ANNOTATION: Rolling, Jr., James Haywood. A Paradigm Analysis of Arts-Based Research and Implications for Education. Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research 2010, 51(2), 102-114.
In “A Paradigm Analysis of Arts-Based Research and Implications for Education,” author James Haywood Rolling, Jr. of Syracuse University, attempts to describe arts-based research and outline its potential for generating new curriculum approaches for general arts education practice and the development of the learner. He describes arts-based theoretical models as characteristically “poststructural, prestructural, performative, pluralistic, proliferative and postparadigmatic,” and thus prescriptive of a variety of new and useful models for art education.
New research paradigms emerge, he asserts, when old ones are not fully adequate to solve problems within a field of study. The arts-based research approach emerged accordingly, which he asserts “destabilizes the footings of the sacred monuments we make of our scientific and social scientific research methods and outcomes” in favor of a model that is more appropriate to formulating understanding in the arts, whose processes are by nature emergent, ephemeral, multiplicitous, infinitely subjective, and creative. The latter element, creativity, is critical to his conclusion that arts-based research may serve as an ideal model for future educational practices in fields beyond the arts, in which teachers face the imperative to teach creative thinking. Arts learning creates an applicable model for learning in many subjects, he asserts, in that the arts are intended to eternally achieve novel results, not the testable, predictable, and generalizable results that are hallmarks of what is widely upheld as “valid” research.
Most arts education research of the last 100 years has been focused on two things: 1) justifying the lasting value of arts education to the learner (and thus continually advocating for its place in public education), and 2) determining what curriculum and approach is best for learners. One major problem in researching artistic processes is that there is no single cause that creates an effect, nor is there a single effect that will result from the same set of “causes.” As such, in trying to understand arts learning, a new method of research was called for to best understand the multiplicity of causes and outcomes—and indeed, to intentionally reach for results that moved beyond simply understanding cause and effect, but rather pointed toward unseen directions. This is arts-based research.
Once you decode the patois of pedagogical parlance too perplexing for the pared-down position of this annotation paradigm (perorations if presented in propria persona might possibly prescribe a a plastic poncho), the article presents rich thinking worthy of a fuller exploration for my own research in learning technology in the arts, particularly because it points to the multiplicity of effective approaches to intentionally achieving unpredictable results—that is, in using creative methods to understand and characterize the multiplicity of processes that achieve creative ends. In short, a method that prioritizes discovery over description, peculiarity over predictability.
Susan Gedutis Lindsay 