Thoughts on an Agenda for Research and Development in Arts Education

Abstract

Conducting a broadly defined program of research is one of the vehicles a profession uses to keep itself intellectually alive. Through research, and the journals that serve as its teachers, new ideas are presented, examined, and revised, and the stimulus for inquiry into the problems of the field is made available to its members. Such inquiry is normally the result of the particular interests of individual scholars; and, although there are styles of inquiry and fashionable programs that emerge from time to time within the profession, there has not been a national research agenda in arts education that might more rationally and systematically generate insights into, if not answers to, the problems the field faces. Research in arts education is best characterized as a piecemeal approach: Whatever connections one makes across research projects are more the result of the reader's efforts at synthesis than of a plan intentionally designed to facilitate them. While such an approach to the problems of the field has a great many virtues - problems change in educational practice, individual scholars may be interested in offbeat problems that eventually prove productive, different levels of schooling and different geographic and cultural areas have different needs - the identification and pursuit of the field's generic research needs through a funded research program over time is one important way to foster intellectual growth and to improve ELLIOT W. EISNER is professor of art and education at Stanford University and president-elect of the National Art Education Association. Among his major publications are Readings in Art Education (co-editor), Educating Artistic Vision, and The Arts, Human Development, and Education (ed.). This article is reprinted with the permission of the author and publisher from Arts and Aesthetics: An Agenda for the Future, ed. S. Madeja (St. Louis: CEMREL, 1977).