International Journal of Education & the Arts

Citation: Scott Shields, S. (2016). How I learned to swim: The visual journal as a companion to creative inquiry. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 17(8). Retrieved from http://www.ijea.org/v17n8/.

In this paper, I discuss my engagement with a visual journal as a companion to creative research practice during my dissertation research. Grounded in arts based research methodologies; I explore visual journals in relationship to research, reflection and analytic processes. I begin with a discussion of the visual journal as an artifact of qualitative thought, including its epistemological, theoretical, and methodological undercurrents. Next, through a series of visual journal examples, I discuss how this methodological engagement influenced my research trajectory. I close the paper with a discussion of the implications for using a visual journal in research and offer suggestions for how to start your own creative research endeavors.