Speaking in Tongues: The Uncommon Ground of Arts-Based Research.

We run carelessly over the precipice after we have put something in front of ourselves to prevent us from seeing it.- Blaise Pascal (Aphorism from Les Pensees, in Groarke, 2007)This story begins in 2006 when at a meeting of the Council for Policy Studies in Art Education focused on arts-based research, Elizabeth asked, "What about crafts?". Until this time, the images and objects discussed at the meeting - performance art, paintings, site-specific installations - were all associated with what are sometimes called "the fine arts." In addition, the language used, the critical methodologies emphasized, the minimization of functionality, and the emancipatory histories invoked, all drew from traditions associated with fine arts.Elizabeth's advocacy, expressed as a simple probing "What about...," challenged the habits of speaking that framed this particular discussion of arts-based research. To her problem, John and Charles added,"What about design?"and suggested that further conversation about these distinctions could help to inform the field of Art Education. Nevertheless, as It turns out, John and Charles mis-heard Elizabeth's question. Where John and Charles heard "craft" as a general domain of visual arts activity, Elizabeth was actually questioning whether all acts associated with artmaking, such as repetitive processes, could be considered research. Elizabeth's question and Charles' and John's mishearing are emblematic of: (1 ) the opportunity that slippages of language can provide to open up creative and critical discourse, and (2) the traction that has accumulated around language use in the visual arts areas commonly associated with crafts, design, and fine arts. Both questioning and mis-hearing are essential to arts-based research. By comparison, conventions for conversing about art education, like the American Psychological Association (APA) style and proposltional formats, are borrowed from the social sciences. This article is our attempt at introducing a writing style that best exemplifies the ambiguities and incompleteness of arts-based research. We consider that both an emphasis on research reportage and a focus on the fine arts, as the research wing of visual arts studies, have limited the contributions that arts-based research can make to the field of Art Education.We propose that: (1) the fine, craft, and design arts each provide opportunities for conducting research; (2) their identities are built upon mutual support and willful self-separation - "I am a crafts artist not a designer"; (3) they mark the boundaries of our research that aren't fixed; and (4) they provide a framework for a comprehensive art education program in which the disjunctions among the three disciplines provide opportunities for critical discourse. Following in the tradition of William James (1 981 /1 907) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1 973), we hold that terms such as "crafts," "design," and "fine arts" are tools that construct and mark identities, which are formed and established through interrelated networks of people, actions, objects, histories, and economies. Likewise, in writing about craft, design, and fine arts based research, we are inspired by Walter Benjamin's (1968) aphoristic methodology, which challenges chronological and analytic approaches to writing and conversing about history."What is an aphorism?" Literary theorist Louis Groarke (2007) defines the aphorism as "the art of terse expression" (p. 393), a philosophical genre that originated as early as the ancient Greeks with authors such as Heraclitus and Epictetus, through the Enlightenment with Pascal, and into the 19th and 20th centuries with Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Wittgenstein. While the aphorism is considered a literary tool, it nonetheless has implications for how art educators theorize and write about the disparate yet intersecting characteristics of research in crafts, design, and fine arts without limiting them to any hierarchical order or synthesizing into a solitary pedagogical construct. …