Abstract:
A journey that we have been travelling along for the last few years has been a research project that explored engaging with the experiences of queerly identifying tertiary students. This project involved collecting and analyzing stories, and a lot of dialogue, reading, writing, and thinking. This journey has been bound up in describing, investigating and critiquing ‘what is’; including the relationships between educational contexts and the lives and learning experiences that take place in those contexts. This paper continues our journey but shifts the focus from analysis and critique of ‘what is’ to imagining and articulating ‘what might bes’. In particular, we will discuss and demonstrate an imaginative strategy that we will provisionally call fabel-ing and that we deploy to help journey in to ‘what might bes’. We will argue and demonstrate how this creative arts-based strategy can be used as educational research and to generate impact and engagement. We will also describe how our fabel-ing connects to rich traditions of deploying fictive methods to support knowing and change in education, the social sciences and philosophy. We will also creatively deliver aspects of our fabels deploying performative techniques such as reading aloud, lip-synching, and the use of author generated images that we argue encourage opportunities for affective and intellectual connections. These fabels are driven by persistent preoccupations or re-realizings that our research project provoked or made clearer. At the same time we argue that they do some of the work of laying the foundations of experiences, lives and contexts yet to be.