Exploring imagination as a methodological source of knowledge: painting students’ intercultural experience at a UK university

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.