3rd Edition

Arts-Based Research in Education Foundations for Practice

Edited By Melisa Cahnmann, Richard Siegesmund Copyright 2026
440 Pages 10 Color & 27 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

440 Pages 10 Color & 27 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

440 Pages 10 Color & 27 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

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 practices.

As arts-based research grows in prominence and popularity, the barriers between empirical, institutional, and artistic research diminish, leading to an ever-increasing, global need to understand and navigate this evolving domain of research. Featuring contributions from a diverse range of leading scholartists in the field, 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. These essays introduce the theory and practice of arts-based research taking place in sites of teaching and learning. The third edition draws together all contributors from the previous editions, with revised reflective essays, new examples, and updates that bring these ground-breaking works up to date with current developments over the past decade of increased arts-based educational research activity in this rapidly expanding field.

This book is ideal for pre-service and in-service art educators. It can be utilized in art education teacher certification courses that focus on methods, or as a component of a larger foundations course on qualitative inquiry.

Chapter 1: Introduction to the Third Edition

Melisa Cahnmann and Richard Siegesmund

 

Chapter 2: How Arts-Based Research Can Change Minds

Tom Barone

 

Chapter 3: Between Poetry and Anthropology: Searching for Languages of Home

Ruth Behar

 

Chapter 4: Voices Lost and Found: Using Found Poetry in Qualitative Research

Kakali Bhattacharya

 

Chapter 5: Who Will Read this Body? An A/r/tographic Statement

Barbara Bickel

 

Chapter 6: Wild Imagination, Radical Imagination, Politics, and the Practice of Arts-Based Educational Research (ABER) and Scholartistry

Donald Blumenfeld-Jones

 

Chapter 7: Finding the Progress in Work-in-Progress: Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process in Arts-Based Research

John Borstel

 

Chapter 8:  Arts-Based Research: Histories and New Directions

Melisa Cahnmann 

 

Chapter 9: Four Guiding Principles for Arts-Based Research Practice

Melisa Cahnmann

 

Chapter 10: Persistent Tensions in Arts-Based Research

Elliot Eisner

 

Chapter 11: Notes from a Cuban Diary: We Believe in Our History: An Inquiry into the 1961 Literacy Campaign Using Photographic Representation

Joanne C. Elvy

 

Chapter 12: Happenings: Allan Kaprow’s Experimental, Inquiry-Based Art Education

Charles R. Garoian

 

Chapter 13: Queering Identity(ies) and Fiction Writing in Qualitative Research

Douglas Gosse

 

Chapter 14: Celebrating Monkey Business in Art Education and Research

Madeleine Grumet 

 

Chapter 15: Expanding Paradigms: Art as Performance and Performance as Communication in Politically Turbulent Times

Petula Sik-Ying Ho, Celia Hoi-Yan Chan, and Sui-Ting Kong

 

Chapter 16: Turning Toward: Materializing New Possibilities through Curating

Brooke Hofsess

 

Chapter 17: What Is an Artist-Teacher When Teaching Second Languages?

Yohan Hwang

 

Chapter 18: A/r/tography as Practice-Based Research

Rita L. Irwin and Stephanie Springgay

 

Chapter 19: Songwriting as Ethnographic Practice: How Stories Humanize

Kristina Jacobsen

 

Chapter 20: Hearing Jesusa’s Laugh

Terry Jenoure

 

Chapter 21: sista docta, Redux

Omi Osun Joni L. Jones

  

Chapter 22: Ethnographic Poetry

Adrie Kusserow

 

Chapter 23: The Abandoned School as an Anomalous Place of Learning: A Practice-Led Approach to Doctoral Research

Natalie LeBlanc

 

Chapter 24: The Ecology of Personal and Professional Experience: A Poet’s View

Carl Leggo

 

Chapter 25: For Art’s Sake, Stop Making Art

Jorge Lucero

 

Chapter 26: Understanding and Writing the World

Kristina Lyons

 

Chapter 27: A Researcher Prepares: The Art of Acting for the Qualitative Researcher

Kathleen R. McGovern

 

Chapter 28: Misperformance Ethnography

Monica Prendergast and George Belliveau

 

Chapter 29: Art, Agency, and Inquiry: Making Connections between New Materialism and Contemporary Pragmatism in Arts-Based Research

Jerry Rosiek

 

Chapter 30: Troubling Certainty: Readers’ Theater in Music Education Research

Kathryn Roulston, Roy Legette, Monica Taylor, and Celeste Buckhalter

 

Chapter 31: The Drama and Poetry of Qualitative Method

Johnny Saldaña

 

Chapter 32: Learning to Perceive: Teaching Scholartistry

Richard Siegesmund

 

Chapter 33: Thinking in Comics: An Emerging Process

Nick Sousanis

 

Chapter 34: Nurse-in: Breastfeeding and A/r/tographical Research

Stephanie Springgay

 

Chapter 35: Ethnographic Activist Middle Grades Fiction: Reflections on Researching and Writing Dear Mrs. Naidu

Mathangi Subramanian

 

Chapter 36: The End Run: Art and the Heart of the Matter

Dana Walrath

 

Chapter 37: Putting Critical Public Pedagogy into Practice: Reorienting the Career Path of the Teacher-Artist-Scholar

Yen Yen Woo

 

Chapter 38: Being Pregnant as an International PhD Student: A Poetic Autoethnography

Kuo Zhang

 

Chapter 39: Conclusion: The Tensions of Arts-Based Research in Education Reconsidered

Richard Siegesmund and Melisa Cahnmann

Biography

Melisa Cahnmann, Meigs Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia, has authored many books on arts-based research and pedagogy, including The Creative Ethnographer's Notebook. Recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Ambassadorship, the Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professorship, and the Beckman for Professors Who Inspire, she lives in Athens, GA, with her husband and two children.

Richard Siegesmund is Professor Emeritus of Art and Design Education at Northern Illinois University. His recent books include Visual methods of inquiry: Images as research, and he has regularly presented workshops on visual methods at the annual conference of the International Congress for Qualitative Inquiry. A recipient of two Fulbright awards in visual methodology, he and his wife now live in Switzerland dividing time between Zürich and the Upper Engadin.