Implications

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In developing a digital platform for Mother Market, one that includes a text and a resources section, I offer an educative tool for students, classroom practitioners, families, and friends to engage in critical and much needed dialogue about how our lives are mediated by economic logic and discourse, and what impact that may have on our social relationships.  At the same time, I also hope to offer a broader model for educators to integrate music and arts into curriculum, recognizing that they and their students could collect music and text from an assortment of sources around a diverse set of topics and issues.  Finally, coming from an interpretivist orientation, I hope to instigate a deeper conversation about how educational researchers, and arts-based researchers in particular, collect, analyze, and report data, and advance new research paths in an era marked by the over-reliance on decontextualized quantitative data-driven research.  In employing arts and/or narrative based data collection, educational researchers can construct more expansive forms of social inquiry grounded in pluralistic discourses and methods that expand our conceptions of “evidence-based” research to include the lived experiences and epistemologies of students and educators.  Given an educational climate that privileges increasingly standardized measurements of knowledge, arts-based inquiry can offer deeper and richer conversations about the social, political, and environmental contexts in which learning occurs.

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