Handbook of Arts-Based Research

This introductory primer explores the arts-based research paradigm and its potential to intersect with and augment traditional social science and educational research methods. The arts-based research paradigm may be broadly understood as a flexible architecture of practice-based theory-building methodologies. Within the ontology that supports the practice of arts-based research, theory and praxis co-construct one another in an ongoing cycle of cause resulting in effect and effect regenerating cause. This textbook aims to reveal how the arts lend themselves to blended spaces of naturalistic inquiry, aiding artists and scientists alike in their conduct of research. Lays out the framework for a flexible architecture of analytic, synthetic, critical-activist, and/or improvisational research methodologies.

The Canadian Journal of Action Research

Arts-based research (AbR) is a cross-disciplinary “set of methodological tools” (p. ix) utilizing the principles of the creative arts, that can be applied to all aspects of social research from cultivating data, to analysis. Patricia Leavy’s (2015) Method Meets Art: Arts-based Research Practice (MMA) is an in-depth exploration of AbR practices. Why is arts-based research important to action research practitioners? Perhaps it is the profound and untapped potential artistic practices can offer to further human knowledge, understanding, and problem solving through the inductive arts-based action research approach. Not only for artists, Leavy presents an argument that AbR offers rich new approaches and practices beneficial to all researchers.

2004

International Journal of Education the Arts, 2012

Arts-Based Research, Foundations, Developent, Perspectives: A Historical Review, 2023

When speaking about key elements in the debate about arts-based research, what comes to mind is that arts-based research has political implications that envision a diversity in methodology and that tackle the systematic oppression which is rooted in the institutions of our society nowadays. It becomes political when there is an authority who decides what is knowledge and which methods are validated in the search for this knowledge. Science has for long appeared to be neutral and apolitical, but by doing so it has ignored its own cultural heritage that has led to the oppression of minorities and those who believe other ways of knowing are possible, even if these methods are not validated by the current scientific, quantitative and qualitative paradigms. Eisner, McNiff, Hervey and Leavy, with the help of many others, have paved the way for a new paradigm to emerge. While this takes time and never will be perfect, as many different coexisting opinions, contexts and realities need to be celebrated, it shows a way, an image or a narrative, that holds power, and from this power change can and will arise.

The qualitative report, 2023

Student researchers in a 2007 graduate-level special topics course participated in storyboarding “moving pictures,” preliminary sketches of their emergent theoretical assumptions about arts-based research. These researchers joined the author in a reflexive search for metaphors guiding scholarly inquiry within an arts-based research paradigm. This chapter represents a paradigm analysis of the characteristics of arts-based research (ABR). It is also an effort to reconceptualize the potential of arts-based methodological practices as a tool for generating new curriculum approaches in K-12 and higher education. As an outcome of the theorizing that emerged during this graduate art education course, ABR models came to be viewed as characteristically poststructural, prestructural, performative, pluralistic, proliferative, and postparadigmatic, offering divergent new possibilities for knowledge creation that augment social scientific approaches.

2016

The practice of contemporary education is fundamentally interdisciplinary, featuring a vast array of intersecting bodies of knowledge to facilitate more effective teaching and learning. This book chapter suggests a flexible architecture for theory-building to guide educational researchers in structuring hybrid pathways and arts-based models for conducting social research.