Teaching and Learning Emergent Research Methodologies in Art Education

Abstract

Teaching and Learning Emergent Research Methodologies in Art Education Stout, C. (201 3). Teaching and Learning Emergent Research Methodologies in Art Education. Reston, VA: National Art Education Association. 212 pages. ISBN 978-1 -890160-55-5.The field of education is filled with numerous texts pertaining to research methodology and methods, constituting its own popular genre. Teaching and Learning Emergent Research Methodologies in Art Education (2013) is a new addition to this genre and is specifically geared toward art education. With the goal of broadening concepts and issues pertaining to the teaching of methodological approaches in art education research, editor Candice Stout is both conceptual and pragmatic in her editorial approach. She and the contributing authors-who are leaders and innovators of qualitative approaches in the field of art education- describe their philosophical and theoretical orientations as well as their pedagogical strategies for teaching qualitative research courses.The ten chapters read not as prescription but as provocation, an open invitation for those who teach and learn arts-based research, or who are currently immersed in research, to come and play, linger, and experiment with form and content, illustrating Stout's assertion thatteaching and learning are forever works in progress (p. vii).The book consists of an introduction followed by ten chapters, each of which is devoted to a particular qualitative approach that includes theoretical orientations, instructional practices, examples of student work, and author reflections. Graeme Sullivan, Janet Miller, Candace Stout, Liora Bresler, Rita Irwin, Kathryn Ricketts, James Haywood Rolling Jr., Charles Garoian, jan jagodzinski, Paul Bolin, Christine Thompson, Lynn Beudert, and Elizabeth Garber each contributed individual or coauthored chapters that pertain to their particular realms of expertise. As a whole, the chapters present a diverse range of methodological and/or analytic approaches to topics, concepts, and issues pertaining to qualitative research in and for art education, highlighting several arts-based approaches as well as psychoanalytic methodology, phenomenology, historical investigation, and action research.Some chapters coalesce in a synergistic way around particular topics or forms of inquiry. A theme of what could be characterized as chance in motion can be seen, for example, across three chapters that focus on arts-based research. Sullivan's and Miller's chapter on creative and critical approaches to graduate research is a means of opening up the nature of craft pertaining to both social science and arts-based research; those familiar with Sullivan's contributions concerning studio practice as research will recognize the approach in this chapter as one that encompasses intertextuality, play, and the insistence of chance and change that is inherent in any research endeavor-whether it be in science, art, or somewhere (in)between. James Rolling addresses arts-based research within a larger landscape of the quantitative-qualitative divide, in which arts-based inquiry emerges out of a negotiation of bodies of knowledge. This negotiation, he argues, is conducive to motion that blurs methodological divides and is at play (in)between and among the Arts and sciences. Garoian's chapter on prosthesis as art research underscores the indeterminacy of play in art, a research logic determined more by slippage and contingency than prediction and causality. Indeed, the concept of research as chance in motion-where the irrational, contingent, and experimental are all at play-underscores many of the contributions in this edited book. Readers will take away the message that research is continually emergent in both process and method.Some authors discuss their work with methodological approaches that exist both within and outside of the field of art education that carry important lessons for the conduct of art education research. …