**2. Arts-Based Educational Research**

The monologue as a form for the exploration of my research and personal questions is a format that is familiar to me as an actor, director, stage manager and producer. I have used the monologue as a convention in several instances as an arts-based educational research (ABER) methodological underpinning that allows one to weave together qualitative approaches and arts-based inquiries and engagements into data collection and representation. ABER offers a way to connect with topics and content using arts-inspired forms. Furthermore, arts-based educational research offers a way to use art to create openings/ruptures for conversation, questioning, and reverberations that other forms of research do not value or prioritize. As I engaged with texts, people, ideas, and emotions during the six years of data collection that led to *Smallest circles first*, I turned to ABER to make visible some of the invisible fears, assumptions, limitations and emotions that I have been confronted with while engaging in decolonizing and anti-racist work. In this way, ABER provides a space for the use of drama and theatre to complicate and create counter-narratives that provoke, promote and provide productive, paradoxical spaces from which new understandings of being and becoming can emerge.
