Arts-Based Educational Research Then, Now, and Later

Abstract

As a doctoral student at Stanford in the 1970s, I was fortunate to be able to observe up close the beginnings of a radically new approach to the study of matters educational. This was the period in the career of my advisor and mentor, Professor Elliot Eisner, during which he was imagining a place for the arts within the fields of educational research and evaluation.Of course, within these olden, if not golden, days of educational research orthodoxy, any questioning of social science as the exclusive methodological wellspring was widely regarded as heretical. Nevertheless, no doubt encouraged by certain developments in the larger intellectual counterculture, Eisner managed to disrupt the prevailing monolithic mindset, successfully challenging the taken-for-granted notion that the scientific method provided the only useful avenue for enhancing educational policy and practice.Over time, Eisner has been joined in his efforts by increasing numbers of converts and disciples, including yours truly. Of course, the legitimacy of non-scientific approaches to educational research remains contested, with the nostalgic notion of a gold standard having been recently resurrected in the United States through policy initiatives at the level of the federal government. Nevertheless, it is primarily due to the groundbreaking work of Eisner that today's traditional methodologists in the academy find it more difficult to dismiss those of us who look to the arts for both a process of researching educational phenomena and a means for disclosing what we find.A presence within the educational research community has indeed been established-through conference sessions, journal articles and books, theses and dissertations, university courses, workshops and institutes, special interest groups, electronic listservs, websites, encyclopedia and handbook entries, newsletters, and so on. The literature that suggests rationales for, and addresses pertinent issues related to, artsbased research has burgeoned. An untold number of examples of artsbased research have found their way into print, and others have been read/displayed/performed at scholarly meetings and conferences. Entire journal issues have been devoted to the topic. And its thoughtful and provocative contents make this issue of Studies in Art Education among the most notable of them.Enclosed are essays by several important scholars who are currently working within (what is by now) the tradition of arts-based educational research. The first of these is Eisner himself, offering a brief, up-to-date commentary on the status and possible future of arts-based research. Five other essayists move to describe, endorse, reinscribe, challenge, and extend some of the premises and practices that have come to be associated with this approach.Indeed, these articles suggest a rich harvest from a methodological field first claimed, cultivated, and planted by Eisner so many decades ago. They reveal nothing less than a bumper crop of theoretical notions regarding arts-based inquiry and of actualizations of the approach in specific projects. While acknowledging Eisner's early spadework, these authors suggest expansions of the original boundaries of arts-based research, and even alterations-some slight, some more pronounced-of its identity. Indeed, a motif of sorts can be found in the (sometimes tacit) homage paid by one author after another to the legacy of Eisnerian-style arts-based research, even as they suggest alternate labels-aesthetically-based research, a/r/tography, arts-inspired research, arts practice as research-for what seem to be, in most cases, newly designated species within an established genus.Indeed, each of the approaches described and exemplified here distinguishes itself as an important addition to the earlier contributions of Eisner and other arts-based research pioneers. The ideas within the essay by Liora Bresler are perhaps most strongly reminiscent of that earlier literature. …