Arts-Based Research Methods in Writing Studies

A Primer

Kate Hanzalik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000352450
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

As the arts become an increasingly popular pedagogical tool in writing studies, Arts-Based Research Methods in Writing Studies offers scholars and educators in the field ways to leverage the arts for their own scholarship through the practice of arts-based research (ABR).

Tailored to the needs of writing studies scholars, this concise guide presents ways of exploring and addressing unresolved research questions from the past as well as new, pressing questions that are emerging in light of increasingly fraught and complicated current contexts. It explores motives and methods for taking up ABR, sheds light on the processes of representing research and the ethical imperative of methodological disclosure, and looks critically at the complexities of fully realizing ABR in writing studies while offering some pedagogical applications. Connecting theory to practice, this book also performs ABR through a co-created mixed-media text about the everyday and extraordinary stories woven into the fabric of new American artists' composing processes.

Arts-Based Research Methods in Writing Studies lends itself to insight that is at once personal for writing studies researchers, useful for research communities, and a catalyst for social change beyond institutional walls; as such, it will be an important resource for scholars, educators, and graduate students in writing studies and those interested in multimodal, multilingual, and translingual learning; equitable pedagogies and administrative practices; online writing instruction; transnational literacies; research methods; community-based research; and disability studies in composition.

1
Writing Studies Research and the Place of the Arts

In this book, when I use the term writing studies (WS), I am also referring to rhetoric and composition. I do not mean to suggest that the terms can be conflated, but they are interrelated and often grouped together in conversations about research. The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) position statement, “Scholarship in Rhetoric, Writing, and Composition” (2018), offers a useful description of the domain of WS research:

The work of scholars in the field is described by various interrelated terms, rhetoric, writing, and composition the most prominent. The interdisciplinary nature of this scholarship may also include or draw from scholarship institutional and administrative institutional and administrative practices; literacy studies; the scholarship of teaching and learning; communication; print and digital media; technical communication; second language studies/English as a second language; linguistics, and critical and cultural studies, among many others.

Understanding how knowledge is produced about/in the discipline can elucidate the exigences, relevance, and possibilities for ABR and vice versa. The literature illustrates that WS research generally focuses on “the practical, theoretical and ethical problems involved in any study of writing, whether in traditional or emerging subdisciplines” (Sheridan and Nickoson, 2012, p. 4). Books about research methods commonly critically assess a diverse range of methodologies and methods, with the shared purpose of envisioning new ideas for research and advancing the ways research is taken up (see Banks et al., 2019; Bazerman et al., 2012; Massey and Gebhard, 2011; Schell and Rawson, 2010; Sheridan and Nickoson, 2012). Readers can get a sense of the range of the field’s research interests and approaches from five recent collections: Writing Studies Research in Practice (Sheridan and Nickoson, 2012), The Changing Knowledge in Composition (Massey and Gebhardt, 2011), International Advances in Writing Research (Bazerman et al., 2012), Re/Orienting Writing Studies (Banks et al., 2019), and Rhetorica in Motion (Schell and Rawson, 2010).

The field seeks to innovate where and how research is done. For example, Sheridan and Nickoson’s (2012) collection of research reflections focus on “reimagining traditional research practices”, such as ethnography (Sheridan and Nickoson, 2012, p. 12), narrative (Journet, 2012), and historical research (Rohan, 2012), “revisioning research in composition” (Sheridan and Nickoson, 2012, p. 99), such as ways to study and problematize discriminatory research practices about multilingual writers (Canagarajah, 2012) and assessment (Inoue, 2012, 2015), and “reconceptualizing methodologies and sites of inquiry” (Sheridan and Nickoson, 2012, p. 183), including an emphasis on sites such as the Internet (McKee and Porter, 2012), community-based research (Grabill, 2012), and international writing research (Lunsford, 2012). Massey and Gephardt’s (2011) volume The Changing of Knowledge in Composition reflects on and advances the influential book The Making of Knowledge in Composition by Steven North, particularly as it relates to such topics as the identity and disciplinary status of writing and undergraduate and graduate education research methodologies. Schell and Rawson’s (2010) volume responds to pressing questions about feminist research methods, such as “What are the key principles of feminist research?” (p. 7), “How can feminist research come to terms with the complexity of gender and other categories of social difference and lived experience?” (p. 7), and “What counts as evidence in feminist research and in feminist rhetoric in particular?” (p. 7). Contributors to Banks et al. (2019) discuss research from a queer perspective by reconsidering data-collection methods, making the case for the importance of failure and ambivalence in research, and rethinking empirical research, to name a few.

WS researchers are reworking old methods and inventing new ones to create their own “homegrown” mixed-method, project-specific approaches (Haas et al., 2012, p. 51) as well as developing collaborative, community-based approaches to understanding literacy practices, such as life-history (Selfe and Hawisher, 2012). They are also looking for ways that research can be shared with a broader audience and can be enhanced with technology (Sheridan and Nickoson, 2012). They seek opportunities for collaborative research involving students and teachers (Nickoson, 2012), more participatory, egalitarian approaches to research (Selfe and Hawisher, 2012), and more reflective writing about how researchers’ identities shape their methodologies (Villanueva, 2011). As times change and new topics arise, scholars have expressed several concerns about the goals for research. This includes continued commitment to social justice (Poe et al., 2018) and more community-based research projects (Grabill, 2012). WS seeks methods that are adapted for disciplinary needs (Sheridan and Nickoson, 2012). While the aforementioned books and topics are in no way representative of all research and specialized topics in WS books, they do provide us with the kinds of questions, problems, and goals that researchers might want to approach in ways that are arts-based.

ABR can be taken up in many ways. For example, experiences, tensions, and stories are always woven into art, so collaborating with artists or arts organizations (Lenette, 2019) to create works that simultaneously illustrate and investigate research topics in WS can be generative. A researcher might collaborate with a photographer, or use photography to understand and convey community-based literacy practices to a broader audience while acknowledging the subjectivity of the researcher. Photographs can be taken in a number of ways depending on the researcher’s purpose. They can be taken by the researcher themselves, by students as researchers, and/or by the research participants as researchers (Lenette, 2019). Analyzing data might involve everyone working together to identify patterns and meaning. The end product of the research could be a photography exhibit, held at a local or university art gallery, where a broader audience can learn about community-based literacy practices while providing a forum for dialogue that addresses the perspectives and stories present in the photographs. Writing would have its place in a curated exhibit. For example, an artist’s statement can explain the project and discuss how specific techniques led to specific perspectives through which the research participants and community-based literacy practices are understood and felt. The possibilities for ABR projects in WS are as endless as the imaginations of the researchers themselves.

ABR lends itself to more flexibility when exploring any number of questions, topics, or problems because it disrupts conventional research standards (Barone and Eisner, 1997; McNiff, 2008; Leavy, 2009; Sullivan, 2005, 2010). Empirical standards, trusted by many in WS, include reliability (when the method can be repeated and lead to the same result), validity (when a research method tests what it is intended to test), generalizability (the applicability or usefulness of the research finding), and replicability (the method can be repeated). In ABR, high validity is a method that has affected the audience, taught them something new, and changed their values (Barone and Eisner, 1997). Validity is not a crucial standard, however, because many researchers do not gauge the reaction of their audience or factor that into their research design. Generalizability is not the standard of ABR per se, although researchers do consider high-quality ABR projects applicable (McNiff, 1998, 2013; Sullivan, 2005, 2010; Barone and Eisner, 2012). Credibility is one standard of ABR research, which strives for the audience’s attunement to and belief in the artistic expression (Barone and Eisner, 2012). Good empirical research is rigorous and leads to a thesis; arts-based research is good when it is vigorous (Faulkner, 2016) and conveys an exegesis instead of a thesis (Sullivan, 2005, 2010).

ABR disrupts ethnographies as well. Common to WS scholarship, good ethnographies provide insight and understanding in a more personalized way. They have been used since at least 1987, though at the time, Steven North, author of the landmark book on research methods, The Making of Knowledge in Composition, described them as “stories, fictions” written by composition researchers as ethnographers with “peculiar concern[s]” about individuals and the communities they are a part of (1987, p. 137). Decades later, Victor Villanueva (2011), drawing upon Ralph Cintron (1997), bell hooks 1990, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999), pointed out the method’s lack of credibility by identifying the racial biases present in the work of Mina Shaughnessy, and North’s failure to see that “stories, fictions,” authored by white researchers who attempt to fix the problems of poor student writers of color, for instance, are subjective. “Objective research just ain’t possible in comp” (Villanueva, 2011, p. 122), and researchers must acknowledge their subjectivity—in fact, these truths, told alongside the “stories, fictions,” are what make good ABR credible and vigorous.

Empirical, ethnographic, and arts-based research methods can be combined if a researcher wishes. By incorporating art at any stage of the research process, ABR projects can lead to new insights and engage researchers, research participants, and the general public in unexpected, equitable, and evocative ways. For example, art can be used to explore a research topic and identify and articulate a research question or problem; in exploring the topic, a researcher might create pottery or paint freely, letting emotional reactions to a personal concern, public crisis, or polemical topic guide their use of clay or brushstrokes toward a clear research question worthy of further investigation (see for example Franklin, 2013). Data collection can bridge conventional qualitative methods, such as an interview, with an arts-based approach. The possibilities for data analysis are numerous and evolving, such as collaborative analytical methods (Koski et al., 2016) or stumbling upon epiphanies latent in the data through the process of artistic creation (Sullivan, 2010). The roles of researchers and participants can converge. The researcher can become a participant-observer-artist involved in making art with participants, such as contributing to a mural, co-creating folk art, and choreographing or performing contemporary dance (see for example Saldaña, 2011). Participants can become researchers by, for instance, gathering data through photographs they take themselves; in turn they express themselves and challenge stereotypes, which can be transformative (Lenette, 2019; Oliviera, 2015). The art-making process provides WS researchers with experiential, immersive data consisting of authentic perspectives as well as venues where those perspectives, as research results, can be expressed in ways that are otherwise impossible. Art can be used to represent research (in the form of a novel, poem, painting, performance, etc.), present research (at a conference, art gallery, etc.), and re-present research (research reflection, typically appearing in a journal). ABR can be the product of a research project, the representational form as an artistic text. Researchers can learn, play, and experiment with new types of compositions as they express answers to a research problem. For researchers seeking to collaborate with their students, they can co-write poems, perform a play, or create and curate an art exhibit as ways to explore a research question; they can imagine and invent a vivid world that evokes empathy; they can express themselves in art-based ways that affect an audience and compels them to act, to change their perspectives, to relate, to feel less alone, or to incite new ideas for future research.

As I have touched upon, ABR has many techniques and benefits. They can lead to new personal and public understandings, epiphanies, closure or new openings, all of which can be personal to the researcher and beneficial to stakeholders in and beyond the discipline and geographical lines. They can create empathy. They can demand social justice and be socially just. If researchers have personal passions, such as playing an instrument or acting, they might find great fulfillment in discovering ways to incorporate these art forms into their work. ABR projects can connect with broader audiences who do not speak in academic terms, who cannot access language, or who simply enjoy the visual and performing arts. Research becomes entertainment that, if done well, can resonate with anyone. What is perhaps most exciting is that the methodologies are fluid, open to predetermined designs while also embracing failures, reconfigurations, and surprises. ABR can incorporate successful traditional research methods or rework prior approaches. ABR might even be a means by which WS can assert its status as a discipline by producing new disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary knowledge relevant and applicable to academic and public contexts.

ABR in WS might be met with opposition and suspicion for at least two reasons. One possible source of opposition and suspicion is that, on the whole, artistic ways of knowing lack the credibility found in critical thinking as well as rigor lent in myriad citations; in consequence, it is frequently and erroneously dismissed in WS (Hanzalik, 2019). Furthermore, few WS journals are designed to accommodate arts-based texts, or what Doug Hesse refers to as “fully enact[ed] multimodality,” “hypertext,” and “nonlinear texts,” which does not bode well for them (Hesse, 2019, p. 383). The scholarship published in emerging arts-based journals are written off by hiring committees and tenure and promotion committees as less important than the print-centric articles published in College Composition and Communication and College English. Anecdotally, WS dissertations that take an arts-based approach are often met with suspicion because they are perceived as lacking rigor, or they are dismissed as irrelevant to WS, even if they are widely celebrated in public life. Some suggest that WS must find its own signature research style (Massey and Gebhardt, 2011); however, I would argue that it is problematic to lay claim to a territory at a time when fields such as the visual and performing arts, social sciences, women’s studies, healthcare, policy studies, and disabilities studie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Allure of Arts-Based Research
• 1 Writing Studies Research and the Place of the Arts
• 2 Motivations and Methods for Arts-Based Research
• 3 Representing Research in Art Form
• 4 Methodological Disclosure in Arts-Based Research
• 5 A Promising Future for Arts-Based Research Methods in Writing Studies
• Index