Pointing to Shaun Tan's The Arrival and Re-imagining Visual Poetics in Research

Abstract

In this article, the authors discuss how Shaun Tan's graphic novel The Arrival (2006) opened a polyphonic dialogue with culturally diverse early childhood educators. Using visual, graphic and symbolic languages provided alternative ways for the research participants to express their experiences and understandings of being recent immigrants. Analyzing and interpreting the stories that the participants narrated, the authors noted their linguistic, aesthetic and embodied responses to Tan's visual poetry-specifically the physical act of pointing to the images. The research raises multiple questions for consideration: How might The Arrival (and other graphic narratives) be used as an elucidative prompt for understanding caregiver/teacher practice in early childhood education and in educational research more broadly? How can visual research methodologies enhance the complex interrelations among curriculum, diversity and visuality in early childhood education? And, lastly, how can such imaginal and playful approaches point to deeper considerations around intercultural dialogue, social relations, pedagogy and the curriculum in early childhood education settings? Graphic novels provoke intercultural dialogue in research interviews and point to new research methodologies. They enhance cultural understandings among students, scholars and educators at post-secondary and pre-K-12 levels, providing insights into how culturally diverse educators and students can live and learn together in an always complex world. Every voyage is the unfolding of a poetic. The departure, the cross over, the fall, the wandering, the discovery, the return, the transformation. (Minh-ha, 1994, p. 21)

Transforming early childhood educators’ conceptions of “dark play” and popular culture

“…He argues that “to be taught” rather than to “learn from” “is to be open to receiving the gift of teaching … being able to give such interruptions a place in one’s understanding and one’s being” (57). So, while we are telling you a story about a story, we are nimbly attending to layered stories about creativity, humanity, history, culture, and life experiences in classrooms, forged through the close relations of teachers to their students, and pedagogies of hope and aspiration in the always risky enterprise of education (Bjartveit and Panayotidis, 2014b).…”