ABSTRACT
The story of arts education research reflects a constant attempt to reconcile the need to understand arts pedagogy with the often external requirement to demonstrate benefit beyond arts learning. One of the most critical and often overlooked responsibilities of researchers, however, is to connect these findings with teachers, schools and students to make learning more effective across schooling. If successful, the initiatives that arise from arts education research can be applied across educational contexts and provide evidencebased change that ultimately enhances learning and particularly learning in the arts. Although traditionally in education, partnership research occurs between researchers and teachers, in this particular case the research involved a partnership between researchers at the University of Sydney (Andrew Martin, Michael Anderson, Robyn Gibson, Josephine Fleming, Caitlin Munday and Marianne Mansour), the Australia Council for The Arts (David Sudmalis) and the Australian Research Council (the majority funder of this research). The partnership brought together these sometimes disparate sectors to deliver high-quality research that crossed formal institutional boundaries.
