Arts-Based Research Primer

Arts-Based Research Primer Rolling, J. H., Jr. (2013). Arts-Bosed Research Primer. New York, NY: Peter Lang. 174 pp.This clearly written primer is sure to be of great value to any art educator who teaches an introductory arts-based research methods course. James Haywood Rolling's book is compact and concisely written, neatly organized, and retails for $18.95 as a Peter Lang PRIMER edition. Helpfully, James Haywood Rolling clearly provides definitions for all key concepts and terms used in his pragmatic primer on arts-based research. Definitions are conveniently located in the margins throughout the book. Especially in the first chapter, and to a lesser degree within the entire primer, Rolling visually maps and diagrams approaches to the arts-based education research he explicates.As one accustomed to deeply deconstructing deceptively simple-seeming subjects, I was at first suspicious of the straightforward approach Rolling pursues. More comfortable luxuriating in contemplation of problems posed, interrogating and teasing out nuances of submerged meanings that may not at first be self-evidenced, the straightforward, no-nonsense tack taken by Rolling took some time for this reviewer to get used to. It was only in a second reading of the publication that I began to develop a deep respect for the (at times too neat and tidily appearing) way Rolling approaches, maps, and diagrams the subject while moving through those multiple theoretical approaches he prescribes novice researchers follow. Building on the methodologically stable structures Rolling constructs, emerging scholars should be able to stretch them further, grounding their variations in the contexts of their specific studies. James Haywood Rolling recognizes the variabilities that arts-based research (ABR) approaches enable, even if he may fail to sufficiently remind readers that they should feel authorized to deviate from the-at first seemingly-prescriptive recipes Rolling offers for educators and student researchers to follow.In Chapter One, Rolling teases out those multiple paradigmatic structures and approaches to ABR, rendering each intelligible, and outlining those various approaches that arts-based education researchers have pursued in the past. He appropriately acknowledges more than a dozen primary proponents of the practice, while nearly as many additional theorists making contributions to ABR, while nodding toward other theorists' contributions to arts-based approaches to research. Unfortunately, several important ABR scholars fail to receive mention within the text. Whether intentional or not, for this reviewer, such omissions confirm that there has been significant interest in the method in the late 20th and early 21st centuries-collectively affirming alternate ways of knowing within the multiple arts has a great deal to offer research methodology and theoretical development.Importantly, Rolling "dispel[s] the notion that arts-based research is not research'' (p. 3) by distinguishing between scientific methods that guess what might happen given a controlled set of variables while undertaking a repeatable experiment aimed at producing evidence that proves the researcher's hypothesis and arts-based approaches to knowledge creation that "address... urgent questions about critical aspects of the human experience and our varying life worlds... those... that can neither be measured with exactitude or generalized as universally applicable or meaningful in all context" (p. 4). In Ways of Knowing the World (Chapter One), he describes "working paradigms for addressing social, behavioral, and educational research problems: the qualitative descriptive domain, the quantitative classificatory and statistical domain, and the arts-based domain privileging hybrid empirical, interpretive and naturalistic theory-building practices described by Lincoln and Guba (1985)" (p. 5). Rolling recognizes that arts-based research addresses "questions differently than scientific research will allow (Leavy, 2009),''the latter being limited, given, "the indices. …