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

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 freestylepainting)
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 postqualitative
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.