For a large print version please contact the engage office: info@engage.org
This PDF is an extract from engage publication:
• engage review Promoting greater understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts
• Research
• Issue 18 – Winter 2006
• 72 pages
• ISSN 1365-9383
The original publication is available from engage as below, subject to stocks.
This text is copyright, and is made available for personal/educational use only, and may not be used commercially or published in any way, in print or electronically, without the express permission of the copyright holders engage. engage reiterates its gratitude to the authors and editors concerned, many of whom work without fee. For more details of engage see end.
Contents
Reseaarch Issue 18 – Winter 2006
Editorial
Iain Biggs Art as Research, Doctoral Education and the Politics of Knowledge
Barbara Taylor en-quire: Learning Through Action Research
Anna Ledgard & David Jenkins TAP: Teacher Artist Partnership
Emily Pringle Researching Gallery Education
Rebecca Sinker, Victoria de Rijke & Howard Hollands Field of Enquiry
Veronica Sekules, Christian Blickem & Charlotte Peel Method in Our Madness
Faisal Abdu’Allah Gallery Education as Research
Bridget McKenzie Quests Driven by Questions
Penny Hay & Mary Fawcett 5x5x5=Creativity
Loïc Tallon On Audio Tours: An Unknown Quantity
Halina Gottlieb & Helen Simonsson Designing Narrative and Interpretive Tools
Stephen Foster Research and the Gallery Director
Reviews Art Practice as Research
Contributors’ details
Editorial, Research
Karen Raney
These days everyone involved in art or education is presumed to be carrying out research: teachers, gallery visitors, project organisers, curators, evaluators, children, and artists themselves. Research suggests an endeavour that is systematic, exploratory, potentially collaborative, and communicable in some kind of ordered way. Research suggests intellectual rigour and a degree of objectivity. In art practice, the idea of research has acted as a corrective to the softer, more limited, more private notion of ‘expression’. What expectations and opportunities does ‘research’ in different contexts usher in? What models are being used? Where does the work of imagination happen within the research model? Most of the articles in this volume are about research into gallery education – projects designed to investigate how learning takes place in the gallery context. Others describe art-based projects in non-gallery settings – school, university, library – which are conceived under, and reflect upon, the notion of research for those involved. Some contributions are concerned with the idea of art practice as research.
At first it might seem that research into gallery education and the question of art practice as research are two different things. But for a number of reasons it is important to consider them together. For one thing, there is a growing overlap between art practice and gallery education. What gallery educators do, and how they research what they do, draws from models found in participatory art practice. Conversely, the exchange with Faisal Abdu’Allah suggests that, for some artists, gallery education is virtually a branch of their own practice – a way of testing ideas, generating new work, keeping an ear to the ground of contemporary culture. The act of running a workshop becomes ‘almost a performance or a temporary piece of work’. Even when an artist’s work is studio- based, the kind of processes that might constitute it as research – practical experimenting, reflection-in-action,* - are also at work in the education research described below. And it is theorists of education like Elliott Eisner, with their interest in sensory-based understanding and the transformative nature of art, who seem to offer the most fruitful lines of enquiry into art practice as research.
Iain Biggs describes the resistance that has arisen as art-based research carves a place for itself in higher education in the form of PhDs and professional doctorates in fine art. He is interested in what happens when previously marginalised forms of intelligence are brought to play on the dynamics of the university system. The arts and humanities have often found themselves on the defensive, denying their difference from traditional forms of research in the name of academic rigour. But the clash between different kinds of knowledge may itself be the point. Artists in higher education must situate themselves in relation to two contexts – the contemporary art world, both commercial and state sponsored, and the world of university research. The best art-based research, according to Biggs, is at odds with both. Therein lies its value. Artists can stage a collision between the world of non-verbal intelligence and sensuous knowing, and the world of conceptual knowledge with its more controlled forms of enquiry.
en-quire is engage’s long-term research programme into the transformative potential of gallery education for young people. The director, Barbara Taylor, gives an overview of the different projects underway, as well as an account of the en-quire ethos. It is based on an action research model derived from the social sciences, where researchers do not study people from a supposedly objective position, but instead they work with, for and alongside people. Artists and educators are assumed to learn together on an equal footing with the young people in their charge. Research data is qualitative and rooted in specific contexts, but it is of relevance and interest to a wider audience.
Ideas about action research and ‘co-learning’ run through most of the contributions. TAP – the teacher artist partnership – was set up to cater for the professional development of both artists and teachers, who then become action researchers in the classroom. Artists and teachers place themselves in regard to theoretical models, and at the same time investigate firsthand different pedagogical and art practice approaches. Emily Pringle’s PhD research into artists as gallery educators led her to appreciate the shared ground between participatory or dialogical art and participatory action research. She describes the ways she has come to see her enquiry as collaborative, while recognising that educators do work from a position of authority and expertise in relation to learners. ‘Pedagogy in the gallery involves nuances of collaboration, that constantly shift and develop.’
The REALL group at Middlesex University gives an account of Field, a module for primary teacher training students which involves English, Geography, History, Religious Education, Citizenship and ICT as well as Art and Design. Students explore a local community in relation to all the subjects, keep a reflective journal and create a book or map. Open-endedness is one of the cornerstones of Field: ‘What are the students capable of when we create a set of parameters and circumstances which are deliberately not those they usually work within (curriculum, school cultures, orthodoxies of practice etc.)?’ The module sets out to model disagreement, contradiction and multiple approaches. Not only is Field seen as experimental research for the students, it is seen as research and development for the tutors, artists and other professionals who contribute.
Sekules, Blickem and Peel speak eloquently of the ‘sideways surprises’ and the ‘quirks of process’ that action research aspires to catch. In the On Tour projects in schools, a video diary room was set up to court the elusive and the unforseen. Individuals or groups could visit the room whenever they wanted, and they had complete control over what was recorded. The video room was used in various ways, but seemed to provide a space for playful reflection, where responses that were not yet coherent could be voiced, and where participants could think outside the limits of the project itself. As everyone used the video diary room, it was a place where the teacher – pupil hierarchy could be relaxed.
The evaluators who contribute to two of the articles appear to be deeply embedded in their projects from the start. Christian Blickem offers a useful precis of different kinds of evaluation in the context of research. On Tour adopted a
responsive, process-over-product model which asked questions like: ‘What stood out? Where were the surprises? How can we understand the value of the experiences to individuals?’ He sees evaluation as retrospective, ascribing value, while research is forward looking - ‘the process through which evaluation is achieved.’ For TAP’s evaluator, David Jenkins, the evaluator’s role is, first, to bear witness and second, to intellectually theorise the project and convey it to various audiences ‘in some kind of cognitive order.’ This involves honouring ‘situational truths’, but generalising when possible, in order to make the findings useful in other settings.
Bridget McKenzie writes about the Britsh Library’s model of creative research, and two of the projects which emerged from it, Reading Patterns and Young Explorers. She takes a framework for postgraduate research and expands on it in ways that take into account the divergent, open nature of imaginative work. Creative research is summed up as ‘a process of dialogue, enriched with play and making, stretched by a big question.’
Penny Hay’s article looks at a major long-term project in the Southwest of England with very young children, designed to ‘research children as they research the world.’ Involving artists, educators and cultural centres, 5x5x5 shares many of the premises of creative and action research described elsewhere: co-learning, democratic participation, dialogue, open-endedness. Interestingly, she writes that the adults involved experienced many changing roles: collaborator, learner, researcher, enabler, observer, documenter, mentor, artist, curator, critic.
Two contributions are concerned with specific interpretive tools in the gallery. Loïc Tallon describes a piece of independent research into audioguides and their use and potential in galleries and museums. This is a piece calling for further, focused research on what he sees as a very popular but under-researched provision. In the UK, the lack of research may be due to prejudice against the audioguide amongst art professionals, coupled with the fact that the commercial audioguide industry is keen to keep their competitive edge and hence do not share their own findings. Tallon argues that audioguides potentially serve a large, motivated audience, providing self-directed learning which can be tailored to specific visitor needs.
It may be that audioguides and related tools are being developed more outside of the UK. Gottleib and Simonsson describe three interactive devices which they helped devise and test in Stockholm. One is a digital audio guide for seven to eleven year olds, in the form of a stuffed animal the child carries around the gallery and can interact with. The second is a Kandinsky painting reproduced on electronic carpet. Touching or rolling on the carpet activates music and reflections about the colours and shapes and about Kandinsky’s aesthetic ideas. The third device explores concepts of mastery and appropriation, and takes the form of a talking chair which offers three very different takes on contemporary art.
Stephen Foster, Director of the John Hansard Gallery, moves the discussion outward, to the realities of management and funding. Galleries either have to piece together funding from different sources, each of which comes with its own pressure and demands, or they end up chasing the same state-sponsored funding, and having to confom to DCMS criteria. This has the effect of diluting the vision and distinctiveness of different insitutions, and reducing their power to be specific centres of research. Moreover, the managing role of gallery directors has come to dominate their role as scholars/curators. Directors need to see themselves as ‘curators of cultural programmes’ if galleries are to become serious research centres in the arts, analogous to research centres in the sciences.
What are the common threads in the projects and reflections below? One is the idea of ‘local effects’ and ‘situational truths’ that are nonetheless generalisable. Research findings are always sensitive to context, but their insights can be transferred to other settings. In art-as-research this means that although the experiences being drawn upon are idosyncratic and private, the outcomes must be shareable and public. All contributors give a central role to reflection. All talk about being both inside and outside of the research. All the research described here is developed and driven forward by dialogue and exchange. Value is placed on equality, collaboration and co-learning, and the aim is to develop everyone involved, artists and educators as well as children, students, visitors, learners.
It is this last idea of collaborative equality, important as it is, which seems to be problematic in practice. In the en-quire programme, for example, artists, teachers, HEI researchers and gallery educators aspire to be on equal footing, but, as a consequence of time and resources, it is the gallery educators who dominate. Taylor admits that in some of the projects the young people were more or less ‘the observed.’ There are plans afoot to address this, by making en-quire the subject of a research project developed by the young people themselves. A drawback to the ideal of co-learning emerges in a different way in the TAP programme. David Jenkins observes that ‘non-directive pedagogies can adopt a self-denying stance, whereby in order to become 'fellow learners' tutors pretend to know less than they actually do.’ Emily Pringle points out that there are times when the artist educator needs to take a more detached, authoritative stance. Who writes up the results of a research project also shifts the balance of power, as when the researcher – formerly a co-learner – retreats to write up, own and take responsibility for her PhD thesis. Perhaps, rather than aspiring to an ideal of absolute equality, it is useful to think about the roles that we move between in different parts and stages of research, sometimes co-learners, sometimes experts, sometimes ethnographers.
The philosopher Mary Warnock recently said that the point of education is to ‘enlarge one’s imaginative pleasures.’ Conceived in this way, education would offer the arts a central role. The most interesting thing about the art-as- research, teaching-as-research, learning-as-research debate is not that art and education are made more rigorous in the process, but that the concept of research itself is changing shape in order to honour the foraging, trial and error, hunch and instinct, private and public nature of what artists do.
* See the interesting chapter by Les Tickle, ‘The gallery as site of research’ in M. Xanthoudaki, L. Tickle, V,. Sekules (eds) Researching Visual Arts Education in Museums and Galleries, 167-182.
This PDF is an extract from engage publication:
• engage review Promoting greater understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts
• Research
• Issue 18 – Winter 2006
• 72 pages
• ISSN 1365-9383
The original publication is available from engage as below, subject to stocks.
This text is copyright, and is made available for personal/educational use only, and may not be used commercially or published in any way, in print or electronically, without the express permission of the copyright holders engage. engage reiterates its gratitude to the authors and editors concerned, many of whom work without fee. For more details of engage see end.
Contents
Reseaarch Issue 18 – Winter 2006
Editorial
Iain Biggs Art as Research, Doctoral Education and the Politics of Knowledge
Barbara Taylor en-quire: Learning Through Action Research
Anna Ledgard & David Jenkins TAP: Teacher Artist Partnership
Emily Pringle Researching Gallery Education
Rebecca Sinker, Victoria de Rijke & Howard Hollands Field of Enquiry
Veronica Sekules, Christian Blickem & Charlotte Peel Method in Our Madness
Faisal Abdu’Allah Gallery Education as Research
Bridget McKenzie Quests Driven by Questions
Penny Hay & Mary Fawcett 5x5x5=Creativity
Loïc Tallon On Audio Tours: An Unknown Quantity
Halina Gottlieb & Helen Simonsson Designing Narrative and Interpretive Tools
Stephen Foster Research and the Gallery Director
Reviews Art Practice as Research
Contributors’ details
Editorial, Research
Karen Raney
These days everyone involved in art or education is presumed to be carrying out research: teachers, gallery visitors, project organisers, curators, evaluators, children, and artists themselves. Research suggests an endeavour that is systematic, exploratory, potentially collaborative, and communicable in some kind of ordered way. Research suggests intellectual rigour and a degree of objectivity. In art practice, the idea of research has acted as a corrective to the softer, more limited, more private notion of ‘expression’. What expectations and opportunities does ‘research’ in different contexts usher in? What models are being used? Where does the work of imagination happen within the research model? Most of the articles in this volume are about research into gallery education – projects designed to investigate how learning takes place in the gallery context. Others describe art-based projects in non-gallery settings – school, university, library – which are conceived under, and reflect upon, the notion of research for those involved. Some contributions are concerned with the idea of art practice as research.
At first it might seem that research into gallery education and the question of art practice as research are two different things. But for a number of reasons it is important to consider them together. For one thing, there is a growing overlap between art practice and gallery education. What gallery educators do, and how they research what they do, draws from models found in participatory art practice. Conversely, the exchange with Faisal Abdu’Allah suggests that, for some artists, gallery education is virtually a branch of their own practice – a way of testing ideas, generating new work, keeping an ear to the ground of contemporary culture. The act of running a workshop becomes ‘almost a performance or a temporary piece of work’. Even when an artist’s work is studio- based, the kind of processes that might constitute it as research – practical experimenting, reflection-in-action,* - are also at work in the education research described below. And it is theorists of education like Elliott Eisner, with their interest in sensory-based understanding and the transformative nature of art, who seem to offer the most fruitful lines of enquiry into art practice as research.
Iain Biggs describes the resistance that has arisen as art-based research carves a place for itself in higher education in the form of PhDs and professional doctorates in fine art. He is interested in what happens when previously marginalised forms of intelligence are brought to play on the dynamics of the university system. The arts and humanities have often found themselves on the defensive, denying their difference from traditional forms of research in the name of academic rigour. But the clash between different kinds of knowledge may itself be the point. Artists in higher education must situate themselves in relation to two contexts – the contemporary art world, both commercial and state sponsored, and the world of university research. The best art-based research, according to Biggs, is at odds with both. Therein lies its value. Artists can stage a collision between the world of non-verbal intelligence and sensuous knowing, and the world of conceptual knowledge with its more controlled forms of enquiry.
en-quire is engage’s long-term research programme into the transformative potential of gallery education for young people. The director, Barbara Taylor, gives an overview of the different projects underway, as well as an account of the en-quire ethos. It is based on an action research model derived from the social sciences, where researchers do not study people from a supposedly objective position, but instead they work with, for and alongside people. Artists and educators are assumed to learn together on an equal footing with the young people in their charge. Research data is qualitative and rooted in specific contexts, but it is of relevance and interest to a wider audience.
Ideas about action research and ‘co-learning’ run through most of the contributions. TAP – the teacher artist partnership – was set up to cater for the professional development of both artists and teachers, who then become action researchers in the classroom. Artists and teachers place themselves in regard to theoretical models, and at the same time investigate firsthand different pedagogical and art practice approaches. Emily Pringle’s PhD research into artists as gallery educators led her to appreciate the shared ground between participatory or dialogical art and participatory action research. She describes the ways she has come to see her enquiry as collaborative, while recognising that educators do work from a position of authority and expertise in relation to learners. ‘Pedagogy in the gallery involves nuances of collaboration, that constantly shift and develop.’
The REALL group at Middlesex University gives an account of Field, a module for primary teacher training students which involves English, Geography, History, Religious Education, Citizenship and ICT as well as Art and Design. Students explore a local community in relation to all the subjects, keep a reflective journal and create a book or map. Open-endedness is one of the cornerstones of Field: ‘What are the students capable of when we create a set of parameters and circumstances which are deliberately not those they usually work within (curriculum, school cultures, orthodoxies of practice etc.)?’ The module sets out to model disagreement, contradiction and multiple approaches. Not only is Field seen as experimental research for the students, it is seen as research and development for the tutors, artists and other professionals who contribute.
Sekules, Blickem and Peel speak eloquently of the ‘sideways surprises’ and the ‘quirks of process’ that action research aspires to catch. In the On Tour projects in schools, a video diary room was set up to court the elusive and the unforseen. Individuals or groups could visit the room whenever they wanted, and they had complete control over what was recorded. The video room was used in various ways, but seemed to provide a space for playful reflection, where responses that were not yet coherent could be voiced, and where participants could think outside the limits of the project itself. As everyone used the video diary room, it was a place where the teacher – pupil hierarchy could be relaxed.
The evaluators who contribute to two of the articles appear to be deeply embedded in their projects from the start. Christian Blickem offers a useful precis of different kinds of evaluation in the context of research. On Tour adopted a
responsive, process-over-product model which asked questions like: ‘What stood out? Where were the surprises? How can we understand the value of the experiences to individuals?’ He sees evaluation as retrospective, ascribing value, while research is forward looking - ‘the process through which evaluation is achieved.’ For TAP’s evaluator, David Jenkins, the evaluator’s role is, first, to bear witness and second, to intellectually theorise the project and convey it to various audiences ‘in some kind of cognitive order.’ This involves honouring ‘situational truths’, but generalising when possible, in order to make the findings useful in other settings.
Bridget McKenzie writes about the Britsh Library’s model of creative research, and two of the projects which emerged from it, Reading Patterns and Young Explorers. She takes a framework for postgraduate research and expands on it in ways that take into account the divergent, open nature of imaginative work. Creative research is summed up as ‘a process of dialogue, enriched with play and making, stretched by a big question.’
Penny Hay’s article looks at a major long-term project in the Southwest of England with very young children, designed to ‘research children as they research the world.’ Involving artists, educators and cultural centres, 5x5x5 shares many of the premises of creative and action research described elsewhere: co-learning, democratic participation, dialogue, open-endedness. Interestingly, she writes that the adults involved experienced many changing roles: collaborator, learner, researcher, enabler, observer, documenter, mentor, artist, curator, critic.
Two contributions are concerned with specific interpretive tools in the gallery. Loïc Tallon describes a piece of independent research into audioguides and their use and potential in galleries and museums. This is a piece calling for further, focused research on what he sees as a very popular but under-researched provision. In the UK, the lack of research may be due to prejudice against the audioguide amongst art professionals, coupled with the fact that the commercial audioguide industry is keen to keep their competitive edge and hence do not share their own findings. Tallon argues that audioguides potentially serve a large, motivated audience, providing self-directed learning which can be tailored to specific visitor needs.
It may be that audioguides and related tools are being developed more outside of the UK. Gottleib and Simonsson describe three interactive devices which they helped devise and test in Stockholm. One is a digital audio guide for seven to eleven year olds, in the form of a stuffed animal the child carries around the gallery and can interact with. The second is a Kandinsky painting reproduced on electronic carpet. Touching or rolling on the carpet activates music and reflections about the colours and shapes and about Kandinsky’s aesthetic ideas. The third device explores concepts of mastery and appropriation, and takes the form of a talking chair which offers three very different takes on contemporary art.
Stephen Foster, Director of the John Hansard Gallery, moves the discussion outward, to the realities of management and funding. Galleries either have to piece together funding from different sources, each of which comes with its own pressure and demands, or they end up chasing the same state-sponsored funding, and having to confom to DCMS criteria. This has the effect of diluting the vision and distinctiveness of different insitutions, and reducing their power to be specific centres of research. Moreover, the managing role of gallery directors has come to dominate their role as scholars/curators. Directors need to see themselves as ‘curators of cultural programmes’ if galleries are to become serious research centres in the arts, analogous to research centres in the sciences.
What are the common threads in the projects and reflections below? One is the idea of ‘local effects’ and ‘situational truths’ that are nonetheless generalisable. Research findings are always sensitive to context, but their insights can be transferred to other settings. In art-as-research this means that although the experiences being drawn upon are idosyncratic and private, the outcomes must be shareable and public. All contributors give a central role to reflection. All talk about being both inside and outside of the research. All the research described here is developed and driven forward by dialogue and exchange. Value is placed on equality, collaboration and co-learning, and the aim is to develop everyone involved, artists and educators as well as children, students, visitors, learners.
It is this last idea of collaborative equality, important as it is, which seems to be problematic in practice. In the en-quire programme, for example, artists, teachers, HEI researchers and gallery educators aspire to be on equal footing, but, as a consequence of time and resources, it is the gallery educators who dominate. Taylor admits that in some of the projects the young people were more or less ‘the observed.’ There are plans afoot to address this, by making en-quire the subject of a research project developed by the young people themselves. A drawback to the ideal of co-learning emerges in a different way in the TAP programme. David Jenkins observes that ‘non-directive pedagogies can adopt a self-denying stance, whereby in order to become 'fellow learners' tutors pretend to know less than they actually do.’ Emily Pringle points out that there are times when the artist educator needs to take a more detached, authoritative stance. Who writes up the results of a research project also shifts the balance of power, as when the researcher – formerly a co-learner – retreats to write up, own and take responsibility for her PhD thesis. Perhaps, rather than aspiring to an ideal of absolute equality, it is useful to think about the roles that we move between in different parts and stages of research, sometimes co-learners, sometimes experts, sometimes ethnographers.
The philosopher Mary Warnock recently said that the point of education is to ‘enlarge one’s imaginative pleasures.’ Conceived in this way, education would offer the arts a central role. The most interesting thing about the art-as- research, teaching-as-research, learning-as-research debate is not that art and education are made more rigorous in the process, but that the concept of research itself is changing shape in order to honour the foraging, trial and error, hunch and instinct, private and public nature of what artists do.
* See the interesting chapter by Les Tickle, ‘The gallery as site of research’ in M. Xanthoudaki, L. Tickle, V,. Sekules (eds) Researching Visual Arts Education in Museums and Galleries, 167-182.