This is the image I was going to share in class because it is the one photo I always go back to on my phone and it makes me happy. I took the image while playing with my daughter in my backyard. I’m not sure why I prefer this photo to others of my daughter, but I do like it.

When I think about my own investigation and final project, I think I want to incorporate some mixed media (music and art or music and photograph) in order to bring attention to a social justice issue.

Thoughts on the readings

This week’s readings, (Eisner, 2001) and (Barone & Eisner, 2012) focused on the meaning behind arts based research, as well as an understanding of the benefits of qualitative research methods. Arts based research provides nuance and expression that helps provide a more complete empathetic understanding of a situation and personal emotions. It invites discourse and embraces difference which hopefully leads to greater understanding and growth. In many educational institutions, the focus on quantitative data and test scores have undermined the holistic learning process that arts based research attends to. A greater consideration for the qualitative research methods might re-orient creativity and nuance as virtues in our society.

I am particularly drawn to the idea of art created to serve a specific purpose, instead of the creation of art for art’s sake. There appears to be an ethical consideration in this type of art, a determination to open dialogue, shine a light on what would otherwise remain obscured, challenge one’s way of thinking, embrace discourse, and contribute to a social beneficence that appears to align closely with the tenets of Authentic Inquiry (Tobin, 2017). Barone and Eisner write, “arts based research is a heuristic through which we deepen and make more complex our understanding of some aspect of the world”.  Art created to invite the viewer towards a metacognition of issues that might otherwise be hidden from the self.