Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice

by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor (Editor), Richard Siegesmund (Editor)

Overview

Presenting readers with definitions and examples of arts-based educational research, this text identifies tensions, questions, and models in the field and provides guidance for both beginning and more experienced practice.

As arts-based research grows in prominence and popularity, the barriers between empirical, institutional, and artistic research diminish, leading to an ever increasing, global need to understand and navigate this evolving domain of research. Featuring contributions from a diverse range of leading scholartists in the field, this text weaves together critical essays about arts-based research in the literary, visual, and performing arts with examples of excellence in theory and practice. These essays introduce the theory and practice of arts-based research taking place in sites of teaching and learning. The Third Edition draws together all contributors from the previous editions, with revised reflective essays, new examples and updates that bring these ground-breaking works up to date with current developments over the past decade of increased arts-based educational research activity in this rapidly expanding field.

This book is ideal for pre-service and in-service art educators. It can be utilized in art education teacher certification courses that focus on methods, or as a component of a larger foundations course on qualitative inquiry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032512709
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/30/2025
Edition description:	3rd ed.
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Meigs Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia, has authored many books on arts-based research and pedagogy including The Creative Ethnographer's Notebook.  Recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Ambassadorship, the Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professorship, and the Beckman for Professors Who Inspire, she lives in Athens, GA with her husband and two children.

Richard Siegesmund is Professor Emeritus Art and Design Education at Northern Illinois University. His recent books include Visual methods of inquiry: Images as research and he has regularly presented workshops on visual methods at the annual conference of the International Congress for Qualitative Inquiry. A recipient of two Fulbright awards in visual methodology, he and his wife now live in Zürich, Switzerland.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to the Third Edition  2. How Arts-Based Research can Change Minds  3. Between Poetry and Anthropology. Searching for Languages of Home  4. Voices Lost and Found. Using Found Poetry in Qualitative Research  5. Who Will Read this Body? An A/r/tographic Statement  6. Wild Imagination, Radical Imagination, Politics, and the Practice of Arts-Based Educational Research (ABER) and Scholartistry  7. Finding the Progress in Work-in-Progress. Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process in Arts-Based Research  8.  Arts-based Research. Histories and New Directions  9. Four Guiding Principles for Arts-Based Research Practice  10. Persistent Tensions in Arts-Based Research  11. Notes from a Cuban Diary. We Believe in Our History. An Inquiry into the 1961 Literacy Campaign Using Photographic Representation  12. Happenings. Allan Kaprow’s Experimental, Inquiry-Based Art Education  13. Queering identity(ies) and fiction writing in qualitative research  14. Celebrating Monkey Business in Art Education and Research  15. Expanding Paradigms. Art as Performance and Performance as Communication in Politically Turbulent Times  16. Turning Towards. Materializing New Possibilities through Curating  17. What Is an Artist-Teacher When Teaching Second Languages?  18. A/r/tography as Practice-Based Research  19. Songwriting as Ethnographic Practice. How Stories Humanize  20. Hearing Jesusa’s Laugh  21. sista docta, REDUX  22. Ethnographic Poetry  23. The Abandoned School as an Anomalous Place of Learning. A Practice-led Approach to Doctoral Research  24. The Ecology of Personal and Professional Experience. A Poet’s View  25. For Art’s Sake, Stop Making Art  26. Understanding and Writing the World  27. A Researcher Prepares. The Art of Acting for the Qualitative Researcher  28. Misperformance Ethnography  29. Art, Agency, and Inquiry. Making Connections between New Materialism and Contemporary Pragmatism in Arts-Based Research  30. Troubling Certainty. Readers’ Theater in Music Education Research  31. The Drama and Poetry of Qualitative Method  32. Learning to Perceive. Teaching Scholartistry  33. Thinking in Comics. An Emerging Process  34. Nurse-in. Breastfeeding and A/r/tographical Research  35. Ethnographic Activist Middle Grades Fiction. Reflections on Researching and Writing Dear Mrs. Naidu  36. The End Run. Art and the Heart of the Matter  37. Putting Critical Public Pedagogy into Practice. Reorienting the Career Path of the Teacher-Artist-Scholar  38. Being Pregnant as an International PhD Student. A Poetic Autoethnography  39. Conclusion. The Tensions of Arts-Based Research in Education reconsidered

Editorial Reviews

"The last decade in Arts-Based Educational Research has seen the blurring of scholarship and artistry in innovative, generative, and provocative ways. This text demonstrates multiple forms of border crossings between disciplines, theories, methodologies, aesthetics, and ethics, which challenge traditional and positivist empiricism about knowledge making. What is specifically exciting about this text is that it focuses on those who engage with the materiality, rawness, and visceral quality of art-making without separating it from the enterprise of knowledge construction, as if those two things could ever be mutually exclusive. The editors have painstakingly put together a body of work that is comprehensive, inclusive and diverse. The scholartistry is groundbreaking and moves the field of Arts-Based and Arts-Based Educational Research into the next decade. This text should not be limited to those "alternate" methodological courses. Instead, this should be a foundational text that instructors could use with students who are new to qualitative research, social foundation, cultural studies, or educational anthropology to give them permission to think in creative, generative, and expansive ways without stifling them in restrictive boundaries. The attention invested in braiding the contributors’ work while being mindful about discourses in quality of arts-based work is simply breathtaking and exemplary."

—Kakali Bhattacharya, Kansas State University, USA

"This is an excellent resource introducing us to arts-based researchers and their work. I used the first edition in a course I taught on arts-based research, and it provided insightful understanding and stimulated significant discussions. My students loved it. I loved it. I felt like I was getting to know new, and some old, friends. It is a welcomed addition to help increase our understandings and appreciations of arts-based research and the people who do this work."

—John J. Guiney Yallop, Acadia University, Canada

"Arts-based Research in Education provides scholars with an exploration of arts-based inquiry, including the theoretical underpinnings, challenges and opportunities, as realized through research exemplar chapters. Readers interested in post-structural and post-modern approaches to research, in exploring the messiness, ambiguity and meaning making qualities of education through arts-based research will love this book!"

— Sharon Chappell, California State University Fullerton, USA

From the Publisher