Collage-making as a chance for educational research with health professionals

The contribution aims at providing a reflection on the use of “collage practice” in educational research involving health professionals. The use of collage has been highlighted in some recent literature related to qualitative inquiry in the social and educational field, especially in visual research (Banks, 2007), in arts-based and arts-informed methods (Knowles and Cole, 2008). Within this framework, this paper seeks to explore the use of collage as an investigation strategy in connection to narratives, referred to an arts-informed perspective (Knowles & Cole, 2008) of using art in research. Using images, as a source for creating meaning in the form of metaphor, referent is made to Ricoeur’s perspective (Ricoeur, 1976), his idea of metaphor as an instrument to reconstruct meaning. This is what can allow a new comprehension of the world, based on imaginative functions. Similarly, the narrative is a paradigmatic way for creating comprehension of the world, using metaphors. For this reason, the use of collage can be a valid research instrument especially when participants involved are adult professionals, in order to break the “fixed versions” of their stories, built during their lifetimes and working experience: the collage will be an instrument to introduce something unexpected that allows them to re-think their stories, producing different narrations (Biffi & Zuccoli, 2016). The paper will discuss the collage technique, proposed as an instrument that can help participants to go deeper into the meaning’s construction, before, after or beyond narrations related to lived experiences, as usually done in narrative (Connelly & Clandinin, 2000), and biographical research (Merril, West, 2009). With particular reference to health contexts, collage, accompanied by narration (Zannini, 2008), can be an instrument to allow professionals to reflect and give meaning to their everyday complex practice with patients. In order to clarify this issue, different examples of qualitative research, carried out by the authors (Gambacorti-Passerini, 2016; Gambacorti-Passerini et al. 2017) in health contexts will be presented and discussed. The search for visual and imaginative metaphors based on images and verbal narrations can create forms of meaning about everyone’s experience, which otherwise would not be discovered