My interest in Pedagogies of Discomfort (Boler, 1999; Cox, 2025; Hu, 2024) catalysed my ARP. Reflecting on group tutorials, and how confusion might be reframed as productive within them, I was reminded by Hu that “it is imperative to view emotions not as individual possessions but rather as socially and relationally constructed phenomena” (p. 71), and by Cox that educators must “actively and intentionally engage with emotion in teaching spaces.” In my ARP, I frame confusion as a difficult emotion that it is important to help students engage with productively, without fear or shame. This focus has led me to engage with The Seductions of Clarity (Nguyen, 2021), Dwelling as an Approach to Creative Pedagogy (Hughes, 2014), and Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education: Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum (Orr and Shreeve, 2017). These works have helped me explore the role confusion plays in learning and creative practice, and the challenges of navigating it within HE.
Nguyen (2021) frames confusion, with clarity as its inverse, as experiential states. They argue that clarity is “the feeling associated with understanding things” (p. 1), and that if clarity is a form of cognitive epiphany that is “incredibly pleasurable” (p. 17), then it “can be dangerously seductive” (p. 1). By contrast, although “a sense of confusion is a signal that we need to think more” (p. 2), it is often experienced as feeling stuck or lost. This raises an interesting problem: if confusion is an emotion we tend to shy away from, how can I help students reframe it as useful? Where Nguyen asks, “how [can] we use our feeling of understanding” (p. 10), I am interested in how we might use our feeling of confusion. I am in good company; foregrounding confusion is what Sara Ahmed (2017) calls “sweaty concepts” and what Donna Haraway (2016) terms “staying with the trouble.” The question then becomes how this can be achieved within the group tutorial format. As Orr and Shreeve (2017) argue, “uncertainty lies at the core of art and design teaching and learning” (p. 56) and fosters “productive confusion” (Bailey, 2014, cited p. 58); it is “not an absence of clarity… [but] the presence of ambiguity” (p. 58). Moving into data collection and analysis, a key concern will be how I can bring this positive and active framing of confusion into my teaching.
In contrast, Hughes (2014) argues that “not-knowing is not a logical and intelligent series of events” (p. 3). I found their emphasis on logical intelligence, and derision of emotion, patriarchal and colonial. They instead advocate for the “creative potential of staying still, or… dwelling” (p. 5). Repetition is a valuable tool, but I am interested in how it might be leveraged within confusion rather than in opposition to it.
This reading has helped me consider how I can “actively and intentionally engage with emotion” (Cox, 2025) in group tutorials, while understanding confusion as a “socially and relationally constructed” (Hu, 2024, p. 71). I explore this further through my thematic analysis.