The Supermodel Astronaut Challenge: traversing frames of mind Leanne Glasser, Emily Young and Pauline Sameshima Department of Education, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Canada Abstract Purpose – The Supermodel Astronaut (SMA) Challenge began with a group of women in a graduate class who joined together to take the pledge “I Am Enough.” The goals of the pledge are to practice positive affirmative actions of self-acceptance, self-grace, self-improvement and positive encouragement of oneself and others. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach – The SMA Challenge involves an online video pledge to encourage women and girls to demonstrate their opposition to the promotion of singular ideals of body perpetuated through media. Various individuals and groups have created music videos titled SMA to the soundtrack created by Ellen Tift (the originator of the project). Findings – Here, framed by Daignault’s (1983) theories on curriculum construction, the authors critically reflect on their support of the idea of the video, but also their apprehension and insecurities in participating in the video production. Originality/value – From reflections, writings and dialogic discussions, they determined five embodied frames of mind that supported them in traversing the liminal space of new learning: imagining the possible, learning in doing, settling in vulnerability, journeying through empowerment and heightening self-reflection. Keywords Feminism, Qualitative research, Education, Arts education Paper type Research paper Introduction What started as a group of women in an education graduate course exploring the difficulties in creating a lip sync video to the song “Supermodel Astronaut” (SMA) (written and composed by Ellen Tift, 2014) evolved into a broader learning opportunity to explore the impact of embodied education through the SMA Challenge project. Through the team’s collaborative inquiry, they discovered that despite coming from varying backgrounds, they felt similar insecurities. The video is located here: https://youtu.be/tlUx-qtGLJk The name “Supermodel Astronaut” (SMA) in itself is an ironic moniker for a women’s movement. While “Supermodel” connotes idealistic conformity with an image and role and “astronaut” implies a far-reaching goal, the challenge reminds women that power and beauty are within. The project began as an arts-integrating, creativity-generating challenge in an education graduate course while studying arts-informed inquiry (Cole and Knowles, 2001) and arts-based research (Barone and Eisner, 2012). As outwardly competent and educated women in a graduate program, the team was surprised after many group discussions and debriefings at how insecure and vulnerable each member felt about being involved in making a video that was to go online. As teachers, the group decided to document and analyze their experiences, and then attempt to distill any ideas and hypotheses relevant to curriculum development. The teachers’ findings suggest that transformative learning spaces require creative tools for moving from the known to the unknown. The team found creative tools for traversing between the liminal spaces of fear and learning (Daignault, 1983) that were grouped into five categories: imagining the possible, learning in doing, settling in vulnerability, journeying through empowerment and heightening self-reflection. Daignault encourages learners to articulate the learning passage, to perform “knowledge through a passageway” by thinking aloud (1983, pp. 7-13). Qualitative Research Journal Vol. 19 No. 4, 2019 pp. 415-425 © Emerald Publishing Limited 1443-9883 DOI 10.1108/QRJ-02-2019-0023 Received 24 February 2019 Accepted 6 June 2019 The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/1443-9883.htm 415 The SMA Challenge