arts-based educational research then, now, and later

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Guest Editorial: Arts-Based Educational Research Then, Now, and LaterAuthor(s): Tom BaroneSource: Studies in Art Education, Vol. 48, No. 1, Arts-Based Research in Art Education (Fall,2006), pp. 4-8Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25475801.

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Copyright 006 bytheNationalArtEducationAssociation Studies n rt EducationA Journalf Issues ndResearch2006, 48(1), 4-8

GUEST EDITORIALArts-Based Educational Research Then, Now,and LaterTom BaroneArizona State University

Correspondenceconcerning thisguesteditorialmay be sentto the author [email protected]

As a doctoral student at Stanford in the 1970s, Iwas fortunate to beable to observe up close the beginnings of a radically new approach tothe study ofmatters educational. This was the period in the career ofmy advisor and mentor, Professor Elliot Eisner, during which he wasimagining a place for the artswithin the fields of educational researchand evaluation.Of course, within these olden, ifnot golden, days of educationalresearch orthodoxy, any questioning of social science as the exclusive

methodological wellspring was widely regarded as heretical. Nevertheless, no doubt encouraged by certain developments in the largerintellectual counterculture, Eisner managed to disrupt the prevailingmonolithic mindset, successfully challenging the taken-for-grantednotion that the scientificmethod provided the only useful avenue forenhancing educational policy and practice.Over time,Eisner has been joined inhis effortsby increasingnumbersof converts and disciples, including yours truly.Of course, the legitimacy of non-scientific approaches to educational research remainscontested, with the nostalgic notion of a gold standard having beenrecently resurrected in the United States through policy initiatives atthe level of the federal government. Nevertheless, it isprimarily due tothe groundbreaking work of Eisner that today s traditionalmethodologists in the academy find itmore difficult to dismiss those of us wholook to the arts for both a process of researching educational phenomena and ameans fordisclosing what we find.A presence within the educational research community has indeedbeen established?through conference sessions, journal articles andbooks, theses and dissertations, university courses, workshops and institutes, special interest groups, electronic listservs, websites, encyclopedia and handbook entries, newsletters, and so on. The literature thatsuggests rationales for, and addresses pertinent issues related to, artsbased research has burgeoned. An untold number of examples of artsbased research have found theirway into print, and others have beenread/displayed/performed at scholarlymeetings and conferences. Entirejournal issues have been devoted to the topic. And its thoughtful and

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Editorial: Arts-Based Educational Research Then, Now, and Later

provocative contentsmake this issue of Studies inArt Education amongthemost notable of them.Enclosed are essays by several important scholarswho are currentlyworking within (what isby now) the tradition of arts-based educationalresearch.The firstof these isEisner himself, offeringa brief,up-to-date

commentary on the status and possible future of arts-based research.Five other essayists move to describe, endorse, reinscribe, challenge,and extend some of the premises and practices that have come to beassociated with this approach.Indeed, these articles suggest a rich harvest from a methodological field first claimed, cultivated, and planted by Eisner so manydecades ago. They reveal nothing less than a bumper crop of theoretical notions regarding arts-based inquiry and of actualizations of theapproach in specific projects. While acknowledging Eisner's earlyspadework, these authors suggest expansions of theoriginal boundariesof arts-based research, and even alterations?some slight, some morepronounced?of its identity. Indeed, amotif of sorts can be found inthe (sometimes tacit) homage paid by one author after another to thelegacy of Eisnerian-style arts-based research, even as they suggest alternate labels?aesthetically-based research, a/r/tography, arts-inspiredresearch, arts practice as research?for what seem to be, inmost cases,newly designated specieswithin an established genus.Indeed, each of the approaches described and exemplified heredistinguishes itselfas an important addition to the earlier contributions of Eisner and other arts-based researchpioneers. The ideaswithinthe essay by Liora Bresler are perhaps most strongly reminiscent of thatearlier literature.Entitled Toward Connectedness: Aesthetically BasedResearch, her contribution is a reinforcement of connections (or arecognition of the softness of the boundaries) between the artisticexperience and the long-established traditions of qualitative research inthe human studies.

While early arts-based researchers were often eager to distinguishtheirmethodological turffrom thatof the social scientists, theyalso, inan era of genre blurring, occasionally explored the links between, andthe border crossingswithin, thework of social scientists and artists.Mining in this vein, Bresler suggestswhat qualitative researchers canlearn from an engagement with the arts?a set of habits ofmind thatincludes an aesthetically based capacity forempathic understanding. Indoing so, Bresler puts a new spin on venerable ideas firstexplored bythe likes ofWilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber.While Bresler is herself a music educator, her avid interest in thenature and history of qualitative research reflects that of hermentor,Elliot Eisner. Recall that Eisner himself (ifnot Bresler) was and is as

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much a curricularist as an arts educator. So were many of his doctoralstudents in curriculum studieswhose theses and subsequent work in thelast quarter of the 20th century evidenced a kind of survival instinct.Deeply convinced of thepotential of arts-based inquiryas a form ofnonscientificqualitative research for reducing the distance between schoolbased activity and genuine education, but also desiring viable academiccareers, some of us hankered for acceptance of our work within theprevailing educational research establishment. Our twofold strategyforgaining legitimacy for arts-based research also bore the stamp ofEisner.Following his lead,we younger scholars aimed to argue and explain ourway into the research citadel, while occasionally offering examples ofwhat itwas we were arguing for.

That strategyhas indeed led to the presence justmentioned. Artsbased research has established roots, spreadwide, and grown tall.Theinitial vision of Elliot Eisner has, inmany ways, indeed come to pass.Still, in those days, our quest for legitimacyalso constrained us in severalways; an examination of our efforts reveals an incremental approachto the selling of a revolutionary idea. For example, as observers havenoted, in those early decades of arts-based research proponents wereinfatuatedwith the literary rts.Consider thatEisner's initial focuswas,after all, on the possibilities of transporting the notion of word-basedart criticism into the field of education. And even his laterprominentadvocacy for the novel as a dissertation (especially the famous AERAdebates with Howard Gardner) involved the literary rts.But this initial emphasis on linguistically based art serves to camouflage something important that I first confronted in a conversation inEisner's office on one autumn Palo Alto afternoon. Reflecting on myown dissertation-in-progress that explored literary forms of journalistic nonfiction as an arts-based research process and means for disclosing findings, I (a vulnerable doctoral student) expressed apprehensionabout the (for 1978) avant garde nature of the topic. But my worriesquickly paled in the lightof the grander vision Eisner shone

on them:what will be trulyrevolutionary,he replied,will be the firstdissertationin education that takes the form of a symphony, or an exhibition ofsculptures, or a theatrical production.

But that personal communication represents merely one pieceof evidence of Eisner's early hopes for a range of art forms to beemployed?many, predictably, later rather than sooner?by arts-basedresearchers. Eisner was not reticent to speak publicly and towriteabout this robustly pluralistic conception regarding the spectrum ofmodalities appropriate for use in arts-based inquiries and disclosures.And glimmers of that inclusiveness are evident in thisvery issue, inhisreiterated endorsement of video, film, andweb-mediated forms of artsbased research.




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The essays in this issue suggest the possibility that Eisner's boldimaginings have been, over time, realized, and maybe even surpassed.Read, for example, about Kristin Congdon's intriguing Folkvine.orgcommunity project thatostensibly involvesdigitalmedia, but that,as theauthor points out, also grows out of the various contributors' expertise inthe following technologies and more: film,painting, sculpture, photography, performance art, creative writing, animation, graphic design.And in his ambitious article, Performing Arts-based EducationResearch: An Epic Drama of Practice, Precursors, Problems and Possibilities, James Sanders reviews and discusses (among other things)arts-based research as enacted by late 20th- and early 21st-centuryacademicians in education and related fields. Sanders' cataloguing isextensive indeed, and theminds of readerswho have not been closelyattending to themore recent stateof playmay boggle at the breadth ofthe field nowadays.

More controversially, Sanders moves to transmute the identity ofrecent arts-based researchers from that of scholars standing on Eisnerianshoulders to the prolificprogeny of past performance [artists] (p. 11).This identityshiftfrom arts-based inquiry as qualitative research towardthe practice of artmay indeed represent a future vision for arts-basedresearchers, even though, in especially perceptive sections on obstacles, possibilities, and potentialities, Sanders ponders the natureof the constraints on and desirable openings for arts-based researchersin relation to academia, as well as the broader context of reactionarygovernmental policy.

The latter concern ismost relevant, of course, to those of us, including Sanders, who are situated geographically within theUnited States.More than our arts-based colleagues from other countries, we maynowadays feel a need to guard against setbacks in our still ongoingquest for fullmethodological citizenship that arises out of regressivesocial policy and academic corporatism.

This may, indeed, explain the non-U.S. origins of the new emphasisaway from arts-based inquiry as a form of qualitative social research andtoward its commonalities with art practice and teaching. Is itpossiblethat theCanadian-hatched moves towards a/r/tographyby Rita Irwinand her colleagues inBritishColumbia [see amarvelous example of onesuch project herein], or the image-based and arts-inspired approachesof other Canadian scholars, suggest a freedom from the worries overfuture restrictions that plague many researchers operating within thecurrentU.S. political climate?In his essay entitled ResearchActs inArt Practice, Graeme Sullivan'splea is, similarly,for an explicit recognition of artmaking as a site forresearch. Some readers may read his brief for approaches to visualarts research that are credible within the academy and within the art

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world but that are not enslaved... [by] existing frameworks (p. 11),as dismissing as constricted those forms of arts-based research (as, forexample, narrative storytelling) that are supposedly more determinedby conditions and protocols framed by the social sciences (p. 10).Sullivan's articlemay indeed be seen by some asmore exclusionarythan others in this set. (Ironically, Sullivan suggests analogous exclusionary tendencies within other unidentified arts-based research advocatesand practitioners. These include unnamed folks who are supposedlyskeptical that non-linguistic forms of artistic engagement such asperformance, time-based media, and the plastic arts, can be definedand defended as researchmodalities [p. 10].)But I prefer to read Sullivan's essay as a persuasive explication ofan additional, rather than singularly appropriate, approach to thinkingabout educational research that employs inquiry and design elementsassociated with any form of art. I see it as a wise shift in emphasisreflecting concerns of academic exclusion, an orientation with (asSullivan notes) historical roots in a need to legitimate, in theUnited

Kingdom and elsewhere, university-based artists and art educators asreal researchers.Read thisway, it can be viewed as enhancing what has over thedecades been earned through the arduous efforts of so many artsbased researchers of various stripes in various places. Then, for me, the

power of Sullivan's contribution matches those of the other authorsin this splendid edition of Studies inArt Education, all ofwhom seemintent upon securing a productive future for a research approach witha remarkable past.



arts-based educational research then, now, and later

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