ABSTRACT
In the past few decades arts-based research in education has developed in diverse and even dazzling ways (Barone & Eisner, 2012). Arts-based researchers in education promote the significant value of the creative arts for inquiring about experiences as well as presenting and representing the themes and understandings that emerge from the research. In turn, the arts are valuable for opening up theories and perspectives for guiding practice and policy-making. Like all arts-based research in the social sciences, a/r/tography is committed to incorporating the arts in all aspects of the research process. So, a/r/tographers lean on their arts experiences and practices and understandings to conceive innovative research questions and possibilities, as well as to conduct research in ways that will open up emerging and provocative and engaging insights. Moreover, a/r/tographers are committed to seeking artful ways to mobilize knowledge for wide audiences. A/r/tographers are always engaging in inquiry as a process, as a verb, and they are open and flexible, ready to embrace new questions, and revisit their research plans, and pursue other directions with a creative disposition that fires their research as well as their art-making and teaching. We are enthused about a/r/tography as a methodology because it recognizes how our art-making and research and teaching are all best understood as life-long and living commitments to practice. We are always in process. Even when we produce poems and art and essays, we know these products are not final and complete. There is always room for revisiting and revising all our work. Literacy researchers might find it useful to compare a/r/tography to the kind of best practices that emerge in the writing classroom where the process of composition is promoted as a pedagogical journey that includes ongoing inquiry. Out of that process, we will produce texts for sharing with wide-ranging audiences, but the researching and writing are always in process.
