Arts-Based Research

Origins and Growing Legitimacy

The term arts-based research was coined by Elliot Eisner of Stanford University in the 1990s. It has an antecedent in Eisner's earlier notion of educational criticism, an approach in which the curriculum is researched and evaluated in a manner similar to that carried out by critics within various fields of the arts. The term was first publicized widely through a series of seven Winter Institutes of the American Educational Research Association co-directed by Elliot Eisner and Tom Barone of Arizona State University. Despite some skepticism and outright rejection by many traditionalist research methodologists, arts-based research gradually achieved visibility, credibility, and legitimacy as an acceptable qualitative inquiry approach in curriculum studies, within other fields of education, and in the humanities, social sciences, and various professional fields.

The approach has been linked primarily (although not exclusively) to curriculum studies as a result of the many presentations sponsored by Division B (Curriculum Studies) of the American Educational Research Association and has been featured prominently at meetings of other professional organizations devoted to the curriculum field, such as the annual conferences of the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy and the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. Articles advocating and exemplifying arts-based research have appeared in numerous curriculum journals. Books and book chapters have also been devoted to the perceived attributes and detriments of the approach.

One measure of its development is the number of related research approaches it has spawned since the 1990s by scholars within and outside of the curriculum field. These include arts-inspired research, arts practice as research, and a/r/tography. Most arts-based research employs literary formats, although many other forms are available in principle, and are sometimes used in practice. These include, among others, literary essays, poetry, short stories, novels, ethnodrama, music and musical improvisations, dance, photography, multimedia presentations and installations, painting, sculpture, performance arts, and so on.

Epistemological Premises and Research Purposes

One of the most distinguishing features of arts-based research is the rationale for the research engagement. The point of doing this sort of research is not the traditional one of making knowledge claims or achieving validity and reliability, at least not in the usual sense of those terms. The purpose for doing arts-based research is not to move the reader or percipient toward the comforts of greater certainty. Instead, a student of curriculum would engage in arts-based research for the purpose of re-viewing curriculum phenomena that have come to be perceived or conceived of in a manner that is usual, conventional, or orthodox. This aim has also been expressed in other (related) ways, including offering the possibility of multiple meanings, of deepening and complicating the conversations about curriculum terms, issues, and phenomena. Ultimately, the reader or viewer may be brought to see dimensions of the curriculum in a new, previously unavailable, light. These alternative perspectives and interpretations may not promote greater consensus, but instead produce disequilibrium, a disturbance that leads to further interrogation of meaning beyond what has come to be taken for granted within the field.

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