Published:
December 2023
Issue:
Vol.18, No.2
About the creator
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Prof Doc (ThAP), Grad Dip (Movement and Dance)
Karen is the Masters Course Coordinator at The MIECAT Institute in Melbourne. She started her professional life as a kindergarten teacher, moving to drama and dance, and then eventually teaching in tertiary institutes and mentoring. When she started her doctorate “A search for presence” in 2015, she would have said then, that her "mode" was dance and movement. She spent the first-year painting and drawing and mucking about with materials. Then when the writing began, she started to wonder if the words she was putting on the page were poetry. Now she dabbles across, between and within multiple modes.
This work is published in JoCAT and licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND-4.0 license.
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Szydlik, K. (2023). To work multimodally. Multimodal showings. JoCAT, 18(2). https://www.jocat-online.org/c-23-multimodal-szydlik
To work multimodally
Karen Szydlik
To work multimodally
To work
multimodally in arts-based inquiry and research is to be
multilingual.
To work
multimodally is to have access to
languages
other than your first,
languages with all their
nuance and
ACCENTS and
grammar and
contested meanings.
It is to s t r e t c h the s y n a p s e s
and travel new pathways
To inquire/research in one language, let’s say movement,
and then to revisit the movement in another, say drawing,
and then to revisit yet again in another, say clay,
and perhaps finally to scribe lyrically, poetically,
is
to have access to the cultures of the mode,
to have access to many ways of coming-to-know,
many ways to make meaning.
Multi-modality offers diverse and original experiences, and supports us
to see and
feel and
hear differently.
It invites us to bracket out (the known)
to make way for “something not yet known”.
To work in a material or in a mode with which we are LESS FAMILIAR is to create
s p a c i o u s n e s s
and invite possibilities and create opportunities for unique coming-to-knows.
In the schools of Reggio Emilia in Northern Italy, one of their values is the hundred languages. This is a metaphor “for the extraordinary potentials of children, their knowledge-building and creative processes, the myriad forms with which life is manifested and knowledge is constructed” (Reggio Children, n.d.a).
Loris Malguzzi, the founder, wrote:
A hundred always a hundred
ways of listening
of marvelling of loving
a hundred joys
for singing and understanding
a hundred worlds
to discover
a hundred worlds
to invent
a hundred worlds
to dream.
The child has
a hundred languages (and a hundred hundred hundred more)
(n.d.b Reggio Children)
Coming to multi-modality in arts-based inquiry, as an adult, is akin to having 100 languages at our disposal.
It offers complexity
and layering
and uncertainty.
It is a place to wrestle and question.
It is a generative space of potentialities.
It is a place to be curious and to wonder.
Multi-modality allows us
multiple layers and a
“multitude of voices” (Schaller, 2020, p.21) and
“multiple truths” (Schaller, 2020, p.23) and as Warren Lett wrote
“multimodal narratives require focus to find the voice of the symbols” (Lett, n.d., personal correspondence, quoted in Schaller, 2020c, p.46).
In the doctoral work A search for presence, I wrote: “How difficult it can be to accommodate new knowing even when the learning is repeated from a diversity of sources, in my case multimodally. New knowing can be so slippery” (Schaller, 2020a, p.14). But coming to know through multimodality can amplify the newly discovered and be the site for the birth of something new. Perhaps in this place a new voice is generated, perhaps multimodality can be transformational and invite us to find new ways of being in the world.
Multimodal showings
The most immediate way of sharing multimodal working is through sharing multimodal expressions. Here you will find other MIECAT artists, facilitators, researchers, creative arts therapists and supervisors inviting you as reader into their experiencing of working multimodally. Each of these contributions was part of an invitation for this explainer. For more information about multimodal creative arts therapy please read the Explainer by Ariel Moy. Published work in this area can be accessed on the Multimodal Creative Arts Therapy explore page.
