For students with intellectual disabilities, art can play an important role in offering opportunities for self-expression, creativity, and learning — and teachers play a central role in enabling these opportunities. This research project investigates, in collaboration with teachers, art education for this student group, focusing on how teaching practices, materials, and methods can support students’ artistic understanding and participation, while simultaneously expanding teachers’ professional knowledge through collaborative inquiry. For this paper, the focus lies on the method of research circles and how they function as multimodal and multisensory sites.

The study is situated within a practice-based and participatory framework, taking the form of research circles where teachers and researchers meet to share experiences, conduct workshops, and jointly explore questions of teaching and learning in art. These research circles serve as spaces for testing and reflecting on teaching practices through workshop exercises. This multimodal and multisensory orientation emphasizes how tactile, spatial, visual, and auditory forms of engagement shape both pedagogical reflection and professional development. The empirical materials include fieldnotes, sound recordings, photographs, video recordings, and workshop materials.

Theoretically, the project draws on perspectives on multimodality and sociomateriality, emphasizing that knowledge appears as embodied, material, visual, and situated. Multimodality highlights how meaning is constructed through the interplay of multiple sensory and representational modes, while sociomateriality foregrounds the entanglement of people, materials, and practices in knowledge-making. Further, the project connects to traditions in visual arts education, exploring kinships between teaching methods and research methods. This framework allows for the study of how materials and methods mediate meaning-making and how multisensory experiences open pathways for understanding and communication.

Expected outcomes include insights into how multimodal and multisensory approaches can enhance teachers’ professional learning and strengthen art education for students with intellectual disabilities. This methodological contribution is of relevance to the Nordic context, for researchers engaged in empirical studies in general and in research circles specifically.