Arts-based Methods and Organizational Learning

Higher Education Around the World

Tatiana Chemi, Xiangyun Du, Tatiana Chemi, Xiangyun Du

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319638072
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319638089
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Includes contributions from a range of locations to present a global perspective

Brings a broad approach with the inclusion of a number of arts-based methods

Encourages an interdisciplinary approach to arts-based methods and learning

© The Author(s) 2018

Tatiana Chemi and Xiangyun Du (eds.)Arts-based Methods and Organizational Learning Palgrave Studies in Business, Arts and Humanitieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63808-9_13

Begin Abstract

Artists and Arts-Based Method Use in Higher Education: A Living Inquiry of an Academic Programme in a Faculty of Education

Pamela Burnard¹ , Carol Holliday¹ , Susanne Jasilek¹ and Afrodita Nikolova¹

(1)

Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Pamela Burnard (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Carol Holliday

Email: [email protected]

Susanne Jasilek

Email: [email protected]

Afrodita Nikolova

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

ArtistsArts-based methodsLiving enquiryHigher educationTransformative organisational learning ecologyPedagogy of possibilities

End Abstract

Introduction

The performance of teaching and learning in global higher education is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, and it needs to transform (Lemoine et al. 2017). The problems facing contemporary higher education are many. We need to find new ways of delivering an antidote to the paralysing and prohibiting structures of postmodern political agendas (Green 2001), of rethinking notions of power and the disciplining of organisational learning (Braidotti 2014) and high theory (Ellsworth 1997). The ways higher education has been expected to perform its functions for the benefit of the larger society have been: (a) to emphasise the specialised knowledge and skills necessary for the development of a modern, technology based society and (b) in the practical application of new discoveries to changes in societal demands. Collectively, this demonstrates an urgent need for higher education research which is transformative , participatory, involving academic and non-academic stakeholders during all parts of the process, and which is socially responsible, with the power to transform and emancipate. This is where artists and the application of arts-based methods can find fresh ways of seeing, understanding and shaping the organisational learning ecologies in Higher Education (HE) and can lead us to some of the best tools for a living inquiry.

So, what is ‘organisational learning’? According to Kijpokin Kasemsap (2017, p. 29), in an article that investigates the roles of neuroscience and knowledge management in higher education, it is ‘a social process in which individuals in organisations enhance decision making and problem solving by improving knowledge and understanding. It is also an organization-wide process that enhances its collective ability to accept, make sense of and respond to internal and external change’.

One of the biggest challenges, working in HE, is finding ways of creating and nurturing organisational learning communities committed to sustained creative futures as global citizens who can work with pluralities, playfulness, possibilities and participatory (research) practices. It is up to us to develop a vision of organisational learning that plays in step with the HE system, currently characterised by rising student fees, increasing student-to-staff ratios and progressive imposed (neoliberal) performativity targets and learning culture. How should organisational learning ecologies cultivate a supportive and open space of possibilities for academics and non-academics co-authoring practices and pedagogies of possibility that nurture aspiring intellectuals and professionals as they seek to fulfil their critical and creative potentials?

One of the imperatives at our institution is to develop practices that actively engage us all in the process of creatively appropriating tools and resources that help us conceive how emergent practices—afforded by arts based methods—might both deviate and affirm, or, put differently, both critique and create organizational learning ecologies —practices and pedagogies—that enable us to work as a living system of knowledge creation, shared knowledge and expertise.

In this chapter, we put forward arts-based methods that break from the idea of art as the knowledge and practice of particular techniques, or the conceptualisation of art as communication, but rather advance ways in which art and art making become capable of releasing the potential of HE.

What Can Art Do as a Research Tool?

What art can do as a research tool, for the construction and acquisition of knowledge and its representation, is being argued by social science researchers and scholars across multiple disciplines. What art can do in pedagogical relations is also guiding new didactics. Arts-based methods are frequently used by arts educators and researchers. Most arts-based researchers have expertise as researchers, artists and educators. In her seminal book Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice, feminist sociologist Leavy (2009) defines arts-based research practices as:

[…] a set of methodological tools used by researchers across disciplines during all phases of social research, including data generation, analysis, interpretation, and representation. These emerging tools adapt the tenets of the creative arts in order to address social research questions in holistic and engaged ways in which theory and practice are intertwined. (2009, p. 2–3)

Leavy’s emphasis on the diverse uses of the arts in social science research, along with the emergence of arts-based research in higher education as distinct from qualitative research practices, forms the basis of an emerging research paradigm (Rolling 2010). Eisner’s collaboration with one of his students, Barone, who used arts in his dissertation, resulted in the seminal book Arts-based Research, expounding the nature, specificities and scope of embodied arts-based research methods (2011). The relationship between art and research embodies how the visual is brought into relation with systems of academic thinking, thought and action . In a seminal critique of arts-based research, Jagodzinski and Wallin (2013, p. 5) make the following claim:

This is, perhaps, the most unique contribution of art to education insofar as it demands of teaching and learning something radically other than the voluntary movement of memory (reflection ), the application of representational matrices (transcendence) or the deployment of laws known prior to that which they apply (morality).

Not everyone in the academy (i.e., higher education) is open to the possibility or willing to acknowledge and become ‘wide awake’ to the urgent ethical and moral questions of our time, nor are they ready to ask the uncomfortable questions about the ways that we perform and reproduce knowledge through hegemonic structures of organisational learning (Greene 1994; Mackinlay 2016). Yet, for some academics, arts-based methods can offer a way of creating a pedagogical encounter like no other. Stephanie Springgay, Rita Irwin, Carl Leggo and Peter Gouzouasis’s (2008) ‘Being with A/r/t/ography ’, an edited collection of essays, offers a theoretical grounding of a/r/t/ography as a methodological tool and diverse theoretical lenses in considering ethics in arts-based research and methodologies. Figure 1 represents arts-based inquiries located in higher education contexts in which power and knowledge are produced, reproduced and maintained. The catalysts for rethinking and theorising space and the ways in which such spaces enable and constrain in the changing higher education environment include artist-researchers engaged in a/r/t/ographic (Güler 2017; Mackinlay 2015, 2016), artist–university–school partnerships (Thomson, et al. 2012; Burnard and Swann 2010) and doctoral students (Stevenson 2017, 2013) as ‘insiders’ in the academy. More often, these artist/researcher/academics can see and position themselves (as do we) as ‘complicit neo-liberal subjects…subject to the precarity of academic employment and the increasing t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Tracing Arts-Based Methods in Higher Education
• Transgressive or Instrumental? A Paradigm for the Arts as Learning and Development
• Theatre in Military Education: Play and Reality
• Performance Art as a Form of Psychological Experiment
• Approaches to Enhancing Student Learning: A Quality-Assured, Creative and Performing-Arts Model
• Understanding Dance Through Authentic Choreographic and A/r/tographic Experiences
• OPEART: Music Theatre Productions Within Teacher Education: Enhancing Communal Engaged Learning
• Learning Entrepreneurship by Hand Clapping: ABM in Use in Entrepreneurship Education
• Letter Writing as a Social and Artistic Pedagogical Process: A Cross-Cultural and Transnational Dialogue Based on International Experiences of Higher Education Across Global Continents
• Arts and Medicine: Connecting the Arts and Humanities to Professional Education
• Developing a Transdisciplinary University in Finland Through Arts-Based Practices
• Using Art-Based Techniques in Faculty Training Programmes
• Artists and Arts-Based Method Use in Higher Education: A Living Inquiry of an Academic Programme in a Faculty of Education
• Future Perspectives for Arts-Based Methods in Higher Education
• Backmatter