Crafting a Sense of Self: Exploring amateur arts-based practice within a university business school context

Abstract

This research uses arts-based practice in a pivotal role both as a research context and methodological means, within a university business school setting. A personal creative rupture, challenging my sense of professional self, prompts the central research aims to: (1) analyse how amateur arts-based practice shapes university business school lecturers’ sense of self; (2) gain new understanding of creative learning processes applied to a business school context, and (3) explore the use of an artefact-based data collection method to elicit rich participant narratives around selfhood. Participant voices of a micro sample of business school educators are at the heart of the research. Narrative accounts of their lived creative experiences illuminate and synthesise perceptions on sense of self and place, both creatively and professionally, and how it can be subject to various practices. Their symbolic artefacts steer conversational style interviews, supporting a social constructivist orientation. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus acts as a central mode of analysis. Case analyses collate and re-frame participants’ stories about shaping of selfhoods. The instrumental nature of artefacts is explored in prompting sensitive, private and potentially inaccessible insights into crafter and professional selfhoods, challenging the role of more conventional research methods. Perceptions of amateur creative practice, from a university business school perspective, reveal how the two seemingly disparate worlds intersect. For some business school lecturers, their creative practice plays a large part in their lives. For others it is more functional. Findings suggest the varying degree of intersectionality is influenced by the inner structures of habitus alongside external structures within fields of practice, drawing on the duality of Bourdieu’s sociology. Through heuristic processes the transformational nature of habitus is investigated. Findings identify the enabling and constraining nature of embodied dispositions. This contributes fresh insights into creative and professional selfhoods, including value systems, attitudes to risk and coping strategies for practice in navigating change and sense of agency. What has been identified are potential alternative routes to gaining insight into creative processes and practice and transformation of selfhoods, within the already fast-growing domain of arts-based methods Findings show unifying and varying benefits and impacts of creative practice on both personal and professional selfhoods as university business school lecturer. Amateur creative practice varies including motives, cognitive and affective benefits, degrees of engagement and attitudes to risk. The research offers a deeper layer of reflexivity on educational philosophy, perceived tensions and the value of creative intelligence within a university business school context. It also offers valuable perspective on the responsibility as educator in creating safe temporal and mental space to nurture business school learner creativity.