Arts Based Research

Arts Based Research Barone, T" & Eisner, E. W. (2012). Arts Based Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 208 pp. ISBN 978-1-4129-8247-4 (paperback)Tom Barone and Elliot Eisner have crafted a thought-provoking text that seeks to explicate the complex and emerging discipline of arts based research. As the Preface explains, what began with Barone's interest in the use of creative non-fiction in social research has evolved into a vehicle for new ways of conceptualizing qualitative research. For Barone and Eisner, the relationship between art and science is nothing new. They point to the Enlightenment as the site of schism between art and science that reached its height with logical positivism. They argue that quantitative methods embraced in traditional research constrict social phenomena, reducing the individual into statistic. They further argue that qualitative, blurred genres offer an expansion of understanding in which the theories and practices employed by artists are utilized as a way of "diversifying perspective, of securing insight" (p. xii).The text asks questions such as"What Is and Is Not Arts Based Research?""Why Do Arts Based Research?"and, my favorite, "Yes, But Is It Research?"The book is well organized and informative for both aspiring arts based researchers and critics.The opening chapters tell us what arts based research can be: a heuristic through which we deepen understanding of social phenomena; a species of qualitative research, not meant to replace or augment traditional research, but to represent diversity in methodology; a methodology meant to open up the subject, to permeate its skin, to fracture its identity.They cite many artists, educators, and researchers working in the discipline and include three text-based examples chosen for the qualities they feel good arts based research should provoke: investigation, re-presentation, and disequilibrium. Of the three, the most riveting and evocative is "Broken and Buried in Arkansas,"an unpublished manuscript by doctoral student, Sabrina Case. Her text inspires a sense of mental vertigo, the need to reach out to get one's bearings, to question, "is this true?" For me, this was a powerful example of what Barone and Eisner mean by producing disequilibrium or disruption. Case's narrative, a disturbing and heartbreaking essay on her experience as a teacher in a forgotten school district in Arkansas, does exactly what Barone and Eisner say arts based research can do: deeply persuades a reconsideration of the subject. Her explorations of race relations, race politics, at-risk populations, idealism, and cultural baggage dissolve into and through one another, upsetting expectations, dissuading predictions and, ultimately, laying bare one of the sorest sites in our country's education system. For this experience alone, I would read the entire text. Case describes her work as educational auto-ethnography conceptualized as non-fiction. Her work is filtered through memory over 6 years and crafted with creative license to bridge gaps of time and allow for thematic ties. Also of note is the achingly beautiful essay, "Notes From A Marine Biologist's Daughter: On the Art and Science of Attention," by Anne McCrary Sullivan. Sullivan deftly weaves academic writing with poetry to explore the relationship between attention and learning.But, is it research? For the authors, the answer lies in definition and context. Research is coming back again and again, scrutinizing the world. Arts based research involves reading, investigating, interviewing, observing, and fieldwork and the result may be the work of art or the work of art. …