ABSTRACT

Imagination, as an essential aspect of human nature, is fundamental to all ways of thinking. However, this powerful faculty is usually overlooked or marginalized in educational research. In the article, I explore imagination as a methodological source for researchers to generate expansive, purposeful, fluid, and developmental knowledge about the subjective realities constructed by individuals as meaning-makers. To do so, I illustrate how I use two variations of painting (i.e. cartoon- and freestyle-painting) to facilitate such an imaginative space for understanding students’ meaning-making about intercultural experience. Imagination, as facilitated through the subjective, transformative space of arts methods, can extend the epistemological and methodological possibilities of knowledge for educational research. It provides a post-qualitative methodology which can be particularly useful for enabling conceptually abstract and structurally complex knowledge that may not be expressible or interrogatable in a coherent way through traditional research methods in education.

摘要

想象力作为人性的一个基本方面，是所有思维方式的基础。然而，这种强大的教师在教育研究中通常被忽视或边缘化。在这篇文章中，我将想象力作为一种方法论来源，让研究人员生成关于个人作为意义制造者构建的主观现实的广泛、有目的、流动和发展性的知识。为此，我说明了我如何使用绘画的两种变体（即卡通绘画和自由式绘画）来促进这样一个富有想象力的空间，以帮助理解学生对跨文化体验的意义构建。想象力，通过艺术方法的主观、变革空间的促进，可以扩展知识在教育研究中的认识论和方法论的可能性。