Abstract
This study aims to depict the process through which students with special educational needs move toward self-expression, and to capture their transformation within classroom practice by using Creative Nonfiction (CNF). CNF, as a method within Arts-Based Research (ABR), reconstructs the complex experiences of educational settings in a narrative form based on classroom practice and dialogic records. Focusing on an information studies class at a Japanese special needs school for students with physical disabilities that used NHK for School’s u&i, this study examined two questions: (1) how students formed their own narratives through viewing the program, and (2) how the teacher employed the program and designed the learning environment to support the emergent process of self-expression. The findings illuminate the interactional and contextual conditions under which students’ self-expression begins to take shape, and articulate the practice-based knowledge involved in the teacher’s moment-to-moment judgments and design of the learning environment. Furthermore, the study positions CNF as an educational medium and demonstrates its methodological potential to evoke readers’ reflection. Overall, this study offers a perspective for reconsidering support for self-expression not merely as a set of techniques but as a practice of reconfiguring relationships and learning environments.
