Using Art as Research in Learning and Teaching: Multidisciplinary Approaches Across the Arts - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783208929 ISBN 13: 9781783208920

Verlag: Intellect Books, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Using Art as Research in Learning and Teaching explores various multidisciplinary visual and performing art forms, including creative writing, as ways to provide a rich contribution and understanding to research, learning, and teaching. Key figures in the field share their art-based research, arts practice, and philosophy, bringing the arts to life within their taught and learned contexts across a variety of art forms and levels of post-compulsory education. Featuring a foreword by internationally-renowned proponent of art-based research Professor Shaun McNiff, this book will be informative and useful to arts researchers and educators, addressing key challenges and possibilities in a rapidly changing higher education environment.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ross W. Prior is Professor of learning and teaching in the arts in higher education at the University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom.

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Using Art as Research in Learning and Teaching

Multidisciplinary Approaches Across the Arts

By Ross W. Prior

Intellect Ltd.

Copyright © 2018 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-892-0

Contents

Foreword Shaun McNiff, xi, 
Preface Ross W. Prior, xvii, 
Chapter 1: Introduction: Artist–Educator–Researcher Ross W. Prior, 1, 
Part 1: Aesthetic Education and Ways of Knowing in Art, 13, 
Chapter 2: Art as a Procedure of Truth Malcolm Ross, 15, 
Chapter 3: 'Not Sure': The Didactics of Elusive Knowledge Peter Sinapius, 29, 
Chapter 4: Art as the Topic, Process and Outcome of Research within Higher Education Ross W. Prior, 43, 
Chapter 5: A Different Way of Knowing: Assessment and Feedback in Art-Based Research Mitchell Kossak, 61, 
Part 2: Developing Our Practice in Postgraduate Education, 75, 
Chapter 6: Doing Art-Based Research: An Advising Scenario Shaun McNiff, 77, 
Chapter 7: Research–Practice–Pedagogy: Establishing New Topologies of Doctoral Research in the Arts Jacqueline Taylor, 91, 
Chapter 8: The 'Epistemic Object' in the Creative Process of Doctoral Inquiry Using Art as Research in Learning and Teaching Carole Gray, Julian Malins and Maxine Bristow, 109, 
Chapter 9: Finding My Visual Research Voice: Art as the Tool for Research Megan Lawton, 127, 
Part 3: Involving Students and Others in Art as Research, 143, 
Chapter 10: Making and Material Affect: From Learning and Teaching to Sharing and Listening Mah Rana and Fiona Hackney, 145, 
Chapter 11: Using Art to Cultivate 'Medical Humanities Care' in Chinese Medical Education Daniel Vuillermin, 163, 
Chapter 12: Entanglement in Shakespeare's Text: Using Interpretive Mnemonics with Acting Students with Dyslexia Petronilla Whitfield, 179, 
Chapter 13: Dancing as a Wolf: Art-Based Understanding of Autistic Spectrum Condition Kevin Burrows, 199, 
Part 4: Current and Future Issues in Arts Learning and Teaching, 215, 
Chapter 14: Making Art and Teaching Art: Harnessing the Tension Libby Byrne and Patricia Fenner, 217, 
Chapter 15: Future Approaches in Using Artistic Research from Human Experience Petar Jandric and Sarah Hayes, 235, 
Notes on Contributors, 251, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Artist–Educator–Researcher

Ross W. Prior

What I cannot create, I do not understand.

– Richard Feynman

We may as well begin by defining what we mean by 'research', when discussed in this book. In some ways it may be easier to state what we are not considering, but even then we find disciplines such as science can inform some of our artistic research. However, in artistic research, science is not the mode of inquiry. Approaches to research depend on epistemologies, which vary considerably across disciplines and even within disciplines. However, as a tentative definition, we can begin by offering the following:

Art as research involves a diverse range of human activities in creating visual, auditory or performed artworks, expressing the artist's imaginative and/or technical skill, intended to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional impact. Art as research uses systematic investigation into the study of process, materials and sources in order to understand art more completely and reach new conclusions. The primary components in using art as research are documentation, discovery and interpretation for the purpose of the advancement of artistic knowledge and furthering understanding of all of life and other disciplines too.

Shaun McNiff gives us a useful definition of the specificity of the use of the term 'art-based research', which neatly aligns to the process of art as research:

Art-based research can be defined as the systematic use of the artistic process, the actual making of artistic expressions in all of the different forms of the arts, as a primary way of understanding and examining experience by both researchers and the people that they involve in their studies. These inquiries are distinguished from research activities where the arts may play a significant role but are essentially used as data for investigations that take place within academic disciplines that utilize more traditional scientific, verbal, and mathematic descriptions and analyses of phenomena.

(McNiff 2008: 29)

McNiff's definition brings us close to the heart of the matter. Given that our research focus is similarly outlined in both of the above definitions, there are many ways in which we may use art as methodology and address evidence in research using the arts. McNiff (2009) directs us to the potential of the art form itself in responding to issues of research, rather than relying upon other methodologies. He recognizes that historically in the arts and in art therapy, these fields have been 'so thoroughly tied to traditional social science methods of research and the more general notions of scientism that we have not appreciated our own unique potential to further human understanding' (2009: 144).

The key here is art for understanding. Embracing all of the arts in the one act of epistemological communion, McNiff leads us to an appreciation of the natural processes found within art-making that can provide artists with the answers they seek within their own work. Faster to catch on in the United Kingdom and Europe than in the United States, using art as methodology is proving to be a highly relevant way of conducting artistic research, which allows artists to further understand what it is they do.

There are unhealthy divides within our higher education system that have created sizeable polemic divides; these include theory vs. practice, 'hard' vs. 'soft' research, qualitative vs. quantitative research, researcher vs. lecturer/teacher, practitioner vs. researcher and somewhat incredulously, research vs. learning activity. There is a simple basis for these divides, which frequently comes from the nature of the academy itself, where lecturers largely teach what they were taught and/or operate within research paradigms that they know best through their own postgraduate education experience. The unfortunate consequence of this conservatism is that, instead of furthering development, it can hinder and negate advancement. Henk Borgdorff usefully and tersely suggests:

The debate often concerns issues of institutional or educational politics that are thought to be important for determining whether artistic research can be recognised as a type of academic or scientific research. Prominent issues are the standards needed to assess research by artists, the institutional rights to award third-cycle (doctoral) degrees in the arts, and the criteria to be applied by funding bodies in deciding whether to support research by artists.

(Borgdorff 2013: 112)

Further difficulty arises within places of higher education when academic research excludes a most essential research type, which is research into learning and teaching. Key to advancing any discipline is found within both the philosophy and practice of its learning and teaching methods. Within these methods or approaches, a discipline can either experience great progress and awakening, or conversely, suffer a stultifying constraint adhering to an immoveable and arguably outmoded orthodoxy.

An academic colleague of mine once remarked that the great creative literary works have already been achieved and we will not see the likes of a William Shakespeare again. It may be true that we won't see...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783208929
• ISBN 13: 9781783208920
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 276
• Herausgeber: Prior Ross W.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar