Arts Based Research

Tom Barone, Elliot W. Eisner

• Editorial: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781452235790
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Pedagogía
• Categoría: Investigación en educación

Arts Based Research is ideal for students, researchers, and practitioners. This unique book provides a framework for broadening the domain of qualitative inquiry in the social sciences by incorporating the arts as a means of better understanding and rethinking important social issues. In the book's 10 thought-provoking chapters, authors Tom Barone and Elliot W. Eisner--pioneers in the field--address key aspects of arts based research, including its purpose and fundamental ideas, controversies that surround the field and the politics and ethics involved, and key criteria for evaluation.

Chapter 1

What Is and What Is
Not Arts Based
Research?

All forms of representation, the means through which the contents of our mind are shared with others, are both constrained and made possible by the form one chooses to use. Sound, which reaches its apotheosis in music, makes possible meanings and other forms of experience that cannot be secured in nonmusical forms. The narrative, as rendered through words, makes possible stories and other forms of prose that are not renderable in music. Arts based research is an effort to extend beyond the limiting constraints of dis-cursive communication in order to express meanings that otherwise would be ineffable. Indeed, an examination of the forms of communication employed in the culture at large reveals a level of diversity of forms that is enough to dazzle the eye, delight the ear, and tempt the tongue. Humans have invented forms within a spectrum of sensory modalities in order to “say” in that form what cannot be said in others. Arts based research represents an effort to explore the potentialities of an approach to representation that is rooted in aesthetic considerations and that, when it is at its best, culminates in the creation of something close to a work of art.

The idea that research can be conducted using nondiscursive means such as pictures, or music, or dance, or all of those in combination, is not an idea that is widely practiced in American research centers or in American schools. We tend to think about research as being formulated exclusively—and of necessity—in words the more literal, the better. The idea that research reports and sections thereof can be crafted in a way not dissimilar from the way in which great novelists write and great painters paint is even rarer. Thus, the idea that we advance is that matters of meaning are shaped—that is, enhanced and constrained—by the tools we use. When those tools limit what is expressible or representational, a certain price is paid for the neglect of what has been omitted. Yet, in American culture, and indeed more broadly in Western culture, the determination of what is true depends upon the verification of claims made in propositional discourse. We have a hankering for the facts—no ifs, ands, or buts! In general, we don’t want our prose gussied up with nuances, qualifications, or ambiguous contexts. The cleaner, the better. The clean methodological ideal is what some scholars want to achieve. Reduction of ambiguity is seen as a paramount virtue. It’s interesting to note that William James himself suggested in a lecture given at the turn of the century that we should save some space in our mental life for the ambiguous. Creativity was something he valued.

This preoccupation with what we think of as misguided precision has led to the standardization of research methodology, the standardization that uses the assumptions, and procedures of the physical sciences as the model to be emulated. The experiment, for example, is, as they say, the gold standard, and quantification of data is a necessary condition for conducting experiments or so it is believed.

Beliefs about what constitutes legitimate research procedure have enormous ramifications for understanding human behavior and social interaction. The gold standard that we alluded to earlier not only identifies the experiment as the summum bonum of research method. It, by implication, identifies the approach as being scientific. The idea that research could be nonscientific seems to many researchers as oxymoronic. We argue that a great deal of research and some of the most valuable research is not at all scientific, where science means, in general, quantification of data and the application of statistical methods to determine causal relationships. Such research methods have given us a great deal, but they are far from the whole story. The need to provide methodological permission for people to innovate with the methods they use has never been more important. Yet, ironically, so much of what is prescribed leads to a reduction in methodological innovation, rather than an expansion.

The perceptive reader will note that our ambition is to broaden the conceptions not only of the tools that can be used to represent the world but even more to redefine and especially to enlarge the conceptual umbrella that defines the meaning of research itself.

One might well ask how a symbol system without clear connections to a codified array of referents can be useful in doing something as precise as a research study is intended to be. How can clear, concise, and precise conclusions be derived from the use of forms of representation that do little in the way of precise specification? The answer to that question that we formulate is the clear specification of a referent by a symbol is not a necessary condition for meaning. In the arts, symbols adumbrate; they do not denote. When they adumbrate something important happens—people begin to notice. What they notice can become, and often becomes, a source of debate and deliberation. In the particular resides the general—after all, Arthur Miller’s (1967) Death of a Salesman is not about any particular salesman; it is about middle-aged men who lose their jobs and strain their relationships with their wives and children. The playwright’s skill qualities of life are revealed, and the reader learns to notice aspects of the world.

Thus, the contribution of arts based research is not that it leads to claims in propositional form about states of affairs but that it addresses complex and often subtle interactions and that it provides an image of those interactions in ways that make them noticeable. In a sense, arts based research is a heuristic through which we deepen and make more complex our understanding of some aspect of the world.

This last point is of utmost importance in understanding what arts based research is about and what it is likely to provide when it is done well. Arts based research does not yield propositional claims about states of affairs. It tries to create insight into states of affairs whose utility is tested when those insights are applied to understand what has been addressed in the research. For example, in the film Schindler’s List, a set of moving images makes the experience of Nazi concentration camps palpable. We are afforded an opportunity to participate in those events, and we can debate with others the deep motives of those who managed this center for human extermination. The film, as with other works of art, makes it possible for us to empathize with the experience of others. We believe that such empathy is a necessary condition for deep forms of meaning in human life. The arts make such empathic participation possible because they create forms that are evocative and compelling.

One might ask whether we can trust what we derive from such material. We do not seek for any reader to take such material at face value. Such material always provides a starting point for further inquiry. We are not interested in capturing and then belling the cat. What we are interested in is a provision of a new perspective that makes it possible for those interested in the phenomena the research addressed to have a productive heuristic through which a deepened understanding can be promoted. In that sense, our aspirations are far more modest than those who seek to replicate in prose facts, nothing but the facts. The facts, deconceptualized as they often are, are hardly ever adequate for telling the whole story.

One might ask why an approach to research based upon artistic and aesthetic foundations would be important at an age at which schools in particular seem to be doing such a poor job. Don’t we need more rigorous pedagogical methods, more precise quantitative assessments of performance? Don’t we need tougher standards and higher expectations? At a time when the ship seems to be sinking, why mess around with the arts, a form of experience and action in which surprise and nondiscursive forms are the order of the day?

We would argue that it is precisely during a period in which precision, quantification, prescription, and formulaic practices are salient that we need approaches to research, and we add, to teaching, which exploit the power of “vagueness” to “get at” what otherwise would seem unrecoverable. It makes no sense to embrace plans that win the battle but lose the war. We need to touch the souls of students as well as to measure their sleeve length or hat size.

THE ARTS ARE OFTEN LARGER THAN LIFE

A second reason the arts are important as a means through which understanding is promoted is because its expansion serves as a marker that diversity in methodology is possible. Methodological pluralism rather than methodological monism seems to us to be the greater virtue.

One of the axiomatic truths in cognitive psychology is that the frame of reference through which one peers at the world shapes what one learns from that world. To the carpenter, the world is made of wood. To the psychometrician, the world is made of quantity. Pluralism and diversity is a virtue not only in race relations but it can be an extremely important virtue in getting multiple perspectives on states of affairs. Without support of the conception of such diversity, it is not likely to be provided.

What sometimes hampers students from getting a handle on arts based approaches to research is a reluctance—or should we say an ignorance—on the part of faculty as to the meaning of the term arts based research. Without support from faculty, doctoral students are often left in the lurch. It is demanding enough to do a dissertation well using conventional forms of research method, let alone a research method that is at the edge of inquiry. Yet, it seems to us to be particularly important to encourage students to explore the less well explored than simply to replicate tried and true research methods that break no new methodological grounds. It is better, we believe, to find new seas on which to sail than old ports at which to dock.

The perceptive reader will note that there are two major potential consequences for arts based research. One of these is broadening our conception of the ways in which we come to know. We are trying to open up through this work a new vision of what the arts are about and what educational research can become. We do not see this aspiration as the creation of either an alternative or a supplement to conventional educational research. We do not see it as an alternative because we have no ambition to try to replace conventional methods of empirical research with arts based research; we are not interested in the hegemony of one method over another. We are not interested in a supplement because we do not wish to conceive of arts based research as something one must do in addition to doing conventional research. Arts based research is an approach to research that exploits the capacities of expressive form to capture qualities of life that impact what we know and how we live. We believe we can find such contributions in the poetic use of language, in the expressive use of narrative, and in the sensitive creation in film and video. These options do not exhaust the ways in which arts based research can be conducted or the media that it can employ. We list them here simply as examples of media that have potential relevance for doing research.

Film, video, and various forms of digital and electronic imagery are, relatively speaking, new means through which research can be reported. The term report is somewhat too passive. The availability of new media makes possible the generation of new concepts and the creation of new possibilities. For example, Michelangelo himself could not have conceived of what fluorescent tubing as the substance of sculpture might generate in human experience. The movie camera makes possible slow motion to the point where the path of a bullet can be slowed down to the speed of a butterfly. Our point is that the availability of new means has consequences not only for how one addresses the world and reports its features but it has consequences for features to be attended to that might not have been options prior to the availability of these forms. There is an intimate connection between technology and expressivity, and we are certain that in the future the possibilities of the computer and other electronic devices will be exploited in ways that are even more daring than they have been thus far.

How would our thinking, our understanding, and the knowledge that we crystallize and ship around the globe have been affected had writing not been invented? Winston Churchill once said, “At first we build our buildings and then our buildings build us.” The tools we design have an impact on how we become designed by the tools of our own hand. The arts, like the sciences, remake the maker and the tools that the maker uses has a profound impact on who we become. It is in this sense that arts based research is a means through which we seek new portraits of people and places. An artist, commented Gombrich (2000), does not paint what he can see but sees what he is able to paint. With the invention of the ax head, humans were able to build forms and perform functions that were simply out of reach before. That general principle applies to the resources used in arts based research.

Given the apparently elusive character of art forms, how will we determine the “validity” of what an arts based research project yields? How will we know if it is accurate or inaccurate? Can arts based research be trusted? We will be addressing these issues more fully throughout this book. But one answer to these questions was alluded to by Wallace Stegner, the American writer, when he was asked what it was that conferred greatness on a work of fiction, he responded by saying that a work of fiction needed to be true in order to be great. The irony is clear. Truth is not owned simply by propositional discourse; it is also owned by those activities that yield meanings that may be ineffable ultimately but that nevertheless ring true in the competent percipient. What we seek is not so much validity as it is credibility. The virtues to be found in arts based research are not located in some isomorphic relationship between a statement and an event; it is to be found in the degree to which, as Geertz says, it makes our conversation more interesting.

What he is driving at is the search for vehicles that allow one into a dimly lit cave that is lightened up—made even bright—by the luminescence of the work. The arts in general teach us to see, to feel, and indeed to know. What we are proposing is that the means through which the arts function as illuminating vehicles may find expression and utility in research activities as well as in the arts themselves.

But what if there are differences in the ways in which different researchers see a so-called common situation or at least a situation common to them? How are differences reconciled? We are reminded of Clifford Geertz’s (1974) comments concerning ethnography. He said the aim of ethnography is to increase the precision through which we vex one another. This vexing, this pursuit of intellectual issues, this highly nuanced activity called arts based research, is a way of coming to know that recognizes that differences between investigators is nothing to moan over. Differences lead to challenge, and challenge can lead to debate and insight. After all, one of the characteristics that artists and scientists share is that both groups of individuals are troublemakers. The trouble that they make is trouble for themselves. It is trouble found in the unanswered questions and unresolved problems that serve to animate activity within their field. When there is no problem, there is not likely to be much of an inquiry taking place to resolve it. In short, differences in view may indeed be challenging, but at the same time they may promote precisely the kind of inquiry that expands our awareness of what we had not noticed before.

We realize that the term arts based research will appear to more than a few as an oxymoronic notion. Research is the child of science; art is something altogether different. We reject this formulation attesting to the dichotomy between art and science. Science, well done, imaginative in character, sensitive to qualitative variations, and organized according to what aesthetic forms can carry is also the result of artistic judgment. Anything well made, employing skill and sensitivity to form and prized not only for its practical utility but for the quality of experience that it generates can be thought of as an example of an art form. The borders between art and science are malleable and porous. This means that fields like physics and mathematics, the law and history, are fields in which artists work. The artists we refer to are physicists and mathematicians, attorneys and historical scholars. Our aim is to recognize the aesthetic features of fields and their activities, fields and activities previously assigned to realms that supposedly had nothing to do with aesthetic matters whatsoever.

The important point here is that historical portrayals, whether in narrative texts or in film, for example, are occasions for the arts to shine. How a character is represented in a historical study matters significantly in what a reader is likely to take away from the work when it is read. A legal brief, well argued and artistically crafted, may have the result of saving someone’s life or making it possible for the state to take it. Artistry as a general process is found in almost any activity, at least potentially, that humans undertake. The so-called facts are seldom “unencumbered” with rhetorical moves. Rhetoric, the art of persuasion, is ubiquitous in virtually every activity designed to persuade or encourage a particular kind of action or to arrive at a particular type of judgment.

One might ask, if artistry in action is ubiquitous, why make a special case for arts based research, or, put another way, why argue a more or less special case for the arts as the basis for doing research when apparently it already exists?

The answer to that question, it seems to us, is that it doesn’t already exist in the robustness that it needs to possess to become a respectable and ongoing part of what constitutes research activity. It has taken nearly a hundred years for conventional forms of research to be refined and broadly accepted as ways of understanding individuals and groups. For arts based research to have an opportunity to develop an equal level of acceptance requires articulation of its distinctive and valued role. That is what we are trying to provide in this book.

There is also another factor that must be considered in any justification regarding the value and uses of arts based research. The reason we referred to is related to the evocative nature of artistic form. Arts based research emphasizes the generation of forms of feeling that have something to do with understanding some person, place, or situation. It is not simply a quantitative disclosure of an array of variables. It is the conscious pursuit of expressive form in the service of understanding.

Consider a film such as The Godfather. Mario Puzo (1969), author of the book, provided the material out of which a script was written. He needed to learn a great deal about mafia families living on the East Coast of the United States. He needed to understand how their “business” was managed, how profits were made, how killings were ordered, and what the settings and, indeed, some of the history of the mafia families unfolded during the 1930s and 1940s. But learning of these facts is not enough to produce a product that will allow a reader or a viewer to grasp the situations being described and the people being portrayed. For the book, as for the adapted screenplay, plots had to be formed, and portraits of individuals needed be decided upon. For the film, sets needed to be designed, language appropriate to the occasion needed to be determined, pace and tempo of action needed to be judged, actors needed to be cast who were suitable for the role they were to occupy, and the history of the period needed to be revealed in a credible light.

It is the evocative utilization of such data that makes the work expressive and affords individuals who see or read it with the opportunity to participate empathically in events that would otherwise be beyond their reach. A statistical description of the incidence of mafia assassinations or histograms describing the growth of revenues over the period in which these families operated would not, we believe, yield anywhere near as lus...