Embedding art as a research methodology within educational processes

Abstract

The focus of this position paper outlines and explores the way art, as a research methodology, can be understood and used more fully within the context of education. The paper demonstrates that in art-based research and in the teaching leading to it, art is both the object of investigation and the method of inquiry. Art-based research involves deep reflection on the interplay between mental motivations and physical ones that are present through contact with the medium (artform). The world-wide growing appreciation of using art as research within higher education is gaining considerable momentum with the explicit promotion of having the most relevance to artist-educator-researchers and resisting the dominance of social sciences within education which has not adequately served artistic inquiry.

Aim and Objective: The aim of this paper is to propose that, at the centre of art as research, the artist-educator-researcher can bring together the tensions evident in higher education. The principle objective of the paper is to introduce a new concept by the author acknowledging the threefold primacy of art in research and education: art as the topic, process and outcome of research.

Art as Methodology: In art-based research we can ask what the object or creative expression reveals about itself and what role the artist plays. Rather than providing an accompanying narrative by the artist giving a self-referential, one-sided emoted account of what the artist experienced or intended, art-based research offers a more complete research approach that recognizes the artistic objects of art as ‘full participants’ in the process. The artefact (e.g. piece of music, painting, dance) and the active interplay between the artwork, the process and the artist (as artist-educator-researcher) define the methodology known as 'art as research' or 'art-based research'.

Findings and Conclusion: Examples of this interplay will be presented in sharing the multiple outcomes of this method of researching within education. The results of these exemplar approaches reveal that research questions and findings arise in and through practice. Processes, if studied, reveal a great depth of knowledge. Art-based inquiry, therefore, includes multiple ways of knowing, including affective, sensory, creative, observational and intuitional, as well as the use of experimentation, risk-taking, discovery and meaning-making through the process of making art. The findings from the exemplar approaches presented also demonstrate that artwork of any type can be art itself, with responses drawn from poetry, dance, performance and so on. There is tremendous richness and endless possibilities for a researcher in these types of investigations, and therefore the potential for learning and teaching is immense. In conclusion, this paper finds that scientific and social scientific approaches are not fully useful to artists. Rather artists can make use of art as a research methodology to investigate their own practices and outcomes seeing art as the topic, process and outcome of research.