voi Cesperson’s situated interpretation of events in time and place – as is all data gathering
in qualitative research. any researcher visiting the same interview location would
undoubtedly produce alternative interpretations of the interview, and of the world
around the interview. i too would do so if i visited it again. i and the student would
have changed, the norwegian barque would be gone and the puffins would be out to
sea. The weather might be dark and forbidding instead of bright and inviting.
in making plans for filming subsequent students in distant placements, i reflected
not just about the reactions of previous audiences but about my own changing, self-
critical reactions. as an artist, i felt a sense of self- belief and justification in using video
to record the environment around the subject. i expected comments from audiences
about including ‘peripheral’ detail. i was also confident that an audience of art students
would not share or display similar puzzlement. i was not consciously trying to provoke
an audience reaction but found myself in a situation that artists commonly face; art
provokes an audience response. art can annoy, excite, disturb or please. The viewer is
given an insight into the thinking of the artist whether willingly or not. it was also clear
to me that i was becoming very much a part of the research. audiences were invited
to share my personal selections of time and space. The researcher, the audience, the
environment and the respondent were becoming inextricably linked to the research.
With this in mind, i began to become intrigued about my changing perceptions of the
research. Whilst continuing with the original distant placement focus, the use of video
was developing status as a parallel research focus.
intrigued by my reflections on the use of video, place, time and audience reaction, i
set out to experiment with subsequent video locations, respondents and settings.
another two contrasting placements were filmed. They were in the small coastal
village of Carnoustie and in the busy oil city of aberdeen. in the Carnoustie video,
students were filmed with art works done by pupils visible in the background, clearly
locating the respondents in an art and design classroom. in stark contrast, in the
aberdeen location, the student was deliberately placed against a matt black curtain. i
could see connections with art processes. artists consider positive and negative spaces
in a painting or the spaces around a sculpture. at what stage does the video image
become superfluous to the research? at the micro stage with the subject against a black
curtain? at the macro stage with the subject and their art room as a background? or in
the edited video in which the respondent in the art room is prefixed by images of the
front of the school, harbours and cliffs?
The second edited video was presented to some student teachers. They could clearly
associate with the respondent placed in the familiar art room setting of a placement
school. Furthermore they made comments about the distinctions between their own
urban placements in or close to edinburgh and the environment around the respondent
in the Carnoustie video. The responses showed that the meaning behind the framing
and editing of the image was as significant to the research as would be more traditional
aspects such as the transcribed words of the interviewee and an account of the policy
context of teacher education placements in scotland. it is clear that the material is
not reducible to standard modes of representation, and that further presentation and
dissemination will need to take account of this. insights are to be found both in the words
of the student and in my artistic response to a particular time and place. For instance
the research produces an insight to the way that ‘distant’ is itself an expressive term for