What Can We Learn From Contemporary Art Practice? Extending the Practices and Processes of Arts-based Educational Research

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Arts-based educational research is founded on the belief that the arts have the potential to contribute particular insights into, and understandings of phenomena that is of interest to educational researchers. As Elliot Eisner (2006), the first to articulate a place for the arts within educational research, claims “the arts provide access to forms of experience that are either un-securable or much more difficult to secure through other representational forms” This paper explores what a deeper relationship with the practices and processes of art (and contemporary art in particular) might offer to the continuing elaboration and development of arts based educational research theory and practice. It argues that if we are going to use art as a form of inquiry, as a means of analyzing, representing and disseminating research we need to engage in a critical discussion about how we understand art and what it offers – how it informs, guides and is present in our work and scholarly endeavors. While we have done well in locating arts based educational research in existing and emerging educational research paradigms, we have not done so well in situating this mode of inquiry in the multiple discourses and practices of art. There isn’t the same commitment to the art part of arts-based educational research as there is to the research or educational parts even though ABER researchers argue that the arts provide a special way of coming to understand something. The paper examines the work and work practices contemporary artists Huang Yong Ping and Clive Moloney and an artist researcher-scholar in order to raise and address questions such as: • Can we ever truly have a method of inquiry that attends to both art and research in equal measures?

• Are these two systems incompatible?
• How can we respect the traditions, histories and discourses and practices of the two disciplines while we integrate both in trying to come to understand teaching, learning and schooling systems?
• To what extent can the processes and practices of art making lead us to research practices that are open and attend to multiple ways of coming to know, to research that is transformative?

Stream: Arts Theory and Criticism

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Dónal O Donoghue is Assistant Professor and Chair, Art Education at the
University of British Columbia Vancouver Canada. His research addresses men,
masculinity, and schooling, and focuses on the intersections between
educational research and contemporary art practice.