The Educational Researcher as Artist Working Within

This article discusses the complexity of arts-based educational research and arts-based autoethnography and presents a concrete example of an installation tableau that investigates the regulation of the human body and human sexuality in a junior high classroom of a Roman Catholic school in the 1960s. In this article, the modern abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock serves as an example of an artist using the unconscious to direct his work. Pollock’s interest in surrealism and Michel Foucault’s discussion of the work of the Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte figure prominently in the theoretical foundation for this article. Pollock provides a parallel to the process of the arts-based educational autoethnographer as researcher working within.