an array of skins that can support a data-driven visualization of the meaning-making process by rearranging and displaying in different forms what it interprets as patterns and trends within the data (Digital Scholarship Lab Ball State University, 2018; Sinclair & Rockwell, 2016). This part of the research journey focuses on identifying clues about how the digital environment allows one to observe the enrichment of the experience with information (Brown, 2011). The first step was to consider all creative outputs related to the same concept as a corpus. Regarding a global view, Figure 7 - Initial Voyant Tools Screen per concept corpora analysis shows a summary of possible views that facilitate analyzing the meaning-making process by observing differences and similarities in word patterns between text assignments. The initial skins conditions were set to show the 20 most frequent terms per text (see Part 1 of Figure 7). Next, different possibilities for pattern detection of relationships between words were selected. Parts 2, 3, and 4 of Figure 7 show the selection of skins for the initial interface – Cirrus, Trends, and Bubblelines – that provided different possibilities to understand the relationships shown by the tool. 44 Figure 7 - Initial Voyant Tools Screen per concept corpora comparison 45 The selected skins provide an initial distant reading and a broader view of the relationality of the meaning-making process. Cirrus, the classic word cloud, gives a first glance at the relative frequency of terms. The summary sections show the most frequent terms per assignment and the number of occurrences. From these two sections, it is possible to see how concepts start to expand. For example, the idea of emotions was addressed by students, with feelings, to feel, people, we feel, body, situations, world, space, life, government, I feel, reactions, allowing, moral, and generate. The trends view shows correlations by plotting the distribution of word occurrences across the corpus. When considering multiple texts such as this research project, the x-axis represents the students’ assignments and the y-axis the relative frequency of words. Finally, the Bubblelines view shows words defined in circles along a horizontal line representing the student’s text. The circle's size depicts the word's frequency and location in the text. Both views facilitate observing a representation of how closely located terms are within the text. Figure 7 also includes three more skins explored to complement the distant reading: Scatter Plot, representing the Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Mandala, and StreamGraph. The intention behind these visualizations is the same, using the frequency of words as translators of the interactions occurring with the tool. The PCA (Part 5, Figure 7) facilitates seeing each creative output as a dimension, and each word is a data point. The mandala visualizations (Part 6, Figure 7) show the relationships of the most frequent terms in the corpus. Words are located in the circle's periphery, while students’ texts are at the center of the space. The relative frequency determines the 46 location of the text. The last visualization included is the result of using the StreamGraph skin (Part 7, Figure 7). In this view, when the chronological order of documents is meaningful, the line in the graph is coloured according to the word it represents. See Appendix C, D, E, and F for individual visualizations per creative outputs per concept. The representation included here is a deliberate depiction of students’ shorter creative texts and final essays, presented together as the inseparable elements of a collective learning experience. When observing a process, it is essential to understand the inputs while considering what is possible to observe from one’s position as a researcher of the learning experience. One possibility to contextualize the data visualizations is to follow the relationships between the frequency of words in the assignments against the most frequent words in the assigned readings. Table 4 - Word frequency in assigned readings – shows the most common terms and their frequency per reading. For space/body creative assignments, the more frequent words were: cuerpo, habitamos, hablar, espacio, mapa (body, inhabit, speak, space, map). For emotion: emociones, sentimientos, sentir, persona, forma (emotions, feelings, to feel, person, form). Regarding objects: objetos, objeto, museo, experiencia, persona (objects, object, museum, experience, person). Finally, the most frequent words for the final essay were: experiencia, personas, cuerpo, forma, emociones (experience, people, body, form, emotions). These terms can then be analyzed in relation to the most frequent words on the assigned reading, intentionally excluding the main categories (emotion, space, object) – such as build, bridge, essence, feelings, desire, person, dimension, function, 47 and sense – and trace the use of these words in the visualizations to identify concept dynamics in creative outputs. One challenge with the tool's usability is the lack of lemmatization, which influences the results. Table 4 shows 102 occurrences for the word objeto (object) and 42 for objetos (objects), which should be considered the same central concept rather than two separate ones. In this project, one of the potentials of the tools evaluated is to avoid adding an extra layer of labour on the educator. This issue is a potential source of tension when integrating the tools in the classroom. Nonetheless, the results of this analysis demonstrate the potential of the interface to support the exploration of complex questions about how we think and what we create as a result. By offering a glimpse into the space surrounding the terms used by students to describe their connections to the guiding concepts of the learning experience, the interface provides valuable insights into how students engage with and make sense of new ideas. In this case, the intentionality of the research questions guides the decision-making process about what visualizations allow, asking new and nuanced questions about the learning process. 4.1.1.2. Student worldview dynamics Voyant Tools has a visualization skin called TermsRadio, which intends to depict a change in the frequency of words when chronological order is important (Sinclair & Rockwell, 2016). While the visualizations produced by the interface are snapshots of a moment in time outside the context of the learning experience, they hold the potential for insights into the dynamic development of students' worldviews. The relationships between terms demonstrate the connections students made when they engaged with 48 new concepts and ideas as the course progressed. Conceptual interpretation is an essential part of the cognitive processes involved in constructing and evolving worldviews. Building, Dwelling, Thinking (6,673 words) The government of emotions (2,131 words) Aesthetics of consumption (1,043 words) Spanish English Freq. Spanish English Freq. Spanish English Freq. habitar inhabit 91 emociones emotions 34 objeto object 102 construir build 75 creencias beliefs 12 objetos objects 42 puente bridge 53 sentimientos feelings 11 dimensión dimension 28 esencia essence 46 deseo desire 10 función function 25 espacio space 44 persona person 8 sentido sense 24 mortales mortals 37 emoción emotion 8 forma form 22 hombre man 30 deseos wishes 8 significados meanings 20 cuaternidad quaternity 30 teoría theory 7 exprimidor squeezer 18 tierra Earth 29 razón reason 7 personas people 17 lugares places 26 forma form 6 consumo consumption 16 espacios spaces 23 ética ethics 6 producción production 15 palabra word 22 creencia belief 5 material material 15 cosa things 21 afectos affections 5 procesos processes 14 significa meaning 19 spinoza spinoza 4 vista sight 13 medida extent 19 racional rational 4 cultura culture 13 cuidar look after 19 punto point 4 estructura structure 12 cielo sky 18 principio beginning 4 vida life 11 pensar think 16 pasiones passions 4 útil Useful 11 divinos divine 16 mente mind 4 representa represents 11 construcciones buildings 16 contrario contrary 4 funcional functional 11 Table 4 - Word frequency in assigned readings Figure 8 – Voyant Tools TermsRadio Visualization per concept – represents the streams of associations that emerge and show self-organizing patterns in students’ creative outputs (See Appendixes G, H, I, and J for individual images per concept). 49 These representations of the fluidity in which concepts are connected, based on individual language patterns, highlight the dynamic nature of learning and how students construct meaning. Visualization sheds light on the relationships between language, thought, and experience, demonstrating how our experiences and perceptions of the world shape language shapes. Another interesting configuration of analysis using this skin is the one resulting from uploading and treating the creative outputs of each student (author) as a corpus. Figures 9 and 10 show examples of the emergence and self-organizing nature of the student’s conceptual network while immersed in the creative writing task. The left sides of the graphs represent the space around the most frequent terms used during the final essay, when connections between all the individual conceptual elements are expected, which might be represented by the area being more densely populated with words. The words represented in these visualizations inhabit a relational area with other terms. This relation is part of the subsequent qualitative inquiry, where I interpret categories from the text. For example, I analyzed verbs relating to actions connected to a concept. Figure 11 contains the assigned readings’ TermsRadio visualization, which facilitates contextualizing the analysis of students’ worldview dynamics on the external elements that act as catalysts for the worldview transformation processes. 50 Figure 8 - Voyant Tools TermsRadio visualization per concept 51 Figure 9 - Voyant Tools TermsRadio Visualization for student 1 corpus 52 Figure 10 - Voyant Tools TermsRadio Visualization for student 5 corpus 53 Figure 11 - Voyant Tools TermsRadio Visualization for assigned readings 54 4.1.2 Meaning Extraction Helper: A program to help language exploration MEH language exploration is founded on a bottom-up approach to text analysis. This approach to qualitative research is not the traditional approach of processing the data by seeking to find a set of pre-configured categories, but rather lets the data tell us what texts share the same words. The frequency of words, contrary to the approach of Voyant Tools, is not the guiding feature of this analysis; we are looking for features and central themes in the nature of language in the texts (R. Boyd, 2019). Despite the activation of the stop lists, lemmatization, and conversion included in the software, data processing is affected by spelling and unrecognized characters. The internal lemmatization failed to recognize at times the the data correctly, sometimes due to errors in spelling. The digital tool presented another issue when processing accented words in the text. It was related to the tool reading the accent as a space and dividing the word into two different parts that became meaningless data points as they did not represent actual words. I performed the data analysis without making further corrections to understand the response in these cases, since this research process intends to avoid adding extra labour to educators when following what is happening during the learning experience. I included a sample of the frequency list produced by the software in Table 5 - MEH word list ranked by frequency. When reviewing the column “ObservationPct,” which indicates the observation percentage of each document containing each word, issues with the automatic lemmatizations arose. This was resolved by sorting the excel file exported by MEH to understand better the behaviour of words in the corpora and which words should be accounted for as one concept. For example, for the word emoción (emotion), which is a 55 central concept for the class, there were only 106 occurrences; nonetheless, there were seven different words that could belong to the same category with a total of 142 occurrences (Table 6 - MEH word count concept Emotion). Token Frequency Docs_With_Token ObservationPct � 1887 40 100 r 491 40 100 unir 300 38 95 parar 226 33 82.5 segundo 220 35 87.5 experiencia 200 25 62.5 personar 142 27 67.5 sentir 142 27 67.5 habitar 130 24 60 objetar 120 21 52.5 cuerpo 107 25 62.5 emoción 106 20 50 espaciar 101 21 52.5 formar 98 26 65 est 83 29 72.5 disar 82 12 30 coser 74 25 62.5 pensar 72 24 60 z 70 20 50 Table 5 - MEH word list ranked by frequency These words refer to emotions as a central category in more nuanced forms. One factor, for example, grouped the following terms: fear, sadness, relation, pain, dimension, eternal, nostalgia, happening, mitigate, conflict, and destroy. A second factor revealed a category interpreted as related to dynamics surrounding the concept of objects. The words contained in that factor are: peculiarity, person, object, die, 56 decorative, yield, worship, sign, equip, transcend, and appreciated. Action words compile another interesting aspect, such as: reinterpret, expand, possession, effective, name, provide, attribute, old, exists, distinguish, gradual, texture, composition, interaction, predominate, adapt, formulate, act, and communicative. Token Frequency Docs_With_Token ObservationPct emoci 17 12 30 emocion 1 1 2.5 emoción 106 20 50 emocional 8 6 15 emocionante 4 2 5 emocionar 5 4 10 emotivar 1 1 2.5 Table 6 - MEH word count concept Emotion 4.2 Securing validity From these results, it is possible to see how using both text analysis tools for triangulation and verification facilitates a) obtaining convergence or corroboration in the results; b) eliminating and minimizing unreliable key alternatives from the data; and c) elucidating divergent aspects of the phenomenon of study (Tashakkori & Teddlie, 2003). Taraban et al. (2020) used a similar process to review overlaps between the themes extracted by their analysis to confirm the accuracy of identified themes when using text analysis tools. In this case, the possibilities of seeing patterns in data visualization, in combination with text categories produced by MEH, helped reveal a more nuanced understanding of concepts. These convergences between the text analysis outputs 57 represent a space where the enriched experience of language use and combinations makes sense. 4.3 Qualitative analysis of quantitative results It is important to note that the narratives about worldview dynamics and meaning-making processes from the visualizations and themes produced by the text analysis tools can only provide a limited perspective on the student’s learning of the course's core concepts. The narratives included in this analysis speak of concept relationships in word frequencies and prominence of specific factors. While analyzing the data, the focus is on understanding what course concepts consistently appear in low and high frequency, which can indicate intentions of understanding the concept in terms of connections with previous and new information. The visualizations and coding produced by the text analysis tools are just mediums to support the analysis of the creative text. They should not be considered as the sole basis for making conclusions about the student’s learning process, since it is also essential to consider the context, the students, and the writing task when interpreting the results as total views of the meaning-making process. 4.3.1 Concept space/body The most frequent words in this narrative include body, inhabit, space, and map. A closer view of frequency shows that the learning experience supported students to see connections between these main derivatives of the concept of space-body. This narrative is an active story, spoken through verbs such as: built, think, speak, we build, 58 experiences, and feeling. There are also hints of emotions in these words, such as feel, existence, and life. There is also a notion of shape and time (form, measure and present). In Figure 8 there is a story about a body that inhabits a space that we built, represented in blue (body), purple (inhabit), and green (we inhabit) lines. There are also hints of more nuanced views on what that body in transit in space is doing. There is a space that gives meaning to memory through the senses (spaces, inhabit, meaning, sight, touch, occupy, medium). There is a map of time that explains how we occupy the space (map, times, how, closer, occupy). There is an existence that we think about in our texts (maps, spaces, think, inhabit, times, meaning, sight, thinking). There is a story about a collective experience (we occupy, we inhabit, we build). 4.3.2 Concept emotion One learning objective included in the instructional design is to learn how to instigate emotions and to acquire more language to speak about the spectrum of emotions humans can feel. The senses make an entrance through adjectives that talk about temperature and body movements. The story about emotions centers on the concepts of experience, people, bodies, shapes, and emotions. Experience is the most frequent word and is within the 20 most frequent words, connecting to words such as process, design, design, feel, medium, and message. The assigned reading for this concept does not include these terms. Hence, these words speak of the connections students were making with their visual design educational context. The stories from Figure 8 speak of a world (situations, spaces, objects) where people react and feel (sad, 59 life, I feel, vision, judgment, feelings, morals). There is a story about people that live emotions to build character (body, people, life, emotion, character, punto, object, context, feelings, hand). There is also one about how bodies feel to demonstrate what is important (form, body, feel, comprehend, rest, hand, important). There is a MEH theme that brings in more nuanced emotional words, such as tranquility, negative, causing, anger, happiness, and rest. The other theme related to emotions seems to transit similar opposite emotional words: probable, flourish, grow, feeling, hate, happiness, warmth, in love, confused, beat, note, conduct, blush, involuntary, shake, impossible, hurt, anger, temperature, burn, cold, affirmation, highlight. 4.3.3 Concept objects “I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups and asked if they found it scary. They answered: ‘why be scared of a hat?’ But my drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant ” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (pag. 8) The central element of this story is intentional appreciation. This story is about a special disposition of elements portrayed for feedback (appreciation, intentional, disposition, element, publish, special, portray, feedback). From this story, one can speculate that the visit to the virtual museum permeates the student’s worldview, searching for connections to attach itself to and enriching the meaning-making process. The mandala visualization tells a story about a person that gives meaning to the 60 existence of objects (meaning(s), object(s), museum, experience, person, shape, existence). It is a story about colour, earth, memories, history, and emotions that are felt by someone and that give life to meanings (shape, steps, principal, need, earth, footprints, shapes, meanings, spaces, inhabit, process, lives, stories, continuation, existence, use, text, someone, medium, person). There is a story about an existence that acquires meaning in history, culture, and relationship (existence, meaning, consumption, life, sense, history, culture, meaning, relationship, and functions). The function of objects is emerging in an interwoven mesh with the previously created stories about the role of emotions. 4.3.4 Course central concept: Experience design A story about context can be read from the MEH factor containing the words semester, career, creative, research, intense, and professor. This story speaks of the intimate nature and intensity of the relationships between the educator and the students when they share the learning experience. When designing an experience, I expect students to reflect critically on their role with the customer and user. The expectation is that students comprehend the impacts their design decisions have in terms of the memorability of the experience. Another story told by MEH is about the relationship between prototyping to satisfy the participant by improving, accepting, and solving needs (refine, successful, to provoke, here, plan, prototype, fail, satisfy, competitor, improve, accept, solution, consumer, scent). From the word frequency, the story is plain and straightforward. A person lives an experience with their body that shapes an emotion (experience, people, body, shape, 61 and emotions). The mandala adds process, design, and space ideas to the story. Those frequent words also talk about a message, a medium to use important ideas to make you feel, think, and create. These are stories where the design is the medium for ideas to generate emotions (idea, emotions, design, medium, generate, achieve). There is also a story about objects designed for people to make them think (process, think, design, fair, design, objects, start, people, arts, beauty). The MEH themes also tell a story about a structure to convey an important message with transformational power (structure, essential, flow, expose, reflection, immediately, include, advance, reveal, lucky, involve, contain, spiritual, compose, matter, emerge, conclusions, interactions). There is a story about how to design an experience by activating the senses and taking measured conceptual risks (order, to sound, image, stand, fair, clarify, research, background, risk, conceptual, event, explore, trespass, divide, inform, schedule). 4.4 Qualitative results personal academic narratives I included in Appendiz K1 to K6 my academic journals created using an arts-based multimodal narrative inquiry process. These personal creative outputs speak about who I am as an educator, researcher, and student. They embody my critical reflections, worldview, and catalysis moments about the learning and research experience. I included them as a source of inspiration for the concluding narratives of the thesis to build an image, at best kaleidoscopic, about the educational research experience from my teaching voice. 62 The auto-ethnographic process revealed the circumstances and tensions of the pedagogical research practice I encountered. By looking back into my practice and searching for clues to create new meanings and more nuanced descriptions of a particular cultural experience (Adams et al., 2021). This process allowed me to delve into the lived experience and reflect on my learnings through the essential part of the educational experience: reflecting on our thinking and learning processes – that strange, beautiful, emotional, and sometimes even painful thing called metacognition. As Jones et al. (Jones et al., 2016, p. 23) say: “autoethnography creates a space for a turn, a change, a reconsideration of how we think, how we do research and relationships and how we live.” 4.5 Summary These research results showed how the affordances of the text analysis tools facilitate initial distant and broader views of the conceptual relationality inherent to meaning making. The trends show correlations and distributions of word occurrences by representing how closely located terms are in the texts, which facilitates identifying concept dynamics. I observed the connections with guiding concepts coming from the engagement with assigned readings by using them as data points. Further, I depicted changes in chronological order, which prove to have a potential for understanding the dynamics of worldview during the course. There are larger clusters of words in the visualizations of students’ final essays, which is congruent with theories that recognize conceptual interpretation as essential for constructing and evolving worldviews. 63 The narratives’ interpretations present an active story of the web of connections being catalyzed by the instructional design of the creative learning experience. They speak of active bodies that inhabit spaces with the possibility to be built, felt, transited, and occupied. These spaces have shape, time, and the possibility of sparking emotion. There are narratives about more nuanced conceptions of emotions and the intimate relationship with the senses. Further, the relationship between emotions and the design process is personal, builds character, and demonstrates a spectrum of feelings. There is also a story of objects that have functions and that acquire meaning in history, culture, and relationships. And finally, there is a complex story about designing an experience with a customer in mind that seeks to have a transformational power, while involving conceptual risks and activating the senses. These results show that using these text analysis tools can be a powerful means for exploring language and uncovering insights that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. The integration with the personal journals guided the next chapter. 64 Chapter 5: Conclusion The previous results chapter describes the mixed-methods design that focused on exploring the meaning-making processes and worldview dynamics in creative writing assignments. The digital text analysis tools’ affordances provided valuable insights into the behaviour of words in corpora and identification and grouping of words belonging to the same category or concept. The combination of text categories produced by MEH and data visualization in Voyant Tools revealed more nuanced understandings of concepts. These research results inspire this chapter that concludes with my critical reflections to answer the third research question about how digital humanities inquiries can support ethical research and learning processes.2 My conclusions, in the form of three narratives, speak about pedagogical tensions and ethical strategies to attend to them. I also propose opportunities for integrating digital research tools for hybrid creative learning experiences. In the first narrative, “Learning in the digital context,” I discuss possibilities for re-imagining the learning space from a critical digital humanities perspective to promote student agency. This narrative looks at expanding the worldview of students' meaning-making processes in the digital context through the lens of digital audiences. I propose a critical evaluation of the possibility of integrating meanings to redefine the learning 2 In addition to the data analysis, this chapter draws inspiration from my student, educator, and researcher diary entries from the year 2020. These multimodal arts-based reflections, included in Appendix K, convey what these years of research represent for me and the emergence of new worldviews as an educator and researcher. 65 experience's main components from a digital perspective. The reflection focuses on understanding students as digital audiences and how they cope with digital media's pervasive and intrusive role in their lives. I propose that by activating active coping strategies, students can transform their everyday lives, redefine their practices and choices, and, in the process, initiate social transformation. The second narrative, “Digital tools for understanding meaning-making,” summarizes my critical reflection on the ethical implications when using data visualization and text analysis tools as objects to access comprehension during the creative learning experience. This research explores the intersection between digital technologies and learning experiences, reflecting on the implications of digital justice and ethical considerations for arts-based research and meaning-making spaces. I discuss how digital technologies can mediate knowledge production when they are active processes. I highlight the importance of understanding the creation of tools as they shape intellectual practices and the need for critical reflection on the power dynamics involved in their use context. I critically reflect on the importance of ethical considerations in the interaction of meaning-making, paying attention to the circumstances of knowledge production from design to framing materials, data management, and forms of labour. The final narrative, “Hybrid creative learning experience design,” is about values and instructional design elements put into practice for creating critical, emotional, and creative learning experiences. This narrative presents a design for a hybrid creative learning experience as a practical approach to show the potential to improve meaningful learning processes and transform worldviews in the digital context. It highlights how to 66 include self-awareness, self-management, critical reflection, emotional activation, and the use of language to identify worldviews and their manifestations for the embodiment of invisible connections in the learning process. 5.1 Learning in the digital context3 The students’ meaning-making processes, including data visualization and narratives in the results section (Figure 8 and Figure 9) show the increase in connections of words during students' final essays, supporting the idea of worldviews becoming more refined and densely populated by concepts and relationships when integrating new ideas. These data results remind me of the importance of sparking emotions and creating instructional designs that include digital tools that catalyze worldview transformations. One possibility comes from Manovich’s (2019) idea of a new language, of seeing people in the language of data. Even though this approach can be problematic, there is an appeal to connect the language of the digital context with the language of the classroom. Understanding software as a new cultural object of analysis brings the concept of an information model to the forefront. The information model includes elements such as information, data, interface, bandwidth, stream, storage, rip, and compress, all of which are part of a rational approach. These information behaviours 3 This story is about me, an interdisciplinary scholar, expanding my worldview by re-imagining meanings whilst standing at the corner of the digital humanities and looking back into my lived space in education in order to project and connect shared meanings, in a quest to continually open new possible ways of learning. See Appendix K1, K2 and K3 for corresponding diary entries. 67 have become integral components of individual identity and serve as tactics for survival in an information society. As a result, the medium’s representational capacities shift, placing greater emphasis on the content rather than the user. The software used to share a message is a key component of this new cultural object of analysis. This can often privilege a focus on the tools over the users. Rewriting this dialogic story under the lens of this research experience allows me to place education at the center of the triad between technology, society, and culture. Further, it leads to a critical reflection on designing ethical spaces for learning in the digital context. The four main elements of a meaningful learning experience are the foundation of this reflection: (1) a person/student; (2) an interaction; (3) a context; and (4) a myriad of results primarily out of our control as educators. I argue that it is possible to critically evaluate the possibility of the integration of meanings to redefine these components from a digital humanities perspective. The learning experience in the digital context is an interaction designed by the educators, for the students, through their choice of content and tools used for meaning-making. This interaction is a relational mediation that profoundly impacts students and can result in new forms of digital expression and significant learning experiences. Nevertheless, extending meanings from one context to another is filled with tensions that arise from the frameworks from which they are approached. As a digital humanities researcher and educator, this conceptualization is of significant interest to me, as it speaks of the role of digital technology in the realms of culture, self-creation, and development. For that, I propose understanding students as digital audiences, learning 68 interactions as digital mediation processes created by a digital media producer, and context determined by the digital technologies used. 5.1.1 Understanding students as digital audiences Education intends for students to negotiate and create meaning-making practices, which become integral to shaping their identities. As the boundaries of the learning space blur, the underlying power struggles within education affect students and digital audiences, resulting in similar behaviours. From a digital humanities perspective, it is possible to observe that students’ learning behaviours follow some affordances of a digital audience. Digital audiences use coping strategies to face digital media's pervasive and intrusive role in their lives (Mollen & Dhaenens, 2018). I will focus this reflection on behaviours related to audiences’ coping practices and their possibilities for critical thinking. Digital audiences (and students) can resist, appropriate, represent, question, use, reflect, diverge, act, and create as coping strategies (Mollen & Dhaenens, 2018). Activating these coping strategies can lead to a learning experience that results in significant reflection and a shift in worldview. Since coping strategies react to the tension between individual and collective sense-making and digital discourses, they can be expressed in two ways: actively and passively. A passive coping strategy results in most audiences being passive and non-critical consumers (Bird, 2011) with narrow worldviews and certain ethical and political behaviours that perpetuate dominant power structures. In contrast, active coping strategies allow audiences to transform their 69 everyday lives, emancipate themselves, redefine their practices and choices, and, in the process, initiate social transformation (Barassi, 2015; Mollen & Dhaenens, 2018). For creative learning educators to tap into the possibilities of agency by using active coping strategies, it is fundamental to understand the interface as a connecting membrane. In this case, the algorithms used for their possibilities tell hidden stories about meaning-making and worldviews from the arts-based data. Digital tools’ critical strategies that implement disclosure of student self-management practices to express, negotiate, and anonymize their identity allow the creation of shared meanings instead of measuring pervasiveness and exclusion. Further, I recommend that educators see students from a critical perspective where they are not regarded in functional and individual terms and are seen instead as people that are part of collective and complex contexts. Instigating agency is possible by integrating the instructional design digital tools to understand my learning process. They become parts of an appropriation process where digital technologies are used for collective advantages, needs, and ideas as the collaborative nature of humans becomes more evident. This requires the educator to create spaces for developing knowledge to use and understand digital tools’ outputs and experimentation with the algorithm to question its usability. In this way, educators can promote resistance and ethical practices by fostering knowledge about the tool's usage and awareness as sources of power. An active coping strategies implemented by a creative educator must incorporate transparency about the influence the mediation has on the audience and how it shapes personal behaviours. 70 As education faces the lasting impacts of a pandemic world, the analogy of coping strategies as an affordance of students as digital audiences is an example of digital discourse becoming a contested space of meaning for contemporary hegemonic struggles (Barassi, 2015). As such, it is interesting to continue reflecting upon the experiences created by the interaction with the digital tools occurring through and with the screen. Those interactions are instances of digital mediation for students as they turn into digital audiences, and for educators as they become producers, meaning they embrace the interactive environment and see their students and the learning experience in a new way. 5.1.2 Learning interactions Various metaphors from the digital humanities literature explain the digital mediation process: from a more macro philosophical perspective, such as the medium as the message (McLuhan, 2011), to a view of the digital media interface as a membrane (Mollen & Dhaenens, 2018). The different metaphors attempt to configure the relationship through which people communicate and create meaning. I seek to conceptualize the interaction as a mediation process in a learning experience in the digital context as a space of tension and a source of exponential possibilities for educators. My approximation comes from the idea of media as a catalyzer of experiences from one person to another, which supports the notion of understanding the learning experience as a result of a mediation process. Further, the tensions identified by this double logic of remediation (Bolter & Grusin, 2003) occur also in the educational 71 experience, as both affect the redefinition of self. On the one hand, the logic of immediacy can cause the medium to disappear, to become transparent, in the search for a more authentic sense of embodiment, of liveness that responds to the human need to feel, to have a sensory experience that appears to be independent of the mediation. On the other hand, it is hypermediacy, an exaltation and invitation to create a grandiose and undeniable mediated experience. In education, transparency or hyper-exposure can create a more nuanced and, at times, even dominant relationship between the digital audience (students) and the dominant discourse. Hence, a critical analysis of the choices made for the mediation is important due to the inherent qualities that continue to support hegemonic structures. One possibility for educators to create a learning interaction that becomes a learning experience is to attempt to adhere to the digital humanities’ operational proposal as a matter of praxis by configuring the medium as the relationship through which people communicate and shape a given society (McLuhan, 2011). To do so, educators must comprehend digital media technologies as extensions of the body’s senses that support digital audiences' exploration of the environment and their learning processes. This must come with the understanding that these interactions result in extensions that affect the physical and social complexities of students’ contexts. This possibility is also supported by the idea of the digital media interface as a membrane that mediates the relationship between technology and humans, especially as media is embedded in everyday life (Mollen & Dhaenens, 2018). Then, digital technology is a context in which the learning interaction occurs and where students have the potential to catalyze embodied experiences. 72 Educators continue to attempt to activate the senses as powerful opportunities to make the sense-making process more significant by integrating the inputs we receive from the world. A series of sensory experiences will occur, motivated by the involvement with the media and the chosen mediation selected by the educator. Affecting the senses becomes a possibility to challenge the disembodiment brought to the learning experience by the nature of the digital interaction itself. As humans become obsessed with embodying our experiences again, tapping into the power of experience and emotions in terms of interpreting our whole human experience, it becomes imperative to design learning interactions that ensure that usability, display, design, and functionality of the interaction are carefully considered (Murray & Wiercinski, 2012). By doing so, instructional strategies in the digital context will continue to attempt to embody the learning experience in its workings through the digital mediation process in an ever-present attempt to impact digital audiences emotionally. 5.2 Digital tools for understanding the meaning4 An approximation of digitally mediated interactions as meaning-making spaces comes with inherent issues related to the knowledge production of such interactions. As media becomes the translator of knowledge (McLuhan, 2011), supporting the enlightenment idea of better knowledge as the source of better decisions (Chun, 2008), 4 This section is inspired by a dialogic conversation between me (I) and a computer. See Appendix K4 for corresponding diary entry. 73 it is possible to forget that digital technologies only provide tools and do not necessarily have an inherent formative nature. For example, memory is considered a major digital media characteristic; as such, it can be seen as creating a possibility of a better future (Chun, 2008). Yet, this can occur only when memory is an active process, not a static one. When intersecting this notion with a learning experience, it can be evident that memory, as part of the learning experience, is also an active process that, as a result, can commemorate, recollect, and be part of reflective processes that create knowledge as a result of the experience. Hence, if experience memory is seen as a mere act of saving, the nature of knowledge production is subjected to the digital media’s more obscure characteristics, such as being degenerative, forgetful, and erasable, situations that can be highly problematic in an educational context. Elena Pierazzo (2015) delves into this configuration of memory by describing how humanity has become obsessed with managing texts and their overabundance through its attempt to continually save, keep, digitize, dissect, observe, research, and so on. As memory and storage are evaluated as problematic spaces, she uses TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) as an example to describe a possibility for attending to this issue that is accessible for educators. That is, to create the communal language for the learning experience, a set of rules that guide the possibility of collaboration in the digital space. As to how to do this, the author reminds us of some interaction characteristics that require further analysis. For example, she explains how textual scholarship goes beyond thinking about the texts being decoded and how the coding occurs before the coding of the text itself. We can relate this to conceptualizing the digital mediation process as a learning interaction dependent on the relationship between the source and 74 the output (digital mediation). This means it is crucial for educators to understand how tools are created because they are the ones mediating what memory of the world we are being left with, and as history has shown, usually much is erased, intentionally and unintentionally, affecting the knowledge being created during the learning experience. Also, tools can create circular patterns of behaviour that hinder or promote certain types of interpretation that affect the narratives and memories we create as digital audiences. 5.2.1 What about digital justice? The topic of digital justice is central to this research. There are some overarching questions in this field related to the interfaces, algorithms, and tools that have been and are being designed. These questions seek to reflect on how digital justice is ensured. First, the critical features of any design are its usability and having multiple modes of providing accessibility to the information. But the most interesting part of this critical conversation comes from reflecting on the owner of the information and the subsequent power dynamics involved in the tool's use context. I want to highlight two things. The first is related to the importance of participation of communities, when possible, on the design team. Integrating and interacting with digital tool affordances associated with saving and sharing ideas is an issue of reflection crucial to deciding who is the owner of the information. To do so is to provide an equal distribution of the design benefits instead of creating burdens. Hence, we must take care to consider the following when designing digital tools (Costanza-Chock, 2020): freedom of bias, value-sensitive design, retooling, making explicit decisions, understanding and preventing algorithm bias, making algorithm reparations, recognizing 75 users that will benefit most, and paying careful attention to the ontological dimension of design, among others. And while I find Sasha Constanza-Chock’s proposal almost impossible to achieve, I also think that dreams and demands must be this big to change the world. Benjamin Ruha (2020) poses a fundamental question to this critical reflection: “How do we rethink our relationship with technology?” Our relationship with digital technology permeates every aspect of our lives and has become the primary source of interaction in education. Understanding the relations of power that seep through the tools we choose for the classroom is part of a critical digital pedagogy stance that I support. The concept of intentionality supports a value system related to this type of pedagogy, especially if it involves processes and outcomes such as the ones proposed by Costanza-Chock. 5.2.1 Ethical implications of the interaction of meaning-making From a postcolonial digital humanities perspective, disruptive rhetoric needs to happen by integrating the voices of communities that have been so far underrepresented (Risam, 2018). Furthermore, it requires creating new cultural canons going forward, which require more than just adding voices, but encouraging visibility, discoverability of knowledge, and epistemologies of digital knowledge production that are transparent and invite us to interrogate and debate through complexity and contradictions. This means paying attention to knowledge production’s circumstances, from design to framing materials, data management, and forms of labour. 76 When digital humanities are seen as a valuable space for critical intervention, it is possible to understand the relationship with technology as an intersectional element, since the institutional configuration of technologies, rather than the technologies themselves, shape intellectual practices. Hence the invitation for digital humanists to know, care for, and select the tools in context (Sterne, 2015). Tools should be shaped to the purposes of digital humanities from inception to publication to support asking complex questions while staying grounded in particularities (Brown, 2011). This is closely related to the interface’s usability, meaning it should be based on user populations, their habits and needs, and an understanding of how interfaces mediate what digital humanities scholars and educators do. From a critical approach to using digital art and humanities to reflect on the world, this means understanding it as an aesthetics of interaction (Kwastek, 2013). Seeing digital technology as the primary interface for the aesthetic experience forces us to consider its function, symbolism, and operations as means of affection for the user. This requires creating a relationship between the material world and the illusion, the fiction with the potential to be interpreted; hence, the recipient can ascribe meanings to the experience. Furthermore, as digital technology continues to play an active role in cultural communication, the concept of software as a new cultural object of analysis that acts as a connection space between the author and the reader (Manovich, 2001) becomes a crucial means for creating this interaction. In this sense, the software has a significant influence in shaping these relationships, these interactions between the author, text, and reader. Therefore, it is important to dedicate time to ensure that software is used for cognitive processes, as well as a way to access the affective dimension of users. 77 These proposals, ranging from Roopika Risam’s radical invitation to use digital humanities as a space for resistance and abolition of colonization practices to ones that question the use of digital tools and their capabilities (2018), give life to this space of ethical confluence in which this research is immersed. An intersection where digital scholars and arts-based educators can contribute to the critical analysis from the digital humanities perspective is required for the continued configuration of the relations between technology, culture, and society that results in alternate conceptualizations of what it means to be human (Suchman, 2007). 5.3 Hybrid creative learning experience design5 There is immense potential in designing learning experiences in the digital context to improve meaning-making and transform worldviews. However, it is important to bear in mind that, for new worldviews to emerge, it is necessary to be attentive and recognize the personal learning and meaning-making responses. In general, students must be willing to observe themselves, a situation that is not so simple, especially in today’s world where there is so much information calling for attention and activating emotional responses. This situation also complicates the reflective processes necessary for meaningful learning. In addition, it is essential to know the useful language to identify my worldviews, their antecedents, and their manifestations. Otherwise, it is difficult to do appropriate cognitive monitoring of my ideas. 5 This section is inspired in my research manifesto. See Appendix K5 and K6 for corresponding diary entry. 78 Equally important is the need to carry out critical reflections about the education processes that make it possible to identify how I learn and make sense of the world I inhabit and also which digital tools are available that derive meaningful learning processes. Likewise, habituation processes using digital tools and creative processes must be strengthened as a primary strategy in modifying the ways we learn. The tendency to activate or deactivate actions from our emotional responses represents one of the main characteristics of catalysis for a reality that harbours new ideas of the type of human being we want to be. Understanding to become can only happen when we act; that is the main invitation left from this research process. The educational potential of creative thinking in the digital context relies on the notion that we feel to understand, understand to act, and act to be. 5.3.1 Accepting ambivalence and uncertainty Research and learning are emergent processes that require openness to uncertainty and change. Bringing the proposed digital tools into the learning and research space allows us to visualize what happens during the collaborative and creative learning process. Observing this relational characteristic of learning experiences strengthens the necessity of learning to provide a space of non-separation. In this way, these creative learning spaces can be filled with values such as connection and hope that derive from experiences where we can resist and question our aesthetic experience. 79 5.3.2 Trusting experience to create Being in the classroom as an educator, researcher, and student simultaneously allows me to reflect from a very intimate position on the learning experience. There is a definite continued need for heightened emotional states for meaningful learning. This hybrid idea of integrating the digital context as part of the instructional design of creative learning experiences requires us to understand digital technologiesq not as mediums per se. They do not have transformational power; the power is brought to them by their use as jumping platforms that lead to new ways of learning and relating in the learning space. In this sense, digital tools can embody the learning experience in the digital context, bringing a layer of complexity to the relationship by widening students' access to comprehension. 5.3.3 Re-tooling assessment Observing worldview dynamics and meaning-making processes as traces of how ideas connect and interact and then reflecting on the outputs is a door to asking complex questions and critical reflections. In terms of assessment, I bring these types of tools into what seems to be a black box process of attempting to measure, even judge, students’ work, and have a hard time removing uncertainty on evaluation criteria. Bringing in these types of tools as an integral part of reflecting on how we learn and becoming learners for life can shine a light by bringing transparency to the assessment. Integrating these types of tools can become an integral collaborative learning process where students and educators work together to define the terms for using, uploading, and working with the tools while creating a safe space from which we move from 80 assessing the outcome to observing the process and catapulting our meaning process on the affordances of the tools. 5.3.4 Function as an integral value system For an experience to be a space of critical reflection, the function of the tools must be at the service of the values we decide for the learning experience. In my case, integrating these tools is intended to promote agency, disruption, and collaboration in how students learn. The use of tools focuses on creating motivating learning spaces where the student's cognitive and affective dimensions are at the center. In these creative and critical learning spaces, students are agents of transformation through the interactions they experience as active audiences that create new ways of being in these dialogic creative learning spaces. To imagine a different world is to imagine us as different people. 5.3.5 An instructional design proposal for a hybrid experience This instructional design proposal is about a learning experience of non-separation in an online setting. In the following instructional design activity, integrating the digital tools is to embody the invisible connections we have with our peers and integrate emotions and critical reflection into the creative learning space. First, ambiguity, playfulness, and uncertainty are introduced not by revealing the nature of the learning experience, but by using digital tools integrated to facilitate activating emotions. To prevent passive behaviours, the initial selection of digital tools to create the experience are familiar to students' everyday lives (Youtube and Zoom). The 81 day before the class, the students receive an email. This email contains a couple of simple instructions: respond to accept tomorrow’s invitation by including a link to a song that helps them focus and work (give a rigid timeline). The second instruction is to come with their cameras off and stay silent until receiving instructions. Also, state that no further explanations will be given. The next day when students come online, cameras are off, and the presentation slides say: “Hi, we invite you to wait in silence.” A dimension of trust is built through the different use of the communications tools of everyday digital life. Once everyone is in, the slides start to pass, and a question is asked: “Are we interconnected? Let’s try and feel it.” The steps are shown in the following slide: 1) You should have received a link to a playlist in your email. Press play and don’t skip any songs. Just flow and listen until the end. 2) Find a connection with everyone with whom you share this learning experience. 3) Try to draw, sketch, write, feel, think, and explore for the whole time that chance has chosen for you for this experiment. The functions of the online music reproduction tools and the presentation on the digital communication tool are used to create an emotional experience where the students are active participants in the creative learning space, where trust is given to explore and create shared meaning. The playlist the students have received is created with the songs received the day before. When the time ends, show one more slide: “Process your emotions by writing a creative narrative about your lived experiences. Write until you reach 500 words. If you are still inspired, continue writing. If not, put an anonymous name to your file if desired and then upload it into the course text analysis folder.” In the next session, 82 all the text uploaded during the class experience is analyzed as a corpora with the digital tools, and a critical reflection is conducted regarding what these shared meanings reveal about the meaning-making happening around the experience of non-separation. In this instructional design, the values assigned to the tools create a space to feel and connect by integrating the personal context with the shared ones. Technology is used as a medium to understand from where my sense of connection is coming. The creative act becomes a collective experience. 5.4 One last summary reflection The potential benefits of designing hybrid creative learning experiences in the digital context are immense, providing a rich and imaginative data source that can improve meaning-making and transform worldviews. However, the analysis of this data presents challenges for educators and researchers, including complexity, labour intensiveness, and difficulty in clearly articulating what the data reveals about the learning experience. Additionally, ethical issues surrounding participant confidentiality and the preservation of their voices must be prioritized, while ensuring that the results obtained from creative learning experiences are not dismissed as less valid than those obtained through conventional learning methods. To overcome these obstacles, educators and digital humanities researchers must approach the design of digital learning experiences with an openness to integrate digital tools as an integral part of the learning process and prioritize the function of these tools at the service of the values decided for the learning experience. Figure 11 presents a summary of the research findings and critical reflections to respond to the research questions. 83 Figure 12 - Summary of the research findings and critical reflections In conclusion, it is crucial to approach this process with an openness to uncertainty and change, accepting the importance of emotional states for meaningful learning to occur, and re-tooling assessment to observe worldview dynamics and meaning-making processes. Integrating digital tools as an integral part of the learning process can create a safe space for students and educators, as long as collaborative decisions are made to define terms for using, uploading, and working with the tools. Moreover, for a learning experience to be a space of critical reflection, the function of the tools must be determined by a choice of ethical values. The instructional design proposal presented above demonstrates the potential of using digital tools to embody our invisible connections while integrating emotions and critical reflection into the creative learning space. This proposal presents a practical application of an ethical framework that 84 accepts ambivalence and uncertainty while promoting trust, connection, appropriation, and self-management as strategies for securing students’ agency and meaningful learning. Overall, the educational potential of creative thinking in the digital context relies on the notion that we feel to understand, we understand to act, and we act to be, ultimately leading to new ways of learning and relating. 85 References Absolon, K., & Willett, C. (2005). Putting ourselves forward: Location in Aboriginal research. Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous, and Anti-Oppressive Approaches, 97–126. Adams, T. E., Holman Jones, S., & Ellis, C. (2021). Handbook of Autoethnography. Taylor and Francis. 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Springer Nature. Worth, P. J. (2023). Word Embeddings and Semantic Spaces in Natural Language Processing. International Journal of Intelligence Science, 13(1), 1–21. 95 Appendices Appendix A – Philosophical foundations Research is an action deeply influenced by motivations, values, and the vital answers to personal questions, hence the relationship between researcher and the originality of the inquiry process. Within the social sciences and in interdisciplinary research, there is a diversity of research paradigms to which a researcher can adhere. Therefore, it is important to establish your positionality as a researcher by openly describing the philosophical foundations that guide the way you approach your research. Appendix A.1 - A journey to finding my voice: A statement about my positionality The journey to discover myself as a colonized being has been difficult and filled with tension, but is vital for any ethically committed researcher. This process is important because we need to recognize the ways in which we are colonized in order to be able to decolonize ourselves. Without a conscious self-reflecting effort about our purposes and its relation to our positionalities, it becomes quite easy to fall into the hurtful saviour practices of postcolonial researchers described by Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Smith, 2008). As a commitment to a research practice that is also a critical and interpretative approach to the world, we must understand our positionalities as a social, intellectual, and political notion (Denzin et al., 2008). And, at the same time, we must explore our understanding of this position as a result of the different relationships that make us up, including the geographical, ancestral, cosmological, environmental, 96 economic, spiritual, language, and any other elements that constitute our subjectivities (Absolon & Willett, 2005). A first step to decolonizing ourselves is to recognize the influence postcolonial ideas of research ethics have on our own ideas of the purpose of research. Recognizing enquiry as a dynamic process that is deeply influenced by the definitions of ethics, respect, and values we consider important and foundational for our research is crucial to this decolonization process. This reflective practice will guide our research decisions, including the philosophical approach we select to guide our research practice, as well as the research questions and methodologies we select. If we choose to follow a critical view of ethics, then we are compelled to view enquiry as a complex, fluid process subject to continual self-examination in the quest to produce emancipation rather than oppression. This can give way to pedagogies of hope that are contingent on the past, cultivating collective agency by shifting the focus from “us” or “them” to a collective reconfiguration of who we are (hooks, 2013) To achieve this, we must conduct a genealogy of self along the axes of truth, power, and ethics. The components of the ethical axes to keep in mind are (Cannella & Lincoln, 2012): ethical substance (the critical content we choose to legitimize morally and as creative agents); the modes of subjectification (governmentality we subscribe to); ethical work (conditions to construct new ways of being); and telos (the way we deconstruct our worlds to avoid constructing power relationships). A second step to the disruptive and political decolonization process requires that we as researchers commit to a major change of worldview by confronting the past and challenging systems of power. If knowledge continues being seen as a commodity, 97 something to be bought and sold, pursuing a research ethics that moves from this position to a more collaborative one that protects not only individuals but also communities and their knowledge will not be possible. Thus, we must further the notion of research as a lens that helps promote the creative spirit and fuels the determination and agency. This type of enquiry has the potential to reclaim languages, histories, and knowledge, and to give voice to alternative ways of being. Finally, we must put ourselves forward and attempt to express who we are and where we come from as a starting point critical to creating connection. In this way, we can reflect through our positionalities the dynamic and transformative notion of representation in research, meanwhile allowing for a decolonization process of our own minds, hearts, bodies, and spirits. As a researcher in the education field, I want to reclaim my voice by positioning myself. And, at the same time, I am letting my process of locating myself to remember, reconnect, and recover identity as a means to decolonize myself. Appendix A.1.2 - A reflection about place and locating myself. I am from Colombia, and this is my first attempt at observing and narrating my positionality. I am not sure where my ancestors come from, so this tale is a reconstruction of bits and pieces heard and interpreted. In this way, I am hoping to reclaim my past. My father comes from the Tamalameque, Cesar, originally a Chimmila people settlement. My father was born to a family of mixed white and black ancestry. Meanwhile, my mother comes from Andes, Antioquia, a significant town during the golden coffee years of the country. She is mestizo, meaning she was born from a 98 mix of Indigenous and white descent. My parents met and lived in Bogotá, the country’s capital, where I was born. When I turned seven, I moved with my mother to Medellin, historically the land of the Aburraes people and the second-largest city in the country. For most of my life, I have lived in a city. My main concern about naming my community is that I have no sense of belonging anywhere. I have always considered myself an arriero, the Spanish word for people that dedicate themselves to transporting goods by animal traction. According to Wikipedia, the translation is muleskinner. And I guess what I have been trying to convey with this identification of myself is a sense of movement. This person is committed to strict action with a sense of purpose even amid difficulty. As I came across Indigenous ways of thinking about knowledge, I felt sad. I noticed that I longed for belonging. So, I did some soul-searching and found connections, fluidity, impermanency, metaphors, and analogies, personal, collective, natural, global, and individual. I did not know, but by reflecting on my journey, I might have stumbled upon my positionality in my community. In an attempt to connect with what is sacred and spiritual, I got the bits and pieces left in me by my heritage, my African heritage, my Indigenous heritage, as well as my Catholic heritage, and their different but intense relationship with a need for community connection. I have realized that I do not belong to any of them entirely. Neither of them is my community. I am told I am not Black enough. I certainly have no idea of my Indigenous past, nor do I relate entirely to my religious but, at the same time, liberal upbringing. So maybe my story is just one more of mixed descent people, city people, desarraigados, uprooted, no longer Indigenous, no longer Black, no longer a part of anything. The sons 99 and daughters, grandmothers, grandfathers, uncles, aunties, fathers, mothers, extended family of no one, those that have been sucked in, to be discarded by capitalism and the universalizing and essentializing dreams of contemporaneity and liberalism. Those like me are part of immigrant families that are now mixed, spread out through large geographical territories, and for whom there is no clear ancestral connection. But for whom there are still values being instilled and created as we live, as we make our metaphors and worldviews. For now, my worldview of life is that of movement. It is my way of giving sense to the experiences we live. An arriero I am, and my research is an act of telling the story of a journey, of the movement that life is, and as a story is more than an educational process for me, it is a process that, as Qwul'sih'yah'maht Robina Anne Thomas says, can be one of identity that can bring a sense of belonging to my life. Appendix A.1.3 - Isabel Gomez, the educator and researcher I am a lecturer and environmental engineer from Colombia. I teach using arts-based methods as a pedagogical tool, though I am not an artist by training. I started my teaching career ten years ago after completing a graduate diploma in Creative Intervention in a design university in Medellin, Colombia. I was asked to become a lecturer due to the nature of my research project about education for sustainability. The students that came to my class were students from creative career paths (Bachelor’s degrees in Graphic, Fashion, and Space Design, Organizational and Publicity Communication, and Gastronomy). During my first month as a lecturer, I followed the traditional teaching form, where I would deliver a 60-90 minute presentation, mostly to 100 the top of their heads, since my students used to get bored easily with the delivery of the technical content and would immerse themselves in their devices. As the term progressed, I decided to make a change and started researching assignments that would be more in alignment with my philosophical views on how sustainability courses should be taught: connecting with yourself and what you truly cared about and exploring connections with the environment, others, and ourselves in creative and meaningful ways. I started proposing that students explore their own expression and connections, using languages they were more comfortable with, such as drawing, photography, small plays, and creative free-writing activities. I observed firsthand how engaging these arts-based activities were and decided to continue researching further the possibilities for meaning-making in the classroom. After two years of teaching, I decided to do a Master’s in Education, where my research focus was the use of arts for critical learning and sustainability education. My thesis was a design of a learning experience as a mode of connecting participants in epiphanic moments where they question the type of human being they want to be and how to achieve it, in a quest to connect audiences with more ample views on what being sustainable truly means. After this, I became a creative thinking lecturer for Software Engineering, as well as Design Management Bachelor programs at a local public university. During this time, I continued to explore how developing our creative thinking can support the transformation of how we see and engage in the world we inhabit. During my Master’s, I also started working as an educational researcher, being part of many different mixed method and qualitative research projects, evaluating quality of 101 education, teaching methods, and developing philosophical foundations for design faculties. I have continued to work in research in education for the past five years. Further, I have been a learning experience designer for the past eight years. After my Creative Intervention studies, I was able to find an increasing need for businesses and local governments to design impactful educational experiences for fast interactions. There is always a need to connect with others in short-term connections between the audience and the facilitator, therefore requiring emotionally strong experiences to create a spark of curiosity so that people can connect with the content that is being presented. By studying about how we learn and teach through experience, I was able to support many different clients to deliver impactful learning experiences. Creativity is always at the forefront of designing this type of experience, especially with regards to complex and sometimes elusive topics, such as sustainability issues. These professional and educational experiences led me to become the main lecturer of the third-year central laboratory course for a Visual Design Bachelor’s degree at Fundación Universitaria Bellas Artes, a local college in Medellin, Colombia. Taller 5 (Workshop 5), as it was called, was a course designed for Visual Design students to learn how to design an experience by integrating their learnings into creating emotional and meaningful moments that would serve customers for their commercial, promotional, or educational goals. The course syllabus that I created consisted of a series of experiences that allowed students to have an embodied learning experience whilst learning about experience design. Each experience was followed by an arts-based assignment, where students were invited to reflect whilst creating an output that supported their meaning-making process. 102 The classroom is a special place for me. I am not an artist, yet I have discovered, as I walk through the journey of becoming a teacher through being in the classroom, that art is a meaningful form of connection that allows students to rethink their ways of doing and thinking, and opens the possibility to imagine new ways that can lead to a sustainable reality. Appendix A.2 - A transformative and critical pedagogy epistemology The epistemological position for this project is in part transformative-emancipatory, as proposed by Donna M. Mertens (Mertens, 2007). In this frame of reference, knowledge is produced within the social and historical context from interactions based on respect and understanding. This epistemological framework implies a recognition of the research process as a collaborative practice between the researcher and the researched that manifests itself in positive social change. Further, from a critical perspective, I will hold myself accountable for my own biases, values, and attitudes, which constitute my worldview regarding research (Leavy, 2017). In this way, I will adhere to the epistemological implications of such approaches and their influence on the nature of the relationship between the inquirer and what is possible to know. As an education researcher, I want to answer bell hooks’s (2014) call to critically think and transform the ways of teaching and learning by continually reflecting on my process of inquiry, as a means of emancipation. I will foster community empowerment by delving into the meaning-making processes and worldviews of my students from a standpoint that seeks to truly honour and represent the diversity of values, understandings, and voices of the research participants (students and educator). I will 103 include in my research my visions of the complexity and connectedness of reality (Ward & Shortt, 2013, 2020) by carefully and explicitly weaving my thoughts and findings with my students’ discoveries, as a way of making sense of the world from the experiences that we shared. Appendix A.3 - A relational ontology According to Patricia Leavy (2017), it is also important to define our ontology, the nature of reality we believe we can know. My reality is that we inhabit spaces of shared meaning in the classroom. I believe the relational aspect of the shared experience is where the knowledge resides. Therefore, I position myself within a relational ontology that has its foundation in my own practice as an educator. Doing so means that I also recognize that theories are developed in flux. They are constantly emerging, transforming, and deepening, in a constant state of becoming (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) as they are in permanent interaction with the self, others, context, and the design of the learning experience. Consequently, the learning space facilitates a collective attempt to emancipate ourselves and disrupt the status quo, whilst recognizing reality is a construct that is shaped by social, political, cultural, ethnic, and gender-based forces, among others. 104 Appendix B – Taller V (Design V) planning matrix INFORMATION ON THE SUBJECT FACULTY: VISUAL ARTS PROGRAM: VISUAL DESIGN SUBJECT: DESIGN V LECTURER: MÓNICA ISABEL GÓMEZ VÉLEZ SEMESTER : 1 YEAR: 2020 HOURLY INTENSITY WEEK PRESENTIAL HOURS: 6 SEMESTER PRESENTIAL HOURS (16 SEM) 96 SUBJECT CODE: INDEPENDENT HOURS: 6 INDEPENDENT HOURS: 96 AREA: COMPONENT: TOTAL HOURS: 12 TOTAL HOURS: 192 NUMBER OF CREDITS: JUSTIFICATION OF THE SUBJECT Space within the curriculum where the student assumes the intervention of spaces and environments from the concept of user experience and brand. CONCEPT OBJECTIVE Analyze, understand and intervene spaces from the generation of experiences in a manner consistent with the concepts of brand, user, context and experience. PROCEDURAL OBJECTIVE Develop experiences based on brand, user and context analysis. ATTITUDE OBJECTIVE Analytical and prepositive PLANNING THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SUBJECT (WEEK BY WEEK): WEEK SESSION TOPIC DIRECT TEACHING PLANNING INDEPENDENT TIME PLANNING 1 Feb 5-7 1 Body maps The notion of territory Introduction to the course - Unlimited self-portrait activity Creating a map a story. 105 2 Introduction to the notion of territory - Design Thinking Exercise to start the design of the FUBA experience proposal Reading Building Dwelling Thinking - Martin Heidegger 2 Feb 12-14 1 The condition of Place - spatiality Experience Design - Inspirational Question - Feedback Research on the senses and preparation of sensory experience 2 The senses - synesthetic description Presentation on the senses - Format design for synesthetic description Serres, M. (2003). The five senses. Science, poetry and philosophy of the body. Bogota: Editorial Taurus. Presentation - Synesthetic description of the proposal. 3 Feb 19-21 1 Senses and experience Facilitating reflective process - Experience design - Feedback In search of lost time - M. Proust 2 Experience and the senses - Temporality Presentation Experimentation and Socialization of experiences David Epstein's Shaping Time 4 Feb 26-28 1 Emotions Experience Design Presentation Experimentation and Socialization of experiences First installment conceptualization of the experiential intervention proposal - The secret life of the brain. L. Feldman The government of emotions – Victoria Camps 2 Experience and emotions - Otherness The myth of Indra's network and the experience of non-separation - narrative and experiential activity The myth of Indra's net 5 Mar 4-6 1 Ritual Presentation - Reference videos Presentation proposal conceptualization of the experiential intervention proposal - Research and presentation preparation 2 Experiences as a rituals Facilitating reflective process Review of design thinking techniques for contextualization 6 Mar 11-13 1 Experiences in real spaces – Objects Visit around the Universidad station Stimulus analysis – This was changed to a virtual museum visit Analysis of design decisions against sensory and emotional stimuli in different spaces 106 because of the start of the pandemic and lock downs. Reading - Aesthetics of consumption (Juan Diego Santamaria) 2 The perceived experience VS. The designed experience EXHIBITIONS VISIT - REPORT Reading Joseph Beuys 7 Mar 18-20 1 EXPERIENCE - CONTEXT Re-contextualization Presentation tools: empathy map, story mapping, qualitative and quantitative research methods Report Development 2 EXPERIENCE - CONTEXT Re-contextualization Consulting contextualization process Materialize final product 8 Mar 25-27 1 PARTIAL – CONTEXTUALIZATION OF THE EXPERIENCE – Assembly of the experience. Two and three-dimensional proposals according to the assigned product and required scale. 2 Feedback workshop 9 Apr. 1-3 1 EXPERIENCE - PRODUCT: Materialization - Narrative Theory and field trip to visit commercial spaces and analyze the types of showcases. Concept maps, concept models 2 EXPERIENCE - PRODUCT: Materialization - Narrative - Communication Visit Shopping Center 10 abr . _ 8-10 1 EASTER 2 EASTER eleven Apr. 15-17 1 EXPERIENCE - ACTION: Interaction Videos What story do you want to tell? 2 Experience as creative expansion: Proposing multiple spaces for dialogue, creation and co-creation, interrelational and expansive Classroom discussion 107 experiences in diverse contexts 12 Apr. 22 -24 1 EXPERIENCE - ACTION: Interaction - The senses - emotions as an integral part of the design 2 Related videos: The senses The emotional-emotional Synesthetic description of the experience 13 Apr. 29 May. 1 1 EXPERIENCE - ACTION: Interaction - Spatiality and temporality Experimental visual and practical exercises to arrive at furniture proposals that enrich the experience Circulation maps, Story mapping. 2 14 May 6-8 1 EXPERIENCE - ACTION: Interaction - The furniture Experimental visual and practical exercises to arrive at furniture proposals that enrich the experience approach models Definition of materials to work 2 fifteen May 13-15 1 EXPERIENCE - ACTION: Interaction - The facade Group socialization - Accompaniment to personal and group reflection Progress in the development of the project according to the point in which each group takes it 2 Reviews and personalized advice 16 May 20-22 1 INTEGRATED EXPERIENCE final assembly Final Project: The FUBA experience in space through the senses, emotions and relationships. 2 3. METHODOLOGY AND RESOURCES TIME ASSISTED METHODOLOGY RESOURCES Experiential arts-based classes and presentation classes. Workshop. Practical classes. Visits to commercial spaces and fairs. Tutorials. WORKSHOP-TYPE CLASSROOM – VIDEO BEAM - Video Beam, Internet, Board, Markers 108 INDEPENDENT TIME METHODOLOGY RESOURCES Personal workplace, Libraries and academic spaces. Internet, bibliography LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS ATMOSPHERE DESCRIPTION Classroom Unit and project summaries Tutorials (individual and group) Workshops Peer learning and peer-led assessment sessions. Facilitated interaction with external stakeholders Teamwork, including presentations and discussions facilitated by students Development of action research interventions. Intervention tests. Reflection and self-assessment of the testing process and evidence obtained Iterative development of interventions. Developing an appropriate form of presentation. Virtual environments or platforms Videos on vimeo, youtube, netflix. Field trips (annexed format must be filled out) Visit the University metro station area as a space containing multiple experiences Visit Shopping Center JOINT WORKS JOINT PROJECT OR WORK PARTICIPATING COURSES TEACHER S RESPONSIBLE S 109 Experience design DRAWING 5 MONICA ISABEL GOMEZ ASSESSMENT EVALUATION PERCENTAGE OBJECTIVE OF THE EVALUATION EVALUATION CRITERIA Midterm exam 30 % As a project for the semester, the students will design a spatial intervention of an environment where they seek to publicize the FUBA experience. For the first part they must present the contextualization of the experience. The following Form elements will be evaluated: Drafting, Spelling, Invoice and presentation. The following elements will be evaluated: Empathy and Definition of Context. Integration of concepts seen. The process carried out by the student. Follow-up 40% Creative Portfolio Follow-up on the proposed experiences. Includes reflective creative narratives on learning most significant and how they relate to their interests and their future application. Each of the experiences that the students carry out in class will be evaluated by the student, their classmates and the teacher. The average of said note will be part of 5% of each delivery. The follow-up will be divided into two installments. 1. Follow-up (20%) - March 18 - The student will present in the classroom the log that must contain one entry for each session, as well as a reflection by 200 word week 2. Follow-up (20%) - May 6 - The student will present in the classroom the log that must contain One entry for each session. The reflective essay must have a minimum of 1000 words. Final exam 30% Design and materialization of proposal of intervention experience The following Form elements will be evaluated: Drafting, Spelling, Invoice and presentation. The following elements will be evaluated: Empathy, Definition of context and relationship with the proposal, Integration of concepts seen. Materialization and usefulness of the proposal. The process carried out by the student. 110 Appendix C – Voyant Initial Output for the concept of Space-Body 111 Appendix D – Voyant Initial Output for the concept of Emotions 112 Appendix E – Voyant Initial Output for the concept of Objects 113 Appendix F – Voyant Initial Output for the concept of Experience 114 Appendix G – Voyant Tools TermsRadio visualization concept Space-Body 115 Appendix H – Voyant Tools TermsRadio visualization concept Emotions 116 Appendix I – Voyant Tools TermsRadio visualization concept Objects 117 Appendix J – Voyant Tools TermsRadio visualization concept Experience 118 Appendix K – Student, educator, researcher personal data entries Appendix K.1 Research as an act of becoming Figure 13 - Research as an act of becoming 119 December 2020 Brains are organic. They connect in complex forms, and they do not work in linear, top-to-bottom, or bottom-up ways. There is nothing linear in what I am about to tell you, hence my intention at creating this multimodal creative portfolio that is nothing more than a search for an aesthetic way to open the doors of my “self.” This story is an attempt to let you in on the interwoven web of relations that inhabits my brain. Research as act of becoming expresses the intensity of emotions through a chaotic yet bounded experience. It is also a humble approach to making my academic experiences as a student and educator/researcher collaborate, because it is an experience that cannot be told separately. It is a quest to convey the powerful ways in which the lived experience has now integrated into my own worldview. Below is a dialogue between my two identities, the educator/researcher and the student. You will hear the voices of my students in what I share, as they have come to be an integral part of who I am and for whom I am doing all of this. You will hear our resonance as we interact in different ways: sometimes as peers, sometimes as friends, sometimes with me teaching them, most of the time with me learning from them. This experience is happening in a confluence space created by my work with students from design and creative programs, my explorations with design and digital tools, and my use of creative thinking and experience design as teaching and learning tools. This year being a teacher has been .............. (Fill in the blank. You will probably need a longer blank). 120 Appendix K.2 Spaces and bodies in tension, a story about learning in the digital context October 2020 As Covid hit, the education sector saw the potential of the online world to sustain a sense of normalcy in the midst of such particular circumstances. It was a move long awaited in the sector, and as lockdowns were established almost everywhere in the world, students and professors rushed to move to and provide synchronous and asynchronous online learning experiences. As my term started, everyone was zoomed out and had real lives outside of the digital space to which they wanted to attend. So, for those four months of my first term at UBC Okanagan, on Wednesdays and Thursdays I opened my computer, connected to this remote studying space, in a different language, and shared with faces and upper bodies from across the world. There was no getting to know each other, no socializing; the classroom experience in the online world felt dry, functional, efficient and indifferent. You connect, you talk seriously about what you are supposed to be there to talk about, and after two or three hours you log off. The humanity of the experience, the smiles, the complicity, the camaraderie is all lost. The relationality was no longer there. December 2020 I could not finish my research paper thesis. Sometimes questions just evade you; they run from you. Sometimes ideas are just not developed, as I have learned from reading my supervisor’s articles on creative thinking and the honing framework. I understand now that ideas are sometimes in a state of potentiality. As I continuously 121 related my present experience to pain, stress, confusion, angst, desperation, anxiety, and suffering, I started seeking for clues in my past writings. I was reminded by my own words, written in a not-so-distant past, that we feel to comprehend, we comprehend to act, and we act to become. So, I started to wonder who I was becoming through this learning experience. All of a sudden, this frontier between the digital and the physical world that I wanted to break, to pull into the classroom, this liminal space that inhabits that space that does not seem to be a real space, that intersection between these worlds no longer apart, yet not able to be one, this frontier I longed to understand, had become a rigid and clear-cut boundary. This frontier that I had previously wanted to fully comprehend, I no longer wanted to interact with. As an educator, I know that to think critically about new concepts and ideas one must be able to comprehend the materials one is reading, a difficult task when your stress responses are constantly aroused. Situations like Covid can easily bring traumatic experiences to students and professors that we are overlooking. As I pushed to produce something of value, I created a dialogic story between the digital context and the educational experience as a personal process of sense making. Appendix K.3 Understanding us: The students as digital audiences November 2020 Collective thoughts from my students when I asked them what worried them about their learning experience during this pandemic included: • “I am not learning.” • “My learning is slowing down.” 122 • “It is costing me a lot to apply what I am learning.” • “I am learning too much theory with no application.” December 2020 I really have tried to write this research paper and my thesis is due today, but I see no connections. I remix and try to make sense of all these bits and pieces in what feels like a task to prove my inability to respond. And then I am reminded of the strenuous conditions that differentiate my experience from that of my peers. English is not my first language, I inhabit and work mostly in Spanish, my time is spent in this transitional space in which I am compelled to read, think, and write in both languages. The amount of stress I have lived through and the impossibility to focus on one thing at a time due to the circumstances make it impossible for me to retain information. It is not me, it is the nature of the experience. The lack of focus alters the possibilities to understand and critically review new materials. The connections are all new; I have to learn a new language, the language of the digital humanities. As I read again my online posts, I wonder, “who is this person who wrote those posts?” I have no recollection of writing some of the things I wrote. They are all about me and the transferability of what I am reading to my own teaching experience. Yet, because of the ways in which the university has been set up, I am unable to use this material for my research paper. In one term, I have written 20 reflective pieces, two literature reviews, one research paper, and two reflective papers so far, all alone. I was asked only once to team up and collaborate to present a topic. That and some informal meetings I had with a classmate from the program were all the socialization I got out of my first term at UBC Okanagan. 123 Appendix K4 – The aesthetics of the meaning making December 2020 Figure 14 - A dialogue between me and the comp 124 Appendix K5 - How do you design a critical experience in the digital context? Late December, 2020 Through this process of creating my own manifesto, I am attempting to convey my worldview of life as the stills of the movements of the present moment. It is also a way to make sense of the experiences I am living. I am making my research an act of telling the story of my journey, of the movement that my life is, and as a narrative that is more than an educational process for me. It is a process that, as Qwul’sih’yah’maht (Thomas, 2005, pp. 237–254) says, can be one of identity that brings a sense of belonging to my life. Research is an aesthetic experience. In accordance with Bourdieu and Passeron (2009), an experience is a human action with an intention, during which the subject transforms the world and at the same time is transformed by the effects of its own doings. An experience has the potential to be a moment of subjectivation, as it transits the tension between the interactions between the self, others, the world, and reality (Dewey, 2008). For bell hooks (hooks, 1995), aesthetics is a way of seeing, of being, of inhabiting and relating to space. An experience can be aesthetical when it orders or disorders the expressions we make of the world, when it becomes an active interchange that creates new meanings. In accordance, aesthetical experiences are characterized by their vitality and movement as a result of the interaction with some aspects of the world (Dewey, 2008). I commit to the ideas proposed by hooks, Dewey, Bourdieu, and Passeron. Therefore, I look at research, as Warren Linds states in “Brilliant or bullshit!” (Jacobs et al., 2008)), as an emerging act of being, as a constant state of becoming, as 125 a dynamic process of discovery and interpretation. That means that research becomes my own aesthetical experience, my own narrative about how I see the world. When I look at research, as an emerging act of being, as a constant state of becoming, as a dynamic process of discovery and interpretation, then research becomes OUR own aesthetical experience, OUR own narrative about how WE see the world. Figure 15 - Self-portrait and research manifesto 126 Appendix K6 - Accepting ambivalence and uncertainty December 2022 There is this idea that we are separate entities. We are not. We are amalgamations, relational beings, in constant contact and interaction. By means of these constant connections, our worldviews emerge, disarm, reorganize, and even heal. These personal worldviews explode in the form of creative outputs that infuse our lives with meaning.
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Interdisciplinary Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Gabora, Liane
Okanagan Data visualizations of the learning experience in undergraduate creative thinking assignments
Text