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Vignette: The unexpected

It was near the end of the workshop, and the materials table – once a neat arrangement of brushes, papers and pigments – had become a glorious mess. Most of the participants had drifted away, chatting quietly or tidying up. I was beginning to mentally close the session, preparing to gather feedback forms.

Then it happened.

A practitioner, silent until that point, picked up a small pot of gold glitter that had gone untouched all morning. Without a word, she walked to the floor, crouched down and began sprinkling it in wide, arching gestures across a sheet of butcher paper. Another practitioner knelt beside her to add paint with her fingers, and the two began to work together – laughing, gesturing, layering texture upon texture in a way that was utterly unscripted.

There was no prompt. No facilitation. No observer’s gaze, at least not at first. Just a spontaneous act of cocreation. I froze – not out of confusion, but recognition. This was the moment I had been waiting for without knowing it. It didn’t fit neatly into my research schedule. There were no data collection forms or observation templates for what had just occurred. And yet, it stayed with me longer than any planned activity – reverberating as a kind of ‘methodological whisper’, challenging me to reconsider where knowledge lives and how it surfaces.

Framing the question

How do researchers make room for the unplanned in research that is designed to be planned?

This question emerges repeatedly in my doctoral study which is exploring early years practitioners’ engagement with arts-based pedagogy. The vignette I share here is drawn from my own research and serves as a catalyst for this broader reflection, illustrating how lived moments in practice unsettle, redirect and enrich the inquiry. While my research was carefully structured around performative workshops and creative encounters, it was often the unstructured, spontaneous and unanticipated moments that proved most illuminating – the conversations over washing paint brushes, impromptu acts of making, or practitioners’ informal engagements with materials soon after the workshops finished. What began as a methodological sidenote soon transformed into a central concern: What is the role of serendipity in inquiry? And how might the unexpected not just trouble research, but actually constitute it?

Rather than seeing this gap as a methodological flaw, I began to view it as a space of rich epistemological potential. It was about letting research breathe.

Rethinking serendipity

‘As practice-based, arts-informed and participatory methods gain traction across educational research, so too must our understanding of how knowledge emerges in these contexts.’

Serendipity is often treated as a fortunate accident, something delightful but peripheral. But in the context of research, I argue that it demands more serious attention. Drawing on scholars like Stewart (2007) and Mazzei (2013), we might see these moments not as accidents or disruptions to research, but as events of knowledge production – where meaning surfaces unexpectedly, relationally and affectively. Serendipity here is not simply luck, but a way of being open to what exceeds our research plans: the unanticipated gesture, the half-formed thought, the material interruption that alters the course of inquiry. It is the pulse of research in motion, where surprise becomes method. This reframing has significant implications. It challenges assumptions about control, predictability and linearity, and also raises a methodological imperative: how might researchers not only accommodate but actively attune to the unexpected?

Methodological implications

The significance of this reflection lies in its broader methodological implications. As practice-based, arts-informed and participatory methods gain traction across educational research, so too must our understanding of how knowledge emerges in these contexts. The unexpected is not noise to be filtered out, it is often the signal itself. To recognise this is to accept that uncertainty, rather than being a weakness, can be a generative condition of inquiry. I therefore call for a shift: from researcher-as-planner to researcher-as-listener, one who attunes to the rhythms and ruptures of fieldwork. Such a stance demands patience, humility and an attentiveness to moments that might otherwise be overlooked: a pause, a hesitation, a resistance. I suggest that methodological rigour need not mean rigid adherence to a plan, but rather a deep reflexivity and responsiveness to the field’s unfolding complexity, where rigour is measured in sensitivity rather than certainty.

Glitter as methodological metaphor

Looking forward, I invite you to reimagine research as a living process, one that welcomes disruption, divergence and unpredictability as part of its ethical and epistemological makeup. Future work might ask how we prepare scholars to lean into the unexpected, to write in ways that hold the mess and the beauty of research as it unfolds. What happens if we allow serendipity to unsettle our tidy notions of ‘impact’ and ‘outcome’? I find myself returning to that moment of gold glitter scattering across the butcher paper – sparkling, unruly and impossible to sweep into a box. Perhaps research, too, can be like this: shimmering in its excess, refusing containment, and leaving traces that surprise us long after the workshop has ended.

References

Mazzei, L. A. (2013). Materialist mappings of knowing in being: Researchers constituted in the production of knowledge. Gender and Education, 25(6), 776–785.

Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary affects. Duke University Press.