Sculpting the Contours of Arts-Based Educational Research Within a Discourse Community

Abstract

Within the field of education, arts-based research is emerging as an inquiry tradition that reaches beyond disciplinary boundaries-creating innovative junctures among art, education, and research. Individuals with diverse talents and interests are being drawn to this newly coalescing discourse community and, in turn, are engendering rich and multifocal conversations not only about specific examples of arts-based research but also about the broader meanings of this approach to educational inquiry. These meanings, the authors contend, represent different positions within the field, and as the positions are articulated and debated, the contours of the discourse begin to take form. For this reason, the authors call on members of the arts-based discourse community to offer logics-ofjustification for their work and thereby contribute to an evolving culture of inquiry grounded in aesthetic rather than scientific ways of knowing. Keywords: arts-based educational research; aesthetic modes of knowing; culture of art; educational practitioner as researcherWe bring to the writing of this article three sets of experiences with artsbased research in the field of education. First are our own forays into the neb-182 Authors' Note: Drs. Piantanida, McMahon, and Garman have collaborated for more than 10 years on issues related to both conducting and teaching interpretive research. They bring to their more recent involvement with arts-based educational research backgrounds in English literature, literary criticism, and curriculum studies. As facilitators of a dissertation study group, they work with doctoral candidates who are using a variety of interpretive and arts-based methods to study issues embedded within educational practice.

Seeing red: poetry and metaphor as responses to representational challenges in critical narrative research

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