Geo Takach is a Professor in the School of Communication and Culture, Royal Roads University, Victoria BC Canada (geo.takach@royalroads.ca).

 Rationale

The activity shared here introduces learners to epistemological foundations, advantages, and challenges of arts-based methods of inquiry (also called arts-based research, among other terms and variants, abbreviated here as ‘ABR’) as an exemplar of active learning. It offers a space for considering how students’ specific inquiries might be designed as ABR and it suggests an empathetic forum to workshop students’ ideas for arts-based ways to answer their research questions. This chapter presents a rationale for ABR, an overview of an activity to introduce it in the classroom, and reflections on pedagogical learning from conducting the activity. Appendix A features a starting list of resources on ABR.

ABR is “a process that uses the expressive qualities of form to convey meaning” to grow human understanding (Barone & Eisner 2012, p. xii). It explores the world and the human condition by gathering, synthesizing, analyzing, crafting, reflecting on, and ultimately sharing findings through creative practices employed in the arts. ABR can be enacted in diverse forms, such as drawings, theatre, writing, photovoice, textiles and video, among many others. As a methodological supplement to more traditional quantitative and qualitative methods of scholarly inquiry, ABR offers the potential for transformational learning for participants (Gerber et al., 2012).

In embodying ways of thinking guided by intuition, the senses and lived experience, ABR offers ways to access knowledges, ways of knowing, nuances, and expressive understandings that are deeper (Wilson & Flicker, 2014) and less readily available through more traditional research methods like surveys and interviews (Ward & Shortt, 2020). ABR is rooted in an ethic of care (Finley, 2011).

In valuing learners’ experience as part of the research (Ward & King, 2020), ABR offers them a better understanding of not only what they are learning but also their learning process as they iteratively consider each step of their inquiry. This ongoing reflection informs both their learning and creative processes, encouraging them to bring their fullest, authentic selves to the exercise. Students gain the joy of learning-by-doing and the satisfaction of artistic creation, increasing their motivation and their likelihood of retaining that learning (Rinne et al., 2011). This seems to harmonize with both the trend towards active learning in advanced education and the research encouraging that trend noted by Robertson (2018).

The timeless popularity of the arts offers ABR a wider reach than typically awaits the fruits of qualitative and quantitative inquiry (Ward & Shortt, 2020) and consequently a greater prospective impact (Capous-Desyllas & Morgaine, 2018). Impact matters because ABR connects to emancipatory imperatives (Osei-Kofi, 2013) striving to improve actual environmental, social and/or economic conditions. Thus, its ultimate promise (as an instrument of applied learning addressing real-world concerns) is the potential to transform learners, their participants, and audiences well beyond academe.

These benefits come with challenges for learners. For example, ABR’s subjectivity makes it difficult to pin down with referential precision or to achieve consensus as to its meaning(s). Its theory lags its practice. Practitioners must meet standards of both scholarly and artistic rigor, although the latter should not mean reproducing the status quo to the point that rigor becomes “rigor mortis” (Finley, 2011, p. 447). Some students may be reluctant to try ABR, so it is essential to create a safe space for them to explore it. Another challenge is time: the ineffability of artistic processes makes ABR less amenable to strict deadlines demanded by academic-term schedules.

In light of these advantages and challenges, learning outcomes for my activity introducing ABR in the classroom include students demonstrating abilities to:

1. assess the potentialities of ABR in their own journeys as researchers, scholar-practitioners, and citizens;
2. consider how a specific research question of their choice might be answered in a specific arts-based format;
3. experiment with and workshop their own ideas for arts-based ways to answer their research question; and
4. analyze and comment constructively on ideas for ABR projects proposed by their classmates.

The overarching goal is to equip students with a solid foundation to begin their own inquiries through ABR methods as additional resources in their active-learning toolkit.

Overview

This activity proceeds through three steps.

First, I introduce students to the epistemological foundations, advantages, and challenges of ABR methods, as highlighted above.

Second, students are invited to consider a research question that interests them and explore how ABR methods might help them answer it. (When this activity falls within a course, their research questions should certainly relate to topics covered in the course.) I begin by asking learners to consider how their identified inquiries might be designed as ABR. I lead a brainstorming session using a student-generated example of an inquiry relating to their personal, professional or volunteer activities. For example, a research question on how to reduce a specific kind of discrimination in a particular workplace or industry can be explored through a short story, a choreographed dance or a sculpture, to name just three forms. When students seem reluctant to try the activity due to fear or uncertainty, I suggest they situate their research question in a setting familiar to them (e.g., in an organization to which they belong) and in an artistic form that they enjoy, and then to imagine how their question might be addressed in that form. When that still leaves some students uncertain, I invite them to try imagining how their favourite film character or musical artist might address the research question in a movie or a song, respectively.

After working through a few examples in class, I set students to sketch out possible research designs in breakout groups or individually. Questions to address here include:

1. Which artistic form or medium (e.g., painting, short story, skit) might be helpful to address your research question?
2. What are the features of that form that make it helpful, and why?
3. How might you work in that artistic form to: (a) gather information to answer your question; (b) organize or synthesize that information for analysis; (c) analyze it to ground your answer; (d) craft your answer; and (e) present your answer?

This activity’s third step provides an empathetic forum for students to workshop their own ideas for arts-based ways to answer their research questions, as formulated in the second step described above. Here they receive comments from their peers and their instructor, then debrief collectively on their learning through the activity. Questions for the class to reflect on and discuss here include:

1. What advantages can we see in exploring the research question in the arts-based format that was chosen?
2. What challenges can we see?
3. What possible impacts—positive and potentially negative—on the intended audiences for the work can we foresee from presenting it to them?

Such reflections are vital in ABR, mirroring the ongoing, iterative process of informing and fuelling the creation of artistic work by pausing to consider the effect of each step in its evolution. Debriefing confers the further benefit of yielding valuable feedback on students’ learning, their comfort with ABR and the efficacy of the activity itself. When I perceive a need for further collective instruction and exercises or individual consultations, I follow up both in and out of class.

Within a course, this activity serves to seed an actual ABR project. I have used variants of it to prepare students for an assignment proposing an ABR project, which feeds naturally into the actual ABR project as their capstone assignment. Students’ demonstrated engagement in this activity counts towards their participation/contribution grade, if applicable.

Reflections

This activity supports students who are doing research in applied settings (e.g., organizations to which they belong) by offering opportunities to engage immersively, creatively, and consequentially in issues of interest and concern to them, in settings where they live, through artistic approaches. In expanding their tools of inquiry, it equips them to become more diverse and hopefully more effective applied researchers.

Because ABR will be novel methodological territory for many students, I emphasize learners don’t have to be seasoned artists to try it, and there is no single answer or right way to conduct ABR. Like art itself, ABR offers boundless possibilities while inviting copious consideration, creativity and effort. A safe space for experimentation, sharing and collaboration is essential. Instructors should scaffold the activity by ensuring that students are familiar, if not outright comfortable, with what ABR is and how it might help them pursue a research question with scholarly rigour.

This “art for scholarship’s sake” (Taylor, 2016, p. 6) remains a vital distinction from creating art for its own sake (Takach, 2016), which, while certainly rigorous, is free from academic dictates like posing and answering research questions, justifying claims, and citing sources. Still, I model great respect for artistic disciplines. In our zeal to focus on learning and research, we should remember the immense, timeless beauty and power of art as a means of self-expression as well as a tool to inspire others. Many defining historical developments link to artwork, such as Mona Lisa (1503), Leonardo da Vinci’s radical challenge to conventions of portraiture and composition in painting, and Le deuxième sexe (1949), Simone de Beauvoir’s ground-breaking treatise in feminist and gender studies.

Within courses, instructors should emphasize the required relevance of ABR questions to course material, so the activity can confer the additional, pragmatic benefits of priming students for success in any further ABR assignments and showing their learning for grading purposes.

It is also important to allow flexibility in students’ choices of topics and artistic forms, while nudging them to stay within the feasible limits of time and resources available for any ABR assignments. Instructors should leave ample time for questions and provide multiple opportunities for feedback, discussions, catharsis, and decompression in the wake of students sharing their hopes, fears, and vulnerabilities through their arts-based activity. Such flexibility extends to modifying the activity itself to suit the needs and comfort levels of the class.

In sum, in introducing ABR, this activity brings the power and beauty of the arts into dialogue with the investigative rigour of scholarship. With its focus on engagement (individually, perhaps also collaboratively and ultimately with an audience, plus an ethos to promote environmental, social and economic justice), its reliance on self-expression and reflexivity, and its hands-on approach to devising, discussing and enacting inquiry, this ABR exercise offers the potential for active, authentic and action-based learning, respectively—learning that can transform students, instructors and ultimately perhaps organizations, communities and even the world. The most memorable and deepest emotional moments in my two decades of post-secondary teaching stem from students sharing their ABR. That’s why for me this activity reaffirms the immense pedagogical value and efficacy of uniting academics and aesthetics through ABR as an acme of active learning, which experience teaches me is the most potent learning of all.

References

Barone, T., & Eisner, E. (2012). Arts based research. Sage.

da Vinci, L. (1503–1519). Mona Lisa [oil on poplar panel]. Musée du Louvre.

de Beauvoir, S. (1949). Le deuxième sexe (Tomes I et II). Gallimard.

Finley, S. (2011). Critical arts-based inquiry: The pedagogy and performance of a radical ethical aesthetic. In N.K. Denzin, & Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (4th ed.) (pp. 435–450). Sage.

Gerber, N., Templeton, E., Chilton, G., Liebman, M.C., Manders, E., & Shim, M. (2012). Art-based research as a pedagogical approach studying intersubjectivity in the creative arts therapies. Journal of Applied Arts and Health, 3, 39–48.

Capous-Desyllas, M., & Morgaine, K. (Eds.). (2018). Creating social change through creativity: Anti-oppressive arts-based research methodologies. Palgrave Macmillan.

Osei-Kofi, N. (2013). The emancipatory potential of arts-based research for social justice. Equity and Excellence in Education, 46(1), 135–149.

Rinne, L., Gregory, E., Yarmolinskaya, J, & Hardiman, M. (2011). Why arts integration improves long‐term retention of content. Mind, Brain, and Education, 5, 89–96.

Robertson, L. (2018). Toward an epistemology of active learning in higher education and its promise. In A. Misseyanni, M.D. Lytras, P. Papadopoulou, & C. Marouli (Eds.), Active learning strategies in higher education: Teaching for leadership, innovation, and creativity (pp. 17–44). Emerald.

Takach, G. (2016). Scripting the environment: Oil, democracy and the sands of time and space. Palgrave Macmillan.

Taylor, M.C. (2016). Arts-based approaches to inquiry in language education. In K. King, Y.J. Lai, & S. May (Eds.), Research methods in language and education. Encyclopedia of Language and Education (3rd ed., pp. 1–13). Springer.

Ward J., & King, D. (2020). Drawing out emotion in organisational life. In J. Ward & H. Shortt (Eds.), Using arts-based research methods (pp. 15–40). Palgrave Macmillan.

Ward J., & Shortt, H. (2020). Using arts-based methods of research: A critical introduction to the development of arts-based research methods. In J. Ward & H. Shortt (Eds.), Using arts-based research methods (pp. 1–13). Palgrave Macmillan.

Wilson, C. & Flicker, S. (2014) Arts-based action research. In D. Coghlan, & M. Brydon-Miller (Eds.), The Sage encyclopedia of action research (pp. 58–62). Sage.

Appendix A

Ten Readings on Arts-Based Research

Barone, T., & Eisner, E. (2012). Arts based research. Sage.

Bresler, L., & Andrews, K. (2014). The arts and qualitative inquiry: A dialogic and interpretive zone. International Review of Qualitative Research, 7(2), 155–160.

Cahnmann-Taylor, M., & R. Siegesmund (Eds.). (2008). Arts-based research in education: Foundations for practice. Routledge.

Eaves S. (2014). From art for art’s sake to art as means of knowing: A rationale for advancing arts-based methods in research, practice and pedagogy. The Electronic Journal of Business Research Methods, 12(2), 147–160.

Knowles, J.G., & Cole, A.L. (Eds). (2008). Handbook of the arts in qualitative research. Sage.

Leavy, P. (2020). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice (3rd ed.). Guilford.

Leavy, P. (Ed.). (2017). Handbook of arts-based research. Guilford.

Savin-Baden, M., & Wimpenny, K. (2014). A practical guide to arts-related research. Sense.

Takach, G. (2016). Scripting the environment: Oil, democracy and the sands of time and space. Palgrave Macmillan.

Takach, G. (2017). Creating an ecoaesthetic: Integrating arts-based research into courses on environmental communication. In T. Milstein, M. Pileggi, & E. Morgan (Eds.), The pedagogy of environmental communication (pp. 102–111). Routledge.