Sunday, May 24, 2009

An Embodied Learning Experience for the Researcher as Actor


"Working as a researcher as well as writer and actor allowed me to take part in an active and creative learning experience by witnessing, writing script and then physically embodying the stories. A performance can raise awareness educating well beyond the podium conveying lived experience in action with elements visual, emotional physical and spiritual. In this field process we are told and we tell stories engaging in one of the most primal, meaningful and universal of human connections." Cheryl McLean



Cheryl McLean is Publisher of The International Journal of The Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice, IJCAIP and Editor of the CAIP, Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice Research Series.

About Jacob, 87, A Survivor and a Volunteer in the Hospital Cafeteria:

"Jacob would meet me for the first time, each time we would meet, but he spoke seven languagues fluently. He told me he had learned them all in the death camps. When Jacob would serve me my coffee he would usually offer a little advi ce and, on this day, he told me..to be happy you should never want for another's spoon... but hold on to your own spoon very carefully! One day I was sitting in the cafeteria having coffee with Jacob and I asked him, "Jacob, with all you have seen, and all that you know how is it that you can still be so happy every day? And he told me"Wake up every morning at 5:30, say your prayers and don't forget to watch the sun rise."

From the Ethnodrama "Remember Me for Birds" info: CherylMcLean@ijcaip.com










Sunday, May 10, 2009

Quotes of Note

"The qualitative researcher may be described using multiple and gendered images; scientist, naturalist, fieldworker, journalist, social critic, artist, performer, jazz musician, filmmaker, quilt maker, essayist. the many methodological practices of qualitative research may be viewed as soft science, journalism, ethnography, quilt making or montage. The researcher, in turn, may be seen as a bricoleur, as a maker of quilts, or as in filmmaking, a person who assembles images into montages." Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials, Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, Sage 2007.photo c.mclean

"The business of art is rather to understand Nature and to reveal her meanings to those unable to understand. It is to convey the soul of a tree rather than to produce a fruitful likeness of a tree. It is to reveal the conscience of the sea, not to portray so many foaming waves or so much blue water. The mission of art is to bring out the unfamiliar from the most familiar." Kahlil Gibran