A question that keeps popping up for me is how the “form” of inquiry shapes / enhances / constrains what we “see” and experience.
The piece by Wang and her colleagues was a helpful introduction to arts based research and what different forms and genres can help us see/imagine/complicate. I appreciated the practical aspects of the piece and seeing specifically what knowledge and ideas can be crafted using different genres such as photography vs. photo-comics, for example. I did have to laugh to myself that as much as I can critique pieces that seem overly “neat” and “organized”, I really do benefit from pieces such as this that help to “create some order in the messy field” and give us practical ideas for how to engage with different methods.
I realize, of course, that there is so much more than the genre in how we experience something – there is the intent of the creator of the piece, who we are as an audience at the moment we experience it, the context and company in which we experience it and more…But once an artist creates a piece, do they have any control on how it is experienced by others? I don’t know…Rose (2016) discusses that how we think a piece will be audienced shapes how we compose it in the first place. Just thinking of these posts we are writing now definitely proves that. How would we write them if we thought nobody would read them, or if only Gene read them, or if Gene were a professor who only valued “traditional” academic writing? Clearly the audience shapes how we compose even if we cannot control how an audience experiences our work.
The Barone and Eisner piece reminded me of this in describing the limitations of traditional “academic” writing – the way in which the story it can tell is constrained by its form. It isn’t that it can’t tell a story but that it can tell a very specific story within certain confines. They compare this to arts based research that instead “provides an image of those interactions in ways that make them noticeable.” This idea has really stayed with me this week, that “arts based research is a heuristic through which we deepen and make more complex our understanding of some aspect of the world.” This differs significantly from trying to make something clear, to break it into discrete parts and to simplify it, which feels (at least to me) like the purpose of many academic journal articles. I kept thinking of Ursula LeGuin’s idea that, “If you can see a thing whole… it seems that it’s always beautiful.” How does arts based research allow us to see more layers and complexity in what we study…and how does this allow us to see the beauty of kids and communities that are often described by traditional research in deficit-framed language?
This tension between research “clarifying things” and arts based research making messy and complex is a theme that I think will travel with me throughout this semester and hopefully for a very long time. In thinking about Rose’s call to reflexivity and considering our own interpretations of a piece, I am thinking of many of my questions in researching, especially with kids. If the adult researcher is choosing the arts-based methods – drawings, photography, video, etc…we are already adding in our aesthetic and research preferences, already deciding which form shows the complexity of our question, already limiting what types of stories can be told. In grappling with this, I am experimenting with having kids choose their own modalities and combining forms as they wish. But I have still chosen the subject of the research and the combination of kids and those two things will deeply shape the site of production and thus the images and audiencing…so much to consider!
The Eisner piece gives me hope that even as I grapple with the above ideas, the infusion of arts based research will allow the kids and me to be released from “the stupor of the familiar” aspects of our community and start to create new understandings of what is around us…even if they are limited by the forms of research. I suppose I have to acknowledge that each way of inquiry into an idea will have its limitations but will also have so many affordances that will help us launch into other lines of inquiry. I am thinking of John Muir’s idea that, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” I hope, then, that each inquiry, rather than feeling limited, connects and links with other ideas for exploration.
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