Does Arts-Based Research Have a Future?

I want to start my comments with some observations about the connection between the arts and the sciences and between the arts and research. Typically speaking, we do not tend to associate artistic activity with the more cool, calculating, and, for some, rational character of scientific investigation. The arts are guided by "feel," while scientific activities are thought to belong to the rational sphere; calculating, deliberate, logical and perhaps most of all, theoretical. Research is what scientists do. Painting or composing is what artists do. Thus, creating something called "arts-based research" is to some a kind of oxymoron. So we start our conversation with a terminology that some people find difficult to understand.How do we argue the case that research is an activity that takes place in the arts just as it does in any of the sciences? By "just as it does," I don't mean that research done in the sciences and research done in the arts are identical. They are not identical. Even those fields that define themselves as sciences are not, from a methodological perspective, identical. Just what is the basis for believing that research is a proper descriptor for what people in the arts do and that arts-based research is neither an anomaly nor an oxymoron?I think that initially one might conceptualize research as a broad "umbrella" process intended to enlarge human experience and promote understanding. It is a process that is concerned mainly with the creation of knowledge, or more modestly, with the process of knowing. Given this broad umbrella process, science can be regarded as a species of research; so too can the arts.But even science separated from the arts itself is a problematic conception. If the arts are regarded as forms of experience, the kind that John Dewey described in his elegant book Art as Experience, then it could be argued (and I would) that the fine arts do not define the limits of art. Aesthetic experience, which is at the core of art, can be secured in the process of doing scientific research as well as in the satisfactions secured from its results.The point of this brief resume is to liberate the concept of research from domination by science alone and to recognize that science in practice and in outcome can have significant aesthetic features. Very often they are the very features that motivate scientists to pursue their work. It is in this sense that the well executed practice of science can be considered an art.These considerations were not at all salient in the educational research community during the 1960s, '70s, or '80s in the United States, at least. Research was considered a scientific enterprise, and that pretty much was all there was to it. People who were looking for art had to find the time and the place somewhere outside of the educational research community.The view that I have just described concerning the primacy of science is not particularly uncommon today. It is difficult to change canonical beliefs about how inquiry should proceed and how one comes to understand the universe in which we live, even if that universe is restricted to schools and classrooms, to teaching and to curriculum.At the same time, it must also be acknowledged that minds are changing and that new possibilities are being explored. How did all of this get started? Let me say a few words about the genesis of arts-based research and later talk a little bit about some of its features.It was in 1993 that the first Arts-Based Research Institute was offered at Stanford University to members of the American Educational Research Association. The Institute has been offered at Stanford and at Arizona State University virtually every other year since then. My aim in initiating the institute was driven by a tension that I felt personally as a scholar trained in the social sciences but immersed in the arts. That tension engendered the idea that the arts might be used in some productive way to help us understand more imaginatively and more emotionally problems and practices that warrant attention in our schools. …