Artsbased Research

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Arts-based Research

• COE501/EDP591

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The Origins of Arts-Based Research

• It was in 1993 that the first Arts-Based Research
  Institute was offered to members of the American
  Educational Research Association. The Institute
  was held at Stanford and has been offered at
  Stanford and at Arizona State virtually every
  other year since then. My aim in initiating the
  Institute was driven by a tension that I felt
  personally as a scholar and as someone immersed
  in the arts. That tension pertained to the idea
  that the arts might be used in some productive
  way to help us understand more imaginatively and
  more emotionally problems and practices that
  warrant attention in our schools. At the same
  time the idea that the arts could be at the core
  of research seemed a bit oxymoronic.
• --Elliot Eisner

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What is Arts-Based Research?

• Could there be, I asked myself, an approach to
  educational research that relied upon the
  imaginative and expressive crafting of a form in
  ways that enlarge our understanding of what was
  going on, say, in teaching, or in the school
  cafeteria, or in the high school mathematics
  classroom?
• --Elliot Eisner

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Mary Clare Powell

• It all began when I set up a little research
  study because I wanted to know the impact of our
  Creative Arts in Learning program on some of our
  teachers.  Five were from a cohort in Gardner, MA
  (rural/small town) and five were from Boston
  Public Schools (urban).  In addition, 11 teachers
  who had completed the program in Derby Line, VT
  were interviewed once about its impact. 
• Using a case study method, I interviewed each
  teacher and observed her teach about 3 times in
  two years of going through the program.  They
  filled out questionnaires after each course.  The
  names of the principal participants follow the
  article.
• When I decided to extract poems from these
  transcripts, the changes in the inner lives of
  teachers came clearly into focus. Their poems,
  selected and edited by me, became the heart of my
  written piece.  My prose, which surrounded their
  poems, was explanatory.
• But I wasnt happy with this.  I personally hate
  reading prose interrupted by poetry, even though
  Im a poet.  So I decided to make poems out of
  my own prose.  Through this form, this dialogue
  between me and them in poems, taught me as I
  worked and re-worked them.

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Mary Clare Powell

• Poetry is slanted, it is metaphorical, and it
  must be read more slowly than prose and with an
  open heart.  Id love to hear from any readers
  about how this form strikes you.
• I want to know
• What changed inside you
• as you went through
• this integrated arts
• program? 
• How did you shift and morph
• inside?  And how do you
• describe your pretty self
• now?

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The Choking Rooster SingsBy Chris Connor

• During chorus class in 7th grade,
• the teacher was trying to establish
• sopranos, altos, baritones.
• She set up a divider,
• asked three children
• to stand behind it
• to sing the scale.
• After my group, the teacher said,
• and I quote,
• Which one of you sounds
• like a choking rooster?
• The other two pointed at me.
•  
• From that day on I mouthed
• the words when we performed.
•  
• I think it hurt so much
• because I loved singing.
• At home I would sing all the time.

• I carried that hurtful negative
• comment with me all my life
• until this Master's program
• when a special person, Louise,
• changed my view
• and gave back
•  what was destroyed 19 years ago.
•  
• She said Everyone can sing! 
• We were never forced, 
• and I eased myself
• into all the songs.
• After the two weekends
• I was actually singing,
• not mouthing the words.
•  
• Since then I have taught
• many of the songs to my kids.
• I even sing in front of parents

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Poet as a Teacherby Mary Clare Powell

• I don't really trust research.
• There, that's said.
• A house of cards,
• with one person's data,
• valid or not,
• used as a brick
• in building another person's
• new house.
• And so on.
•  
• I love being a poet.
• She doesn't sit for hours 
• Poring over words.
• She wanders, she waits,
• hunts for an experience,
• opens herself to whatever comes along.
•  The poet sits and sits,
• she sifts and sifts. 

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Institute for Documentary Studies, Duke

• At the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke
  University, we recognize that the tobacco
  experience in Durham and the surrounding area is
  an important story in all its complexities, one
  that we should help tell through documentary work
  in collaboration with communities and
  individuals. Our 2003 summer audio institute,
  "Hearing Is Believing," cosponsored by American
  RadioWorks, sent twenty-four participants on
  assignment (in groups of two) into the heart of
  the Piedmont tobacco community to listen to and
  record those who lived part of tobacco's history.

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Safe Youth Coalition
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The Challenges of Arts-Based Research

• One of these tensions pertains to a deep dilemma.
  This dilemma relates, on the one hand, to the
  desire to work imaginatively and, on the other
  hand, as a result of doing so producing material
  that does not communicate.
• Surely one of the functions of educational
  research in general and arts-based research in
  particular, is to make vivid certain qualities
  encountered by the researcher normally, but not
  necessarily in the context of schools. Will the
  images made through arts-based research possess a
  sufficient degree of referential clarity to
  provide a common understanding of the situation
  being addressed, or is a common understanding of
  the situation through arts-based research an
  inappropriate expectation? If so, what are we to
  make of the well-crafted but ambiguous poem or
  painting, for example, the expressive painting
  that we want to connect to the situation we
  intend to render but which works more like a
  Rorschach Test?

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Challenges in Arts-Based Research

• A second tension is located between the
  particular and the general.
• The very conditions that make a study arts based
  are conditions that personalize the study or the
  situation by allowing an investigators thumb
  print to work its magic in illuminating the
  scene.

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Challenges in Arts-Based Research

• A third tension in arts based research is the
  tension between the desire to achieve a work
  product that has aesthetic properties and the
  desire to achieve at least some degree of
  verisimilitude in our work.
• there is a tendency to allow aesthetic
  considerations trump the need for an epistemic
  orientation to disclosure or, if not epistemic,
  at least one that is phronetic.
• Indeed, the more attractive they become, the more
  they might mislead. Consider advertising.