Using Art as Research in Learning and Teaching

Multidisciplinary Approaches Across the Arts

Ross W. Prior, Ross Prior

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781783208920
• eBook ISBN: 9781783209750
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Using Art as Research in Learning and Teaching explores various multidisciplinary visual and performing art forms, including creative writing, as ways to provide a rich contribution and understanding to research, learning and teaching. Key figures in the field share their art-based research, arts practice and philosophy, bringing the arts to life within their taught and learnt contexts across a variety of art forms and levels of post-compulsory education. In what is an invaluable collection, this book is directly beneficial to arts researchers and educators, addressing the key challenges and possibilities in a rapidly changing higher education environment.

Internationally renowned proponent of arts-based research Professor Shaun McNiff provides the Foreword of this ground-breaking book.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Artist–Educator–Researcher

Ross W. Prior

What I cannot create, I do not understand.

– Richard Feynman¹

We may as well begin by defining what we mean by ‘research’, when discussed in this book. In some ways it may be easier to state what we are not considering, but even then we find disciplines such as science can inform some of our artistic research. However, in artistic research, science is not the mode of inquiry. Approaches to research depend on epistemologies, which vary considerably across disciplines and even within disciplines. However, as a tentative definition, we can begin by offering the following:

Art as research involves a diverse range of human activities in creating visual, auditory or performed artworks, expressing the artist’s imaginative and/or technical skill, intended to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional impact. Art as research uses systematic investigation into the study of process, materials and sources in order to understand art more completely and reach new conclusions. The primary components in using art as research are documentation, discovery and interpretation for the purpose of the advancement of artistic knowledge and furthering understanding of all of life and other disciplines too.

Shaun McNiff gives us a useful definition of the specificity of the use of the term ‘art-based research’, which neatly aligns to the process of art as research:

Art-based research can be defined as the systematic use of the artistic process, the actual making of artistic expressions in all of the different forms of the arts, as a primary way of understanding and examining experience by both researchers and the people that they involve in their studies. These inquiries are distinguished from research activities where the arts may play a significant role but are essentially used as data for investigations that take place within academic disciplines that utilize more traditional scientific, verbal, and mathematic descriptions and analyses of phenomena.

(McNiff 2008: 29)

McNiff’s definition brings us close to the heart of the matter. Given that our research focus is similarly outlined in both of the above definitions, there are many ways in which we may use art as methodology and address evidence in research using the arts. McNiff (2009) directs us to the potential of the art form itself in responding to issues of research, rather than relying upon other methodologies. He recognizes that historically in the arts and in art therapy, these fields have been ‘so thoroughly tied to traditional social science methods of research and the more general notions of scientism that we have not appreciated our own unique potential to further human understanding’ (2009: 144).

The key here is art for understanding. Embracing all of the arts in the one act of epistemological communion, McNiff leads us to an appreciation of the natural processes found within art-making that can provide artists with the answers they seek within their own work. Faster to catch on in the United Kingdom and Europe than in the United States, using art as methodology is proving to be a highly relevant way of conducting artistic research, which allows artists to further understand what it is they do.

There are unhealthy divides within our higher education system that have created sizeable polemic divides; these include theory vs. practice, ‘hard’ vs. ‘soft’ research, qualitative vs. quantitative research, researcher vs. lecturer/teacher, practitioner vs. researcher and somewhat incredulously, research vs. learning activity. There is a simple basis for these divides, which frequently comes from the nature of the academy itself, where lecturers largely teach what they were taught and/or operate within research paradigms that they know best through their own postgraduate education experience. The unfortunate consequence of this conservatism is that, instead of furthering development, it can hinder and negate advancement. Henk Borgdorff usefully and tersely suggests:

The debate often concerns issues of institutional or educational politics that are thought to be important for determining whether artistic research can be recognised as a type of academic or scientific research. Prominent issues are the standards needed to assess research by artists, the institutional rights to award third-cycle (doctoral) degrees in the arts, and the criteria to be applied by funding bodies in deciding whether to support research by artists.

(Borgdorff 2013: 112)

Further difficulty arises within places of higher education when academic research excludes a most essential research type, which is research into learning and teaching. Key to advancing any discipline is found within both the philosophy and practice of its learning and teaching methods. Within these methods or approaches, a discipline can either experience great progress and awakening, or conversely, suffer a stultifying constraint adhering to an immoveable and arguably outmoded orthodoxy.

An academic colleague of mine once remarked that the great creative literary works have already been achieved and we will not see the likes of a William Shakespeare again. It may be true that we won’t see another Shakespeare, but nor could we. Shakespeare was particular to his time and place. History has been punctuated with many individuals who have made outstanding achievements, making seismic shifts in thinking or creative contributions. Like all of us, artists are informed by those who have gone before and also by those currently around them. T. S. Elliot wrote that the poet ‘must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same’ ([1920] 1997: 42). We take inspiration in many ways from many people, and from our desire to do it our way, to do it differently. But how often in education do we find tutors wanting students to do it the instructor’s way, even if this is an unconscious intention? I am reminded of McNiff’s belief that ‘the most valued and effective teachers are the ones who can help us assess our work more accurately’ (2003: 149).

Equally, when students are encouraged to research they are frequently exposed to ‘safe’, unimaginative data gathering and presentation. Even when we believe we are being liberal as supervisors, as already mentioned above we frequently resort to research methods to which we have previously been exposed and/or used ourselves. We teach what we know; we limit others by what we don’t know.

Whilst we obviously can’t know all there is to know, our personal approach really must allow others to explore and we should support these journeys of inquiry. In this spirit, my firm belief is that art must stop trying to fit into methods and measures applied elsewhere. We have seen an arguably unhealthy clinical corporatization of the arts in order to find a ‘respectability’ and ‘legitimacy’ measured in financial terms. For example, this is found in the use of the term ‘creative industries’ or the preoccupation with trying to find clinical evidence within the applied arts and health field. This has frequently seen an over-reliance upon the use of models of social science research and procedural method. We have found ourselves asking less than useful questions and missing questions that art itself produces. We have tended to ignore the fact that art can provide the topic of research, the process of research and indeed the outcome of research (see Chapter 4). The artistic process allows for doing research to find questions, not only to find answers. Mitchell Kossak succinctly captures the essentially grounded nature of art as research:

Art-based research, a natural outgrowth of art-based inquiry, utilizes creative intelligence through immersion in creative process and scholarly reflection. […] In art-based research, the phenomenological experience is represented through the creative act itself. The artwork, no matter what the medium (sound, rhythm, movement, enactment, poetry, paintings), opens up a space in which both the world and our being in the world is brought to light as a single, but inexhaustibly rich totality.

(Kossak 2012: 22)

So what can we do to have students develop their understanding of art as research much earlier in their learning journey? The answer seems to reside in the design of the curriculum and hence the tasks we wish students to undertake in order to assess them. Art-based research is more than examining the finished product hanging on a wall or witnessed on a stage – this is where art can encompass the topic, process and outcome of research. However, before specifically addressing art-based research within higher education, let us first consider some essential beliefs about education that underpin current thinking and ultimately shape our view of learning and teaching, and research more generally.

Education, knowledge and meaning

Philip H. Phenix defines a ‘philosophy of education’ as ‘any reasonably coherent set of values and fundamental assumptions used as a basis for evaluating and guiding educational practice’ (1963: 4). Various beliefs about educational practice and what matters most are evidenced in curriculum documents, learning processes and teaching methods. The language used in such documents or used to explain educational practices offers us clues as to the dominant spheres of influence at play. As a part of this, each fashion within education has produced its own buzzwords and implicit and explicit ideals, derived sometimes through purely political agendas and sometimes through trending academic research and scholarship. But how do we in higher education respond to these imperatives, which seek to pin us down further and further? How do we have the confidence to really know the most appropriate ways to educate?

We live in an era of uncertainty where everything has been opened up for scrutiny and question. On the one hand, this may be seen as healthy, but on the other hand, living with constant challenges and unknowns may be exhausting and stressful. Humankind has never had all the answers and we have always sought to know more. However, the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don’t know – an essential tenant of education, of course. Throughout time, civilizations have risen and fallen in their quest for supremacy – be it military, wealth, land mass, technology or culture. Whilst we have understood this truth, we have not yet completely succeeded in safeguarding our own current existence on this planet.

Within this context we find that higher education is rapidly changing too. In its origins, those who possessed scrolls and books held the power within education. It was, after all, the Catholic Church that ensured the continuity of formal education after the Fall of Rome. Places of learning were revered and one’s place within them was highly prized. To some, this may appear unhealthily elite. To others this may represent quality and gravitas. However, the main aim of higher education for our students, neatly summarized by Ronald Barnett (2007: 126), is one of eventual auto-didacticism where they become ‘beings-for-themselves’, authentically engaging with their educational experiences. This is described by Barnett as having ‘their own will to learn and, being so energized, drive themselves forward of their own volition […] determined to come into a relationship with their experiences that is theirs’ (2007: 126, original emphasis).

The educational experience presents students with a range of curricula challenges designed to allow students to self-actualize, which is what education is most centrally about. Increasingly, places of higher education are being shoehorned into workplace training agendas. Businesses and politicians are applying pressure on universities to equip graduates for direct entry into the labour market. Whilst part of this thinking is economically laudable, these training agendas run the distinct risk of producing narrow-focused graduates who lack the ability to become ‘beings-for-themselves’ as Barnett puts it.

One thing that may be agreed is that the digital age has given widespread access to information – more information than can be humanly contemplated. Information is not the same as knowledge, yet they are frequently confused. Knowledge, like information, does not remain static. Both knowledge and information are only ever directly relevant if the receiver can purpose and repurpose what becomes known. However, information is of little use if we do not possess the knowledge to know what to do with it.

In my book Teaching Actors: Knowledge Transfer in Actor Training, in which I conduct an investigation of actor trainers’ understandings of their own practice in an attempt to unravel educational philosophy, I point out that ‘communicating knowledge is not necessarily easy or straightforward, especially when dealing with practices that are experiential and rely on inert or tacit understandings’ (Prior 2012: 183). However, whilst there are multiple knowledge types and many categories of knowledge, the act of knowing broadly remains the same:

Knowing is inherent in the growth and transformation of identities and it is located in relations among practitioners, their practice, the artefacts of that practice, and the social organisation and political economy of communities of practice.

(Lave and Wenger 1991: 122, original emphasis)

‘Artists call upon multiple ways of knowing, which are likely to become further enhanced through the experience of practice’ (Prior 2013: 162). These complex understandings are entwined within the act of doing and being, and because they can be so embodied, the outsider may grossly underestimate all that is involved with being an artist. Therefore, within this complexity, it ought to be firmly acknowledged that ‘knowledge is less a discovery than it is a construction’ (Eisner 2002: 211). Knowledge acquisition is not linear but is gained more as a web of understanding over time.

As far as we are concerned here with art and artistry, knowledge is constructed in and through artistic practice. This contrasts with traditional scientific experimentation, although one could argue that in actuality science too shares a broader knowledge base that is constructed in and through practice. There has been an awakening of understanding leading to an acceptance of embodied knowledge, situated knowledge and enacted knowledge, which offer artist-researchers more useful insights than might be gained through scientific experimentation. Detachment, objectivity, controlled experimentation, random trials and rationality do not reach the heart of artistic inquiry. Artistic practice and experimentation tend to place the artist firmly in the middle, and every situation is entirely unique.

Elliot Eisner argues that knowing depends upon experience ‘either the kind of experience that emanates from the sentient being’s contrast with the qualities of the environment or from the experiences born of the imagination’ (1996: 31). These types of experiential knowing for artists are derived through, for example, accident, playfulness, repetition, improvisation, intuition, inspiration, emotional response and experience itself.

An earlier figure to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction: Artist–Educator–Researcher
• Part 1: Aesthetic Education and Ways of Knowing in Art
• Chapter 2: Art as a Procedure of Truth
• Chapter 3: ‘Not Sure’: The Didactics of Elusive Knowledge
• Chapter 4: Art as the Topic, Process and Outcome of Research within Higher Education
• Chapter 5: A Different Way of Knowing: Assessment and Feedback in Art-Based Research
• Part 2: Developing Our Practice in Postgraduate Education
• Chapter 6: Doing Art-Based Research: An Advising Scenario
• Chapter 7: Research–Practice–Pedagogy: Establishing New Topologies of Doctoral Research in the Arts
• Chapter 8: The ‘Epistemic Object’ in the Creative Process of Doctoral Inquiry
• Chapter 9: Finding My Visual Research Voice: Art as the Tool for Research
• Part 3: Involving Students and Others in Art as Research
• Chapter 10: Making and Material Affect: From Learning and Teaching to Sharing and Listening
• Chapter 11: Using Art to Cultivate ‘Medical Humanities Care’ in Chinese Medical Education
• Chapter 12: Entanglement in Shakespeare’s Text: Using Interpretive Mnemonics with Acting Students with Dyslexia
• Chapter 13: Dancing as a Wolf: Art-Based Understanding of Autistic Spectrum Condition
• Part 4: Current and Future Issues in Arts Learning and Teaching
• Chapter 14: Making Art and Teaching Art: Harnessing the Tension
• Chapter 15: Future Approaches in Using Artistic Research from Human Experience
• Notes on Contributors