A Publication of Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Table of Contents
“The idea of arts-based research is proving to hold great appeal to scholars committed to using the fine arts in systematic ways to understand human experience and to explore new applications of the creative process to areas outside the arts. It is intriguing to envision how artistic inquiry, a process that researchers have for so long tried to explain according to non-arts disciplines, may begin to influence the larger ecology of knowledge and professional practice. But before the arts can realize their potential within this cross-fertilization of knowledge, we must define and establish their unique ways of researching experience.”
“In recent times, the role of the artist in society has been expanded to encompass the fields of education and human services. Since the 1960s, thousands of professionals have been trained in new roles as creative arts educators and therapists. These artists/educators/therapists are changing and transforming the institutions in which they work and the services they offer.”
“What is arts-based research? As soon as we ask this question, we have stepped outside the realm of research itself. The question, 'What is it?', is fundamentally a philosophical question, as Socrates showed. In this essay, I would like to provide a philosophical perspective on the question of what arts-based research is.”
“It could be that each of us awakes each morning with any number of research questions circulating around our brains. Some are practical, personal and immediate—How do I manage an emotional wound suffered by my children? Others are philosophical and more subliminal—What is God and how can I engage in spiritual dialogue? In both examples, research can be seen as a search for an answer to a complex question that seems to elude a simple answer, but that also propels the search and re-search.”
“It all began when I set up a little research study because I wanted to know the impact of our Creative Arts in Learning program on some of our teachers... Using a case study method, I interviewed each teacher and observed her teach about 3 times in two years of going through the program...When I decided to extract poems from these transcripts, the changes in the inner lives of teachers came clearly into focus. Their poems, selected and edited by me, became the heart of my written piece. My prose, which surrounded their poems, was explanatory.”
“This paper presents a model for collaborative partnerships between art therapists and the people they serve....The model regards groups of people—particularly those who are disenfranchised by society—as experts in their own life situations and conditions, with tacit knowledge of how to change their lives in ways that are meaningful to them.”
“My focus was on the disenchanted professional coping with a toxic work environment. I used art based methods with two purposes in mind: 1) to reveal aesthetically the phenomena of artist disenchantment and 2) to transform it in ways that would help art therapists reclaim what had been lost. In essence, my research method was that of an artist whose works serve as objects of intense, aesthetic reflection and subsequent creative action”
“Estimates of the number of children who bear arms for the different warring factions other than the army range from 5,000 to 17,000, many of them taken from their homes and indoctrinated against their will. At the same time that these children play the real game of war with sometimes fatal consequences, other children play at school, in their communities and in their homes. What are the social realities that these children experience and, given the chance, how would they depict the different aspects of their lives if they were asked to play for real, to play as if they were depicting their own lives, or their lives as they would want them to be?”
“The inquiry began with a series of in-depth verbal and movement interviews with a number of Egyptian Muslim women living in Cairo, Egypt. The data gathered from six of these interviews was used as inspiration for dances that would embody the unique voices of the women, as well as themes that seemed to be common among them.”
“This piece of Arts-Based Research is a fifty-minute solo that took six months to create and three to 'live inside of,' as dancers say. Before the piece begins I explain what I am going to do and how the three separate sections will follow one another. I ask each person to try to remain present with me, physically and emotionally, as I move. I pose the question: 'What is the difference, for you, between the primary experience and the translated or worded experience?'”
“One of the things about art-based research is that you don’t necessarily set off one morning and say, 'OK! I think today I’ll start an art-based research project!' You might only realize in process that you’re doing one; or when someone labels your work that way; or in retrospect when you look at what’s materialized and sit back with a grin and think, 'This is good. This is really good! Look at all those metaphors!!'”
“Music carried me through personal trauma, brought meaning to my experience, and gave others a chance to benefit from music therapy. The research process itself served as a therapeutic outlet for my own recovery while identifying the factors that were influential in helping others cope with the pain and anxiety of childbirth.”
“This paper examines the long-term process of art-based research I pursued across art forms, from sculpture to prose, resulting in the writing of a memoir about the story of my conception. The writing of Junkie Bastard emerged from ceramic sculptures I created as a graduate art therapy student in 1994, and earlier, and continued for ten intensely therapeutic years. Only this amount of time could yield sufficient artistic and psychological distance. Junkie Bastard is about growing up in France 23 years ago as a 17-year-old punk rocker with a bad heroin habit, and discovering I was the love child of a Hungarian opera composer.”
“In many ways we had both been investigating the holocaust all of our
lives. As children we were both aware of the holocaust and its impact
upon our families. Throughout our lives we have both read extensively
about the holocaust, and have visited holocaust museums and memorials
throughout the world.”
©2004, Lesley University. All rights reserved.