This activity was developed within the Methods

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As academics, our methodological conversations are often pragmatic, focused on using certain approaches for certain aims, and less focused on deeper exploration of ways of ‘doing’ methods. In this blog post we explore our recent experience of creatively discussing methods within our department, the Manchester Institute of Education. We reflect on how outside-the-box thinking and collective methodological discussion can encourage self-interrogation and shared understandings across multi-disciplines. Specifically, we explore what happened when we asked colleagues: ‘If your method were an animal, what would it be?’

For Change project led by colleagues within the University of Manchester (Barron et al., 2021; Pottinger et al., 2022). Reading about this, we could see potential value in this ‘animal’ question as an outside-the-box methodological south korea email list conversation for our large, multi-disciplinary department, housing colleagues using both research and scholarship methods spanning epistemologies and paradigms. Various teams have reflected on how collective reflexive discussions can extend shared methodological understanding (see for example Siltanen et al., 2008), including through creative approaches (such as theatrical approaches, see Leggatt-Cook et al., 2011), and we were interested in its usefulness in our context.