Art Education Research Research Articles

Using Photography in Art Education Research: A Reflexive Inquiry

This paper reports on the uses of photography in some research into domestic crafts in Brazil. This research, which included fieldwork and curriculum development components, was carried out with the aim of investigating crafts five women practised in their homes in Santa Maria and celebrating them in art lessons in primary schools. Photography was used in the fieldwork part of the research to collect visual data about the women and their crafts and to develop a visual resource for use by art teachers. In the curriculum experiments it was used by school children to record aesthetic aspects of their homes. This paper reflects on and compares the different kinds of photographs taken by the researchers, the women and the children and some strengths and weaknesses of using photography as a data collection tool in art education research.

Talking, Thinking, Responding and Creating: A Survey of Literature on Talk in Art Education

In art education there are many studies that investigate classroom conversations or interactions and analyze the kinds of student/teacher talk found in classrooms. The most common finding is that classroom talk is universally teacher-dominated. However, there is significant literature available in other disciplines which indicates that learning is related to the development of a “discourse community” and that learning to understand a discipline requires learning to talk and think in the discourse of that community. This article is a review of literature related to talk in the art classroom and a discussion of how trends in the study of discourse may have important implications for research in art education.

Research in the Arts: Issues in the development of new and relevant techniques of arts research in music, the arts and arts education

Research in the Arts: Issues in the development of new and relevant techniques of arts research in music, the arts and arts education

Teachers of Teachers: Faculty Working Lives and Art Teacher Education in the United States

Introduction Dream job: Working where valued as a professional art educator; teaching professionally committed students; working with quality school personnel; having time and support to continue active research and writing interests; working in a supportive and collegial atmosphere. (Professor) There is a developing consensus that the preparation of teachers should become central to art education research (Davis, 1990; Day, 1997; Galbraith, 1995; Zimmerman, 1994; 1997). Research exists on specific art teacher preparation programs (Carroll, Jones, & Sandell, 1995; Day, 1997; Galbraith, 1997; Sevigny, 1987; Thompson & Hardiman, 1991; Willis-Fisher, 1993; Zimmerman, 1997), and there is a growing interest in examining art preservice teachers' beliefs about teaching art (Grauer 1998; Kowalchuk, 1999; Short, 1995). Yet there is a lack of research on college level faculty-the teachers of teachers-whose qualifications, expertise, beliefs, and practices, shape and define art education within over 600 diverse institutions that have some association with preparing art teachers today (Galbraith, 1997; Hutchens, 1997). This lack of attention to faculty issues is not surprising, given that the data on faculty members associated with teacher education, in general, is sparse (Ducharme & Ducharme, 1996; Howey & Zimpher, 1989; Murray, 1995). Ducharme (1993) suggested that faculty members who prepare teachers are formerly public school teachers who enter higher education to seek better rewards and to have more autonomy in their professional lives. Faculty work involves paying attention to issues affecting conditions of employment and institutional expectations (Boyer, 1990; Fullan, 1996). It also involves paying attention to decisions that affect job satisfaction, career patterns, as well as professional and personal happiness (Ducharme, 1993). As with teachers teaching in school settings (Goodson, 1992; Huberman, 1993), faculty work is intimately affected by daily interactions with students, colleagues, and administrators (Jordan, 1994). Who then are the art education college-level faculty members that prepare future art teachers? Where do they teach? What are their jobs like? What are their roles, responsibilities, and beliefs in relation to art teacher education? This article reports on data taken from an ongoing research project that aims to identify faculty who teach art education within the U.S., the institutions in which they teach, their specific faculty roles and responsibilities, and their practices and beliefs about art teacher education. Given the broad context of this research and its overall qualitative nature, my intention is to provide the reader with a sense of the issuesthe flavor-that part of this research has uncovered. To this end, I will report on where education faculty members teach, their qualifications, and what they teach, and on specific aspects of their job descriptions, especially those related to teaching and research. I will briefly discuss how selected faculty members view their jobs currently and in the best possible worlds. I will conclude with implications for developing a research agenda that studies art teacher education faculty. Data Sources The data for this article are taken from two sources: First, I sent an open-ended questionnaire to 500 faculty members who worked at a variety of institutions (e.g.; research, teaching, liberal arts, religious, professional art school, private, public, large, small, and so forth) within the U.S. Faculty names, addresses, and institutions were gathered from the NASA Higher Education Division membership list, intensive searches of institutional homepages on the Internet, annual NAEA Convention programs, and the Internet listserv associated with the NAEA Research Task Force on Teacher Education. Of the 500 questionnaires mailed, 167 were returned from 44 states, with a return rate of 33 percent. Of these, 19 questionnaires were unusable, because, for example, art education was no longer taught at that institution. …

A Response to Ted Bracey

Ted Bracey's criticism of my book Mind in Art: Cognitive Foundations in Art Education finds fault with my views on artists, art, philosophy, psychology, mind-body relationships and with my failure to elucidate a theory of Art Education. The list suggests that my biggest failure may have been not writing the book he wanted to write. One might find this lengthy effort to find fault with an introduction to art education flattering, in that it aroused so much ire in the mind of the reviewer. Some of his criticisms are, of course, quite valid and speak to issues that professionals may respectfully disagree on. But his efforts to find so many things to disagree with resulted in his making a number of serious misattributions and misinterpretations. It may be useful to discuss some of our major disagreements and to expose some of his misunderstandings and misattributions. Bracey's biggest disappointment with my book was that I did not propose a new theory of art education. He is correct in claiming that I did not do this, since my intentions, as noted in the preface, were to examine and make explicit those cognitive behaviors normally associated with most higher order and problem solving activity and how they function in the act of creative forming (p.14). Further, I stated in the preface that my purpose was to inform the reader how we can go about understanding the role of cognition in art learning and to suggest some strategies teachers can use in schools to demonstrate the feasibility of that approach. I long ago disabused myself of the dream of constructing a theory that would answer all the questions one could raise about the role of art in education. I have always thought that there is more than one suitable rationale for teaching art-a view I made clear in 1997 (NASA 1997) and in my offering of three competing paradigms, reflecting the Rationalists, Idealist, and Empirical philosophies (Dorn 1994). I have never had any desire to develop a Dorn Theory or to present a single theory of art education as being more adequate than any other. My experience in teaching college students tells me that most art majors are not all that hot to read theory. I believe, perhaps falsely, that Art Education students are more interested in learning how, rather than why, we do what we do. For this reason I did not want to write a textbook on psychology and art in such a way that I might give any students that eyes-rolled-over look. More importantly, perhaps, Bracey aims a good deal of his criticism at my claim that art making is an intelligent activity. He argues that I have advanced unquestioned assumptions about the nature of art and mind, and he asserts that making art is mindless rather than intelligent, that artworks can be made stupidly and that individual artworks reveal only the thinking [that] led them from one work to another. He also believes that the tradition of Modernism has long been discredited, is hierarchical and wildly elitist. One might conclude that Bracey has a negative view of both artists and art. We can only guess why Bracey challenges the claim that making art is intelligent activity. My attempts to provide a view of both top down and bottom up theories of cognitive psychology and aesthetics were apparently insufficient to sway his on this matter. So too was my review of the art education research yielding data supporting a positive relationship between art and intelligence. One can guess about what assumptions he used to criticize the book by noting his use of the ideas of Wittgenstein, Ryle, Lanier, and Institutional Theory. Bracey was correct that I avoided George Dickey's institutional theory of art as a basis for my thinking. Dickey's theory argues that the artist must accept that his or her artwork is first and foremost a commodity for sale on the art world market and that its aesthetic value is decided by the number of works sold and the prices they bring in the marketplace. …

The Place of Practical Knowledge in Research in Art and Design Education

This article explores the changing relationship between research and professional practice in art and design. The basis on which practical studio-based work is recognised as research activity is critically examined and recent influences on research degree programmes in the UK are discussed. A conceptual framework is proposed within which the contribution of research of this kind to the advancement of knowledge can be articulated. Finally, this article identifies some of the wider implications of this approach to research.

Instruction in Visual Art: Can It Help Children Learn to Read?

Can reading skills be enhanced by instruction in the visual arts? Arts education researchers have sometimes made this claim and have argued that the visual arts can play a strong role in the teaching of basic skills in the kindergarten and elementary school years.' There are two possible mechanisms by which visual arts instruction might enhance reading ability, one cognitive, one motivational. The cognitive mechanism would involve transfer of skill. Perhaps visual arts training strengthens visual perception skills (e.g., pattern recognition, attention to details) that can be deployed in reading. If children with poor reading skills are deficient in reading because of a weakness in visual perception, and if visual arts instruction enhances the same kind of visual perception skills needed for efficient reading, then such a suggestion is plausible. The motivational mechanism would involve the visual arts as an entry point into reading. Given engaging art projects that are integrated with reading and writing, children may become motivated to read and write. In this case, however, there would be nothing necessary about the visual arts as a vehicle for reading instruction. An engaging project in gymnastics integrated with reading (or community service, or sports, etc.) might also improve reading skills via the same mechanism. There have been several arts and reading programs designed to help remedial readers improve their reading achievement: for example, Learning to Read through the Arts (LTRTA), begun in 1971, Children's Art Carnival (CAC), begun in 1974, and Reading Improvement through the Arts (RITA), begun in 1975.2 All three of these programs (housed in New York City) were based on the strongly held view that visual art is an effective vehicle through which to improve reading skills.3 The method of these three programs was similar. Children participating in LTRTA received considerable extra art and reading instruction (about 813 hours a week). Typically, students worked on visual art projects with an artist-teacher, along with reading and writing linked to the art projects. For instance, they were given lists of vocabulary words connected to their art

Research Methods and Methodologies for Art Education

For students eagerly planning their debutante fling in that great ballroom called Academic Research, it is important to know something about the varied dance steps that they will encounter-everything from the measured solemnity of the social science minuet to the Duncanesque mysteries of feminist free-form. It is wise for neophytes to be nimble on their toes, for an awkward dancer risks social disgrace. The editors have done us all a favor by including certain dances and excluding others. In particular, there is the glaring absence of the unbalanced gyrations of the deconstructionists, critical theorists and other postmodern dervishes. And, as Gilbert and Sullivan have it, They'll none of them be missed. Especially not in a book of this sort, which must have novice researchers in mind as part of its readership. It is always good educational practice to initiate learners into a field with the most typical and coherent instances of whatever one is studying. When studying mammals it is sensible to save the platypus until last. The contents of this book will be useful to anyone wishing to do research in art education. With only a few exceptions the prose style of the essays is of good quality. emerges from a reading is the absence of an over-arching strategy for art education research and the lack of a consensus as to vital questions the field must address. But this lack of consensus is not a unique feature of research in art education. For example a comparable lack can be observed in the allied field of psychological research into creativity (Pariser, 1993). I will give the flavor of this collection by touching on a couple of key chapters. For beginning researchers, a logical starting point might be Koroscik and Kowalchuk's very helpful chapter on decoding and critiquing journal articles. The authors give broad outlines of four sorts of scholarly articles and then they offer a methodical analysis of two empirical studies. (Both are found in full in an appendix). I used this chapter as a text in a graduate research methods class and most students found it very helpful. Two comments: The authors analyze research projects with which they are closely connected (the work of Koroscik is referred to in both projectsand she is a co-investigator in one of them). As the world of research in art education is small, it was probably wise rather than simply self-serving for the authors to choose work with which they are associated. Obviously, they stand behind their own research and in dissecting it, they run no risk of offending anyone. The analysis offered is balanced, without being either scathing or lopsidedly laudatory. A point: Among the several helpful charts dealing with types of research, the authors present one on p.83 that distinguishes between studies (naturalistic) and studies(experimental). The authors identify descriptive as those that ask the question What is? while predictive supposedly ask What could be? When members of my class read this we felt that this distinction was not helpful. For surely both experimental and naturalistic are concerned with investigating What is. Both named approaches have, as their goal the creation of an articulated and credible representation of some piece of the world. Thus, the identified goals of these two sorts of research suggest a difference in objectives where none exists. This is not to deny the very real differences between naturalistic and experimental studies-it is just to suggest that both sorts of research do have at least one aim in common; namely the description of what is. Wilson's introductory chapter on research as a second search is a stimulating, if less methodical essay. Wilson makes it clear that, above all else, research should be driven by questions, not methodologies. This observation alone constitutes an important guidepost to novice researchers who all too often may be dazzled by the techniques and methods that they have learned to use, without formulating a question worthy of the name. …

Editorial: Small Changes

Last week was the first in the new semester. One of the courses that I am teaching this term is Review of Research in Art Education. This is a required course all students in our master's program. The homework between weeks one and two was to read Koroscik and Kowalchuk's chapter Reading and Interpreting Research Journal Articles and the related appendices (reprints from Studies) in the NAEA publication Research Methods and Methodologies Art (La Pierre & Zimmerman, 1997) and to come to class with three questions discussion. When the questions were shared, it became obvious that this group of fledgling graduate students wanted to initiate some form of dialogue with those that they perceive as writing for them. It seems to me that many established scholars and researchers also appreciate the opportunity dialogue and over the past few issues a few small but important changes have been made to the pages of Studies. We are now printing a contact address the authors of each paper. I hope that some of our authors are being contacted by readers, my students included, who want to congratulate, argue, clarify, develop implications practice, or possibly even collaborate in further related work. Typically Studies has provided a of published Commentary. For example, in the last issue (40:1) Jeffrey Patchen and Mary Ann Stankiewicz were specifically invited to respond to A Survey of Graduate Study in Art Education by Tom Anderson, Elliot Eisner, and Sally McRorie. In addition, Elliot Eisner was invited to editorialize on the contributions of Leilani Lattin Duke and Harold Williams to the Getty Institute the Arts. But please don't wait to be invited. The astute will have noticed that Instructions Authors of Commentaries has now been set off on its own as a clearly identifiable sidebar on the second page of each issue. In this issue the notion of forum has been extended into the book review section. Patricia Stuhr and her faculty colleagues at the Ohio State University share their group reaction to my Celebrating Pluralism: Art, Education, and Cultural Diversity (Chalmers, 1996). Although their review (submitted to Peter Smith, the Book Review Editor, and recommended by him publication) is presented as a letter to me, it is written so that others can also join the conversation. I posit that discipline-based art education and multicultural art education can be compatible, but what do you think? Should we celebrate pluralism or differences? Does it have to be either one or the other? Are there universal moral values? Is cultural relativism a problem? What do we do about value conflicts? Where do you stand on the issue of art education social change? …

Editorial: Seven Readers

This semester I am teaching a graduate seminar: Review of Research in Art Education. seven master's students in this class represent a variety of perspectives and experiences in different art education settings. Pamela has just returned from teaching in Japan and is looking forward to teaching art to English-as-a-second-language students, here in British Columbia. Another student is a hereditary chief of the Nisga'a First Nation. Paul (he also has a Nisga'a name) sees a special role for the arts and art education centered in cultural identity. Jennifer is a very committed high school art teacher. I have known her since she was an undergraduate. She has been waiting for this time in her life when her own family would allow her to return to graduate school. Jennifer has been working with student teachers and has a particular interest in the school-based aspects of teacher education. Luella is a student in educational psychology and special education with a particular interest in art education. She works with at-risk students in a last-chance alternate high school program. Luella is beginning to work more and more with film and she and her students are tapping into the growing educational opportunities provided by the film industry in British Columbia. Susan is a museum educator who works in a community gallery. Most recently she has been concerned with the ways in which First Nations art is displayed and presented to the public. Jocelyn is a fiber artist who teaches a textile design teacher education course, and who also works on-call in elementary and secondary schools. Daphne, who has returned to the city after teaching in small Northern coastal communities, brought her new young son to class. At this point Daphne is not sure whether she will return to a First Nations community, or to her Mennonite roots in Manitoba. I provide a little bit of information about this group (not their real names), because master's-level courses are very often the first place where Studies in Art Education becomes known. Although individual studies may be reviewed in initial teacher education courses, courses such as the one that I am presently offering, use all 40 years of Studies to provide the big picture of scholarly inquiry and research in our field. For some students, often those interested in going on to PhDs and EdDs, acculturation takes place and the relationship is a positive one. But for many others, seeking relevance to their own situations, the relationship is rocky. As I work with this semester's students- first of all on a group project that involves assigning content and methodological descriptors to all the papers in the first 39 volumes of Studies, (we want to provide a more useful searchable index for the field)-and then on to other assignments, such as blind reviews of papers actually submitted to Studies, I watch the group's reactions with interest, and often with concern. text that ties the seminar together is the NAEA publication Research Methods and Methodologies for Art Education (La Pierre & Zimmerman, 1997) [reviewed by David Pariser in this issue]. Students particularly appreciate the chapter by Judith Smith Koroscik and Elizabeth Kowalchuk on Reading and Interpreting Research Journal Articles, and readily identify with the teacher-empowering points made by Brent Wilson in The Second Search: Metaphor, Dimensions of Meaning, and Research Topics in Art. …

The Quest … Research and Inquiry in Arts Education

The Quest … Research and Inquiry in Arts Education

Arts Education Advocacy and Research: To what End?

(1998). Arts Education Advocacy and Research: To what End? Arts Education Policy Review: Vol. 99, Symposium on Arts Education Research, pp. 16-20.

A Long Trail Awinding: Issues, Interests, and Priorities in Arts Education Research

(1998). A Long Trail Awinding: Issues, Interests, and Priorities in Arts Education Research. Arts Education Policy Review: Vol. 99, Symposium on Arts Education Research, pp. 21-29.

Research, Policy, and Practice in Arts Education: Meeting Points for Conversation

(1998). Research, Policy, and Practice in Arts Education: Meeting Points for Conversation. Arts Education Policy Review: Vol. 99, Symposium on Arts Education Research, pp. 9-15.

Arts Education Research: A Reassessment Overview and Introduction to the Symposium

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid B. PankratzDavid B. Pankratz is an arts and education consultant and writer based in South Pasadena, Ca. He is the co-editor of The Challenge to Reform Arts Education and The Future of the Arts and author of Multiculturalism and Public Arts Policy. Responses to the symposium may be sent to slswartdbpank@sprintmail.com.

A Visual Arts Research Agenda toward the Twenty-First Century

Who teaches the visual arts at elementary and secondary levels? What art content is appropriate to be taught? How is curriculum theory translated into practice? How are the visual arts taught? How do different educational environments affect visual arts learning? How do students learn about art? What assessment strategies are appropriate for learners from diverse social, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds? To what extent are teachers prepared to teach in a variety of educational contexts? Questions such as these form the bases of inquiries facing art education researchers as they create an agenda toward the 21st century.

Survey of Current Research in Art Education

Research in art education is often conducted by independent researchers working without coordination or knowledge of other ongoing research studies. Zimmerman, in Briefing Papers: Creating A Visual Arts Research Agenda Toward the 21st Century (1996), notes, Both Davis (1977) and Hamblen (1989) observed that art educators have worked inductively and idiosyncratically without the base-line data and descriptive information about the field that is necessary for informing art education theory and practice. In art education, there is a preponderence of individual, independent studies that have not been replicated (p. 8). In the last several years NAEA has worked vigorously to create rational, comprehensive strategies for research in art education, including publications, and the creation of the NAEA Commission on Research in Art Education, and its eight task forces representing research in demographics, conceptual issues, curriculum, instruction, learning, teacher education, and evaluation. Each of these strategies seeks a clearer conception of research, promotes discussion of research issues and priorities, and encourages research through coordination, communication, and collaboration. For research to proceed in a purposeful manner, art educators need a comprehensive view of ongoing research in the field. The broad array of practical and theoretical issues in art education begs the question, What is the current state of research in art education? In order to answer that question, I surveyed 332 art educators, including 137 members of the Seminar for Research in Art Education (SRAE) and 195 other higher education faculty at U.S. institutions with doctoral and/or masters' programs in art education. The survey asked respondents to identify one or two categories corresponding to the eight NAEA Research Task Forces that most typified each research study. Of the 332 art educators surveyed, 75 (or 22.6%) responded, reporting on a total of 254 studies completed in 1995 and/or ongoing in 1996. Of these, 102 (or 40.1 %) were done by 68 higher education faculty and 10 independent scholars (without an institutional affiliation), 60 (or 23.6%) were doctoral dissertations, and 92 (or 36.2%) were masters' theses. The results are shown in Tables 1-3. Each study is classified by one or two categories corresponding to the eight research task forces. The categories are hierarchically ranked from left to right, and from top to bottom, resulting in a different categorical order for each matrix. In Table 2 and 3, another category, Technology, has been added to reflect write-ins. Higher Education Faculty's Research Research in contexts, concepts, and curriculum dominate the higher education faculty's studies. The first three columns comprise 78% of the studies, while the six cells comprising the first three columns represent over 57%! The shaded cells in the three matrices represent studies in which only one category was listed. Doctoral Dissertations Among the 60 doctoral dissertations, 47 (or 78%) fall in the concepts, contexts, and student learning categories. …

Further Commentary: Response to Burton's Survey of Current Research in Art Education

This year the National Art Education Association (NAEA) celebrated its 50th anniversary. As an educational organization, NAEA is relatively young and now has a history that can be reflected upon and a research agenda poised on the brink of moving into the mainstream of recognition in the field of educational research. In the first issue of Studies in Art Education, Jerome Hausman (1959) wrote: The teaching of art, as we know it, is a relatively recent phenomenon. There is, for example, a much greater tradition for an artistapprentice relationship. Only in recent years have we moved to a point of identifying a profession concerned with the theory and practice of teaching art. (p. 5) His observations appear to be as true today as 39 years ago. Much has happened in the intervening years, yet research in art education is still viewed by some in the larger educational research community as nonexistent or less rigorous than that practiced in other academic disciplines. I teach as a member of a faculty in a school of education that is recognized as a major research institution. I often have been asked by colleagues if there is a body of research in art education, and if there are issues discussed and studies conducted in art education in a similar manner to studies in other more academic areas. It always amazes these colleagues when art education doctoral students receive national and state research awards; they are especially astonished when these students are recipients of awards from the faculty of education. Burton's survey of current research in art education challenges the notion that there is a paucity of research by demonstrating that from 1995 to 1996 higher education faculty, independent scholars, and doctoral and masters' studies, as self-reported by 75 art educators, were conducting 254 research studies. Burton's survey and analysis focuses on eight categories of research identified in 1994 by the NAEA Research Commission. He has attempted to answer the question, is the current state of research in art education? This question poses more questions than are addressed in this survey. A number of unanswered questions occurred to me when reading Burton's study. How many of these researchers were eventually presented in public arenas and/or later published? Are studies identified by art educators' idiosyncratic, one-time events or are they part of ongoing research agendas? What kinds of methodologies were utilized in these studies? How many of the studies employed several researchers working in collaboration and at a variety of sites? Were studies conducted in national and/or international contexts? Were studies based on the work of art education researchers and/or scholars from other fields? Burton's survey is a beginning venture that adds to demographic knowledge in art education. Answers to the questions just posed should be addressed in future studies so that this beginning knowledge base is extended and expanded. The current emphasis on educational reform in the United States and other countries has highlighted the need for research and information in all school subjects including the arts. In 1994, an Arts Education Research Agenda for the Future was published (NEA and USDOE, 1994) that outlined a need for research in curriculum and instruction, assessment and evaluation, and teacher education and preparation. A year earlier NAEA (1993) had published Art Education: Creating a Visual Arts Research Agenda Toward the 21st Century, followed by Briefing Papers (Zimmerman, 1996), Implementing a Visual Arts Education Research Program (NAEA, 1996), and Research Methods and Methodologies in Art Education (LaPierre & Zimmerman, 1997). …

Two Sides of an Orange: The Conduct of Research

In the repertoire of jokes for 6-year-olds, there is one about the number of sides that an orange has. The answer (ask any 6-year-old) is two: an inside and an outside. Whatever one thinks of it as a joke, it is not a bad metaphor for research, which mandates that anyone pursuing it must operate alternately outside and inside, in the realm of researcher looking for support for research, and of researcher actively engaged in research. These two roles require the assumption of quite different personas. The researcher looking for support is rather like a promoter looking for venture capital. One has to convince the prospective client that an investment will pay off. One has to assume that the client has seen many of these not-to-be-missed opportunities come and go, and may therefore be expected to adopt a mildly skeptical, rather than a wildly enthusiastic attitude to any new proposal. One has to address the prospective source of support in language at once familiar and persuasive. The only alleviating condition for the researcher-as-promoter is that funding bodies neither gain nor lose directly if a proposal falls flat, for it is not their own money they are parting with. They may thus be a little more forthcoming with their support than the individual investor might be. By contrast, the researcher engaged in research has maintenance, rather than persuasion, in mind. The establishment of trust, the exploration of interpersonal relations, the encouragement of interaction and reflection on the part of informants, require different abilities from the entrepreneurial skills of the grant seeker. My intent is to deal with both sides of the orange. First, a few of the problems and issues associated with identifying and securing grant money are discussed, along with some general observations about the business of research (for business it is). My emphasis will be on how the individual finds a path through these procedural complexities, rather than on the enumeration of granting agencies and their requirements. Next, several of the particulars of doing research are discussed. Here, I confine myself to discussing aspects of qualitative research, since it is a form that has over the past decade increasingly attracted the attention of researchers in art education, and in education in general. 1The material in this

Commentary: On Arguing from Authority

The National Art Education Association has been involved in a major research effort for about 4 years (NAEA, 1996). Concerted and systematically structured research is a necessity for the future health and development of art education and art educators must hope that the efforts of the various research teams will be fruitful, as fruitful, for example, as Harvard's Project Zero, but more focused on the needs of education in the visual arts, rather than on the collection of psychological data (Lanier, 1987). While I am optimistic about the NAEA research teams' efforts, I wonder if there might be greater rewards if they were accompanied by an equally major push for philosophical investigation. I say this not because I have any delusions about own philosophical abilities-far, far from it!-but because I have noticed a strand in art education literature that I regard as a weakness and that I think might be overcome or at least lessened by a greater attention to philosophical grounding within the field. That is, a more thought-out philosophy of art education-distinct from philosophy of art or philosophy of education-is needed. Is this a rather pompous and perhaps vague quasi-proclamation? Maybe ego has fogged reason, but let me try to explain concerns further. I will start by issuing a challenge to readers of art education literature to estimate how many articles they have read in which the validity of the argument depended on acceptance of the notions of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, or various neo-Marxist theorists? Or perhaps on the writings of currently popular anthropologists, such as Dissanayake or Levi-Strauss? Or psychologists, including Gardner of Project Zero? I further challenge readers to analyze the contents of these articles. How many of them marshal a tremendous amount of theory from outside the field of art education to explain or scrutinize a small scale or even trivial event within art education? I call this using a Sherman Tank for a short ride around the block. The small scale is seldom well-explained by huge and dense theory. Unfortunately, one important area of art education research, participant-observer studies, is prone to this malaise. I say unfortunately because qualitative research seems to promise so much for art education and I often read articles based on this methodology. Participant-observer articles frequently make pleasant reading of a rather anecdotal sort, but the connection to prestigious, usually anthropological theory can seem tenuous if not strained. Perhaps well-reported anecdotes need to be collected and published without so much theory so that solid art educational theory can be developed from that data. Perhaps the grandiose borrowed theories need to be downplayed by art education researchers, editors, and reviewers. However, I am not arguing for know-nothingness but rather, a more lean and tight use of citations of theoretical sources, a little less saying my reasoning is justified by theoretician-flavor-of-the-decade. The most recent champion example of citation after citation of authorities as judgments was not a participant-observer study but an article analyzing an advertisement for the Getty Center of Education in the Art, (jagodzinski, 1997). In one way the analysis was fun. If one enjoys the intellectual equivalent of a Fantasia hippo ballet, then the trouncing of the advertisement's imagery through heavy, very heavyweight theory was amusing. If, however, the theory-ridden exercise is read from the Sherman Tank, or perhaps from the beating-a-butterfly-with-a-baseball-bat perspective, amusement may wear thin. Given the tendency to hyperfootnoteism and dense theorizing of such deconstructive enterprises, it is difficult to gauge whether this was a critique or a parody of a deconstructive analysis. Frankly, since I like jokes, I enjoyed it as a satire of this sort of jargon-loaded field of analysis. In another recent case, Duncum (1997), cited several authorities to the effect that there is no valid difference between the aesthetic experience one can gain from art and that from mass media products. …