This book explores the connections made in and through arts-based educational research through four themes: socially engaged connections, cultural connections, personal and pedagogical connections, and making connections during the COVID-19 pandemic. It emerges from the 3rd bi-annual 2020 Artful Inquiry Research Group symposium on the theme of “connections”. The symposium brought together artists, community members, teachers, students, and researchers through a virtual platform to examine the way(s) in which the arts can help connect people, ideas, and spaces/places in a pandemic reality. Art plays a predominant role in each chapter as authors weave their research and art-based understandings together. This book is a valuable teaching resource for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in teaching, anthropology, digital ethnography, autoethnography, cultural studies, and communications. It is of interest to higher education students, academic researchers, and teachers exploring arts-based methodologies in the fields of creative practice and creativity studies, communications, critical studies, sociology, sciences, teacher education, and the arts.

Drawing from an international authorship and having global appeal, this book scrutinizes, suggests and aggravates the relationships, boundaries and connections between arts, research and education in various contexts. Building upon existing publications in the field of arts-based educational research, it deliberately connects and disconnects the terms in order to expose and broaden the scope of this field thereby encouraging fresh perspectives. This book portrays both contemporary theoretical prospects as well as contemporary examples of practice. It also presents work of emerging scholars, thereby ‘growing the field’. The book includes academic text-based chapters, as well as poetry, narrative fiction, visual essays, and combinations of text-image-sound/video that demonstrate performance of music, theatre, exhibition and dance. This book provides and provokes critical dialogue about the forms, representations, dissemination and intersections of the arts, research and education. This is a focused collection and resource for scholars and students with an international authorship, perspective and audience.

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 across education and the social sciences, the barriers between empirical, institutional, and artistic research diminish and new opportunities emerge for discussion, consideration, and reflection. This book responds to an ever increasing, global need to understand and navigate this evolving domain of research. Featuring a diverse range of contributors, 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. New to the Second Edition: Additional focus on the historical and theoretical foundations of arts-based educational research to guide readers through development of the field since its inception. New voices and chapters on a variety of artistic genres, including established and emerging social science researchers and artists who act, sing, draw, and narrate findings. Extends and refines the concept of scholartistry, introduced in the first edition, to interrogate excellence in educational inquiry and artistic processes and products. Integrates and applies theoretical frameworks such as sociocultural theory, new materialsm, and critical pedagogy to create interdisciplinary connections. Expanded toolkit for scholartists to inspire creativity, questioning, and risk-taking in research and the arts.

This text introduces readers to definitions and examples of arts-based educational research, presents tensions and questions in the field, and provides exercises for practice. It weaves together critical essays about arts-based research in the literary, visual, and performing arts with examples of artistic products of arts-based research (arts for scholarship’s sake) that illuminate by example. Each artistic example is accompanied by a scholARTist’s statement that includes reflection on how the work of art relates to the scholar’s research interests and practices. Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice: helps the reader understand what arts-based research is – tracing the history of the field and providing examples; includes end-of-chapter questions to engage students in practicing arts-based inquiry and to generate class discussion about the material; features a diverse range of contributors -- very established scholars in educational and social science research as well those new to the field; represents a variety of voices – scholars of color, queer and straight orientations, different ages, experience, and nationalities; and presents beautiful illustrations of visual art, data-based poems, plays, short stories, and musical scores. First-of its kind, this volume is intended as a text for arts-based inquiry, qualitative research methods in education, and related courses, and as a resource for faculty, doctoral students, and scholars across the field of social science research methods.

This book explores the wide range of contexts in which research into creating connections in learning and teaching may take place. Creating connections can encompass making links, crossing divides, forming relationships, building frameworks, and generating new knowledge. The cognitive, cultural, social, emotional and/or physical aspects of understanding, meaning-making, motivating, acting, researching, and evaluating are explored as constituent forms of creativity in relation to such connections. From this exploration the authors identify varied connective contexts and means which include the learner, the educator, the organisation, and the relevant community. The crossing of divides, forming learner-educator relationships, bringing together diverse groups of learners, establishing networks and partnerships among educators, and establishing links between organisations and communities are all considered as connections which can be created by and within the learning and teaching dynamic. By examining the factors which help to facilitate and/or restrict the possibilities for creating connections in educational contexts, implications for and outcomes of learning and/or teaching arise from the connections created. The final chapter of this book will explicate the realisations that have emerged for educators and researchers working to create connections. These offer suggestions for future directions and enunciate what and how connections might contribute to both educational institutions and the broader society.

"A comprehensive look at how the arts (broadly conceived) can improve teaching, learning, and curriculum for all students, written in accessible language for non-academics and non-experts. It contains many evocative examples to illustrate the power of the arts to change education"--

Designed to be used as both a class text and a resource for researchers and practitioners, Arts Based Research provides a framework for those who seek to broaden the domain of qualitative inquiry in the social sciences by incorporating the arts as forms that represent human knowing.