Creating Spaces for Reflection with Digital Autoethnography: Students as Researchers into Their Own Practices

This article discusses how digital technologies give students agency in creating new spaces for their reflective activity. Undergraduate art and design students from across fine art, textiles, fashion, interiors, graphics and illustration and animation degree programmes experimented with digital tools, platforms and social media to document and examine their own making. The research took place at a further education college with externally validated higher education provision in the North West of England. Thirteen students signed up as research participants and shared blogs and documentation, had tutorials recorded and completed in‐depth interviews. The research project investigated how and what technologies students used and whether their use stimulated in‐depth reflection on their art and design practices and developing professional identities. This student‐led pedagogy evidences an inclusive approach where they used autoethnography to support themselves as researchers into their own practices; the methodology became a strategy for critical and dialogic reflection. Participants took part in several unstructured interviews providing a wealth of rich phenomenological data. Thematic analysis as defined by Braun & Clarke (2006), was used as a method to analyse and identify patterns of experience, interpretations and descriptions across the data set, enabling me to see and make sense of these collective and shared meanings.