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Does Arts-Based Research Have a Future? Inaugural Lecture for the First European Conferenceon Arts-Based Research: Belfast, Northern Ireland, June 2005Author(s): Elliot EisnerSource: Studies in Art Education, Vol. 48, No. 1, Arts-Based Research in Art Education (Fall,2006), pp. 9-18Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25475802.

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Copyright 006 bytheNationalArtEducation ssociation Studies nArtEducationA Journalf Issues ndResearch2006,48(1), 9-18

Does Arts-Based Research Have a Future?Inaugural Lecture for the First European Conference onArts-Based ResearchBelfast, Northern Ireland, June 2005Elliot EisnerStanfordUniversity

I want to start my comments with some observations about theconnection between the arts and the sciences and between the arts andresearch.Typically speaking,we do not tend to associate artistic activitywith the more cool, calculating, and, for some, rational character ofscientific investigation. The arts are guided by feel, while scientificactivities are thought to belong to the rational sphere; calculating,deliberate, logical and perhaps most of all, theoretical. Research iswhatscientists do. Painting or composing iswhat artistsdo. Thus, creatingsomething called arts-based research is to some a kind of oxymoron.So we start our conversation with a terminology that some people finddifficult to understand.

How do we argue the case that research is an activity that takes placein the arts just as itdoes in any of the sciences? By just as itdoes, Idon't mean that research done in the sciences and research done in thearts are identical. They are not identical. Even those fields thatdefinethemselves as sciences are not, from a methodological perspective,idenrical. Just what is the basis for believing that research is a properdescriptor forwhat people in the artsdo and that arts-based research isneither an anomaly nor an oxymoron?I think that initially one might conceptualize research as a broadumbrella process intended to enlarge human experience and promoteunderstanding. It is a process that isconcerned mainly with the creationofknowledge, ormore modestly,with theprocess ofknowing. Given thisbroad umbrella process, science can be regarded as a species of research;so too can the arts.But even science separated from the arts itself is a problematicconception. If the arts are regarded as forms of experience, the kindthatJohnDewey described inhis elegant book Art asExperience, then itcould be argued (and Iwould) that thefine artsdo not define the limitsof art. Aesthetic experience, which is at the core of art, can be securedin the process of doing scientific research aswell as in the satisfactionssecured from its results.

Correspondenceregardingthis article

may be sent to theauthor at StanfordUniversity, School ofEducation, 485 LasuenMall CU 221, Stanford,CA 94305-3096.E-mail: [email protected]

Studies inArt Education 9

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Elliot Eisner

The point of this brief resume is to liberate the concept of researchfrom domination by science alone and to recognize that science inpractice and in outcome can have significant aesthetic features. Veryoften they are the very features thatmotivate scientists to pursue theirwork. It is in this sense that thewell executed practice of science can beconsidered an art.

These considerations were not at all salient in the educationalresearch community during the 1960s, 70s, or '80s in the UnitedStates, at least. Research was considered a scientific enterprise, and thatprettymuch was all therewas to it.People who were looking forarthadto find the time and the place somewhere outside of the educationalresearch community.The view that Ihave justdescribed concerning theprimacy of scienceisnot particularly wwcommon today. It isdifficult to change canonicalbeliefs about how inquiry should proceed and how one comes tounderstand the universe inwhich we live, even ifthatuniverse is restricted to

schools and classrooms, to teaching and to curriculum.At the same time, itmust also be acknowledged thatminds arechanging and thatnew possibilities are being explored. How did all ofthis get started?Let me say a fewwords about the genesis of arts-basedresearch and later talk a littlebit about some of itsfeatures.

It was in 1993 that the firstArts-Based Research Institute wasoffered at Stanford University tomembers of theAmerican Educational Research Association. The Institute has been offered at Stanfordand at Arizona State University virtually every other year since then.

My aim in initiating the institutewas driven by a tension that I feltpersonally as a scholar trained in the social sciences but immersed inthe arts.That tension engendered the idea that the artsmight be usedin some productive way tohelp us understand more imaginatively andmore emotionally problems and practices that warrant attention in ourschools. At the same time, the idea that the arts could be at the coreof research seemed more than a bit oxymoronic. Some encouraged meto talk about arts-based inquiry rather than arts-based research. I didnot succumb to that temptation, knowing what matters most in U.Sresearch universities.

The initial iteration of these conjectures about the relationshipbetween the arts and educational researchhad been expressed earlier inthe concepts of educational connoisseurship and educational criticism,two notions that Iwrote about inmy books The Educational Imagination in 1971, Cognition and Curriculum in 1982, and theEnlightenedEye in 1991. Could therebe, I askedmyself, an approach to educationalresearch that relied upon the imaginative and expressive crafting of aform of representation inways that enlarge our understanding of what

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1 Aesthetics. (1995).Los Angeles: J.PaulGettyTrust, InstituteforArts Education.

perspectives. That iswhy new perspectives are needed. Among themostprominent of these is literary orm; however, literary orm isnot theonlyform that arts-based research can employ.The world revealed throughfilm and video are other resources thatcan display qualities thatwill nottake the impress of linguistic form.Consider the following. Imagine apresentation by an art teacher and his class interacting in the teacher'sclassroom. Here isone version ofwhat might have occurred.An Art Teacher atWork

What is going on when this high school teacher of art, teachesaesthetics to a class of inner cityyouth?1What did you see and what doyou make of it?The teachers firstmove is to help his students recognize the differences between two types of activities they routinely engage in, onepractical and the other aesthetic. In effect, inhelping them grasp thisdistinction hewishes to show them that therearedifferentways inwhichtheworld can be experienced. He proceeds to illustrate this distinctionnot by resorting to an exotic form of fine art or philosophical theory,but by calling theirattention to a common activity,pouring cream intoa cup of coffee.He first selects a Styrofoam cup and pours a little coffeeinto the cup, adds a littlecream, tastes it,and then points out that theprimary function of pouring the cream into the coffee ispractical. Hethen uses a transparent plastic cup and carefully pours a little coffeeinto it and then a little cream while observing theway inwhich thewhite cream seems to explode in the cup for a brief few seconds after itis poured. He delights in the beautiful burst of cloud-like formationsthat the cream in the dark coffee creates. That kind of an activity,hetells the class, is an activity experienced for its own satisfaction; it is anaesthetic activity, not simply a practical one.The example is something that students are familiarwith, but not intheway the teacher addresses it.The largerpoint of the lesson is thatperceptual attitude is a choice, that there ismore than one way to see.This point is reinforced by giving the students terms?practical andaesthetic?with which to frame thisdistinction.

The teachermoves from the coffee example to the taskhis studentsare to engage in; this isno mere spectator activity. hat taskpertains towriting about what they see, but not just any old form ofwriting. Hewants a form ofwriting that has literaryqualities. He doesn't use theterm literary, ut that iswhat he hopes theywill create, and to increasethe probability that theywill, he tries tomake sure that theyhave asense ofwhat literary anguage entails.

This is accomplished in twoways. First, he models the use of thelanguage by giving them a picture ofwhat it looks like. Second, hegives them examples of what theirpeers have written in the past, thus




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Does Arts-Based Research Have a Future?

making itclear that the task isdoable and that itdoes not depend onspecial forms of adult expertise. In fact, he also gives them a negativeexample, that is,what their language should not look like.He moves on bygiving examples of experiences theyhad or could havehad in theirown lives inwhich practical experiences were transformedinto aesthetic ones; watering the lawn, being lost in the experience ofbeauty, again, not in some exotic material outside their experience, butwithin theirexperience. The examples he usesmake empathic formsofthinking possible.The teacher then introduces the materials with which they are towork. These materials, water and red ink, are significant. Each studentnot only gets his or her own cup of water, the teacher comes around todrop the red dye in their cup individually; personal attention isbeingprovided here. The red dye in thewater invites projection. Its fluidquality, much like a cloud, makes itpossible to see in the unfoldingburst of form images thatwill receivewithout difficulty themeaningseach studentwants to confer upon them. The unfolding clouds of redopen the door wide to individual interpretation.Unlike many tasksin school, this exercise has no single right answer. The key word issingle ; not any responsewill do. The response needs tohave a literaryor poetic feel, that'swhat his talk about similewas about. Thus, whatwe have here is an open-ended task that invites an individual responseand that yet is not simply an instance of anything goes. Not everything goes here. The heart of the problem resides for the students inthe relationship between seeing and expressing. Seeing isnecessary inorder to have a content to express. Expression is necessary to makepublic the contents of consciousness, and sowhat we have here is animaginative transformation of a perceptual event that is imbued withmeaning whose features and significance the students try to transforminto language capable of carrying thatmeaning forward.

This transformation is, of course, what writing is about. Somehowthewriter must find away within the affordances and constraints ofa linguistic medium to try to create the structural equivalent of theexperience. Often in the very process of representation new ideas willemerge that are then themselves the subject of expressive aims. This isexemplified in a student's narrative about the destruction and contamination of theNative American population. When asked towrite a briefreaction to thedye exploding in thewater, this iswhat shewrote:The clear crystalwater looks tome like the landscape the nativeIndians love to live in.The land thatwas given to them from theGreat Spirit.As thedye drops, Columbus lands. The Europeansnot only destroy it,but pollute theirbeautiful landwith diseases.The red dye spreads throughout the pure souls of innocent




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Native Americans. The red dye destroys theirpeople, their tribes,theirculture, their beliefs. In good hearts, these beliefs willnever die.It seems likely tome that these ideaswere close to the surface of herconsciousness and were triggeredby the color and form of the ink. Butnote that the narrative that shewrote had itselfa powerful expressivequality, not only because of its imagery,but because of itsform.Thinkabout the coda she used to bring her narrative to closure. In goodhearts, she says, these beliefswill never die. It is in the relationshipof image to form, ormore precisely, the forms her images take, thatwearemoved by her words.This situation is one inwhich students use qualitative forms of

thinking to do a number of things. First,perception, not mere recognition, is employed; the teacher is asking the students notmerely to lookin order to categorize, but to see. Second, the student's imagination isengaged, in part because of the supportive relationship the teacher haswith the students, but also because the exploding forms the ink createsinvite such a response. In a sense, the free-floating cloud of red dye inwater becomes a Rorschach-like experience. Third, the students mustfind a form, a form crafted in narrative that conveys their experience.They become writers. Their writing begins with vision and ends withwords.We as readers or listeners,begin with theirwords and endwithvision. The circle is complete. The artful crafting of language so thatit expresseswhat sighthas given birth to iswhat this short episode isabout. Finally, theybring closure to the episode by sharing theirworkwith each other.

Thus far I have tried to identify some of the issues, some of thehistory, and some examples of aspects of arts-based research.

What I also feel a need to comment about pertains to questionshaving to do with ideas such as objectivity, validity, and generalization. These three concepts almost always come up in discussions of thebelievability of arts-based research. Iwill not go into a textbook analysisof such notions; textbooks have never been particularly attractive tome. However, consider the process of generalization.As you well know, in standard statistical studies, generalization ispossible insofaras the sample selected from a population was random,which makes itpossible to inferconditions or features to the population that are found in the sample, within, of course, some measure ofprobability. But what do you do with an n of 1?Can generalizationsbe derived from a single case or from a narrative that has not beensubject to quantification? My answer to those questions is yes. Whatneeds to be done is to think about generalization in away that isquitedifferent from its statistical parent. In fact,we generalize all the time




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and have done so even before statistics became a refined inferentialprocess. Ifyou think about generalization in theway inwhich a greatplay?Death ofa Salesman, for example?makes itpossible foryou tolocate in the lives of others the travails thatWillie Loman experiencedas a traveling salesman, you get some sense of the ways inwhich an n of1 can help you understand situations even though the initiating imagewas not statistically selected. A powerful example from the visual artsis found inmost expressionistic works, includingworks that precededthem. Francisco Goya, Pablo Picasso, Velasquez?all create imageswhose meanings transcend the linguistic.Where would we bewithoutRembrandt or thegreatworks ofAfrican tribal art?Art provides canonical images that organize our world and thatapply to more than we bargained for. Sometimes these images are sopowerful thatwe find itdifficult to see theworld they address in anyother way; art not only imitates life, life often imitates art. Characterizations that are artfully crafted of classrooms, teaching practices, andschool environments, perform important cognitive functions. Theygive us a structurewith which to organize our perceptions.With such astructure,we can check out the applicability of the canonical image toother situations.The conceptual parents of thekind of generalizabilitythat I am talking about isperhaps most often located in literature andpoetry, but are also provided infilm, video, and multiple other genres.

We can reach into the humanities to gain insights that can guide ourperception and influence our courses of action.When itcomes tomatters of validation (ifthat is the rightword foraprocess so humanistic in character), we can test the utility of arts-basedresearch by its referential dequacy. By referentialadequacy Imean theextent to which we can locate in what the critic claims is there. Thus,when an art critic talks about a particular painting in a particular way,the critic's achievements are located in our ability to notice what thecritic claims to be there and which we, in fact,discover by virtue of theobservations that he or she provided. The aim of criticism, wroteJohnDewey, is the reeducation of the perception of thework of art(1934). I couldn't agreemore.

In addition to referential adequacy as a means of assessing the validityof arts-based research, there is the process of structural corroboration.Structural corroboration is simply another way of talking about thecircumstantial evidence that enables you to support a conclusion abouta state of affairs. What are the markers that allow you to draw conclusions or to make observations about the situations you are studying?Put very simply, perhaps too simply, is there sufficient evidence torenderyour rendering of a situation believable?In talking bout believability, Iam not suggestingthatthere reformulas,recipes, or rule-governed procedures for making such a determination:




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That most exquisite of human capacities must be exercised inorder todraw a conclusion about the believability of a rendering.The capacitytowhich I am referring isjudgment. Differences among scholars thatrelate to descriptions or interpretations of themeaning of a situationare always subject to debate. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz oncecommented that the aim of ethnography is to increase the precisionthroughwhich we vex each other (Geertz, 1973). Put another way,through ourwork we enrich the conversation and refineour sensitivityto the subtle but significant aspects of the situation we are examining.Finally, consensual validation emerges as a potential means to securethe believability of a description, interpretation, or appraisal of a stateof affairs.By consensual validation, Imean that there ismore than one

person describing, interpreting,evaluating, and thematizing the situation at hand. One finds upon analysis that there is sufficientoverlap tobreed confidence thatwhat these respective critics say is there andwhatitmeans is supported by theother's rendering of the situation. In statistical canons, it isoften referredto as inter judge agreement.As I have already indicated, altering deeply rooted conceptions ofrealityhas never been easy. Itwon't be easy in the educational researchcommunity. In our traditional epistemology we employ a language thattends to objectify nature and which underestimates the extent towhichany form of knowing is a construction and not simply a discovery.I titled this lecture, Does Arts-Based Research Have a Future?Let me try to provide a tentative answer to that question.What we see taking place in educational research is a gradual expansion of themethods that are considered legitimate for understandingschools, teaching, and learning. We are pushing towards pluralism. Atthe same time, in theUnited States at least, there is a national pushtowards a convergent approach to educational research, one thatemphasizes randomized experimental field trials as the gold standard.There are on the one hand constraining conditions that are driven by anational anxiety concerning the quality of our schools, and at the sametime, a growing recognition that there ismore than one story to tell andmore than one set of methods to employ. Clearly, arts-based research isan expression of theneed fordiversity and a tendency to push towardsa de-standardization of method. What is not clear is how much destandardization those in the research community will tolerate and, atthe same time, accept as being legitimate.What is the future of arts-based research in education? There areseveral features that need to be taken into account if arts-based educational research is to have a future. First, arts-based educational researchneeds tohave a cadre of scholars committed to itsexploration. By scholarscommitted to itsexploration Imean individualswho regard arts-based




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educational research as theirprimary researchvehicle. These are peoplewho define their research identitywith respect to the conduct of artsbased research as itaddresses critical educational questions. Luckily, thefield has such people in itsmidst.Second, another consideration deals with the attitudes of existinguniversity faculty.University faculty need to be supportive of artsbased research and students in theirmidst need tofind equal support intheir use of such an approach. It is not uncommon for some universityfaculty to feel a sense of estrangement, or at least loneliness,with respectto arts-based research.Very often their colleagues know nothing of itsfeatures,but, nevertheless,may be suspicious of its scholarlymerits. Allthatneeds to be changed.The most potent source of change pertains to the quality of artsbased research that isdone. Good arts-based research ought togeneratequestions worth asking and ideasworth pursuing. The quality of ourwork is,by far,our most reliable vehicle for insuring the future of artsbased research.Good work may require establishing durable connections between faculties in schools of education and thosewho workin departments in the arts and sciences.What is needed are peoplewho can provide the distributed expertise that good collective worktypically requires.Arts-based researchwill need people who know howto create films, videos, narratives, literary texts, as well as texts of othersorts. We need to broaden the array of forms of representation that canbe used in the conduct of educational research. Arts-based research

should serve as an exemplar of how such uses are crafted and come tobe employed.Yet another consideration pertains to the availability of resourcesthrough which non-text work can be presented. How is film made available to awider public?What do we do with video? And who shouldevaluate quality of thework in thefirstplace? Arts-based researchneedsan outlet, a forum, something appropriate for handling the kind of

messages it provides. This is no easy task, but it is an important one,necessitating inextricable ties to digital technology, theWorld WideWeb, and other contemporary electronic media.Thus, my answer to my own question is that arts-based educationalresearchwill have a futuredepending upon our ability to reach for theheavens by crafting research that reveals to us what we have learnednot to see and on the public's willingness to accept what we have madevisible as one useful way to understand and renew schools. In openingour eyes, arts-based educational research may become something ofa revolution in awareness, epistemology, and inmethod. But itwillnot bewithout itsbattles.When this occurs, we would also do well torememberAlfred Lord Tennyson's poem Ulysses (Tennyson, 1842).




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So I close my comments with Ulysses' words tohis old comrades as heleaves his ageing wife Penelope and his home in Ithaca to seek adventureon an uncharted sea.To encourage his old buddies to join himon

what surelywill be a perilous voyage, Ulysses tells them this:And tho'We are not now the strengthwhich inold daysmoved heaven and earthThat which we are we areOne equal temper of heroic heartsMade weak by time and fate but strong inwillTo strive, to seek to find and not toyield.We, too, should not yield.

ReferencesDewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. ew York: Capricorn Books.Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation fcultures. ewYork: Basic Books.Tennyson, A. (1842). Ulysses, inTennyson: electedPoems. InA. Day, (Ed.). NewYork: PenguinBooks.

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