This article describes an a/r/tographic project entitled Art for Learning Art wherein the audience was invited to respond visually to a museum exhibition-installation. The three main objectives were: first, to rethink current practices in museum education in an effort to reach a dialectical synthesis between art-making and educational activities; second, to further develop three key identities held within a/r/tography; and third, to develop visual research instruments in a/r/tographic final reports. An exhibition-installation was organized around seven engravings, two photographs and one sculpture including the artworks by L. Bourgeois, E. Chillida, E. Munch, P. Picasso, A. Tàpies, among others, in the Spanish Caja-Granada Memory of Andalusia Museum. The main educational goal was to engage visitors with learning to interact visually with original artwork before producing new images that would then immediately became part of the installation.

Social a/r/tography combines three dimensions of a/r/tography (artistic creation, education and research) incorporating a fourth collaborative, participatory community‐based approach. This ongoing project began in two primary and secondary schools located in the slums of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, as cooperative action for curricular development in art education. As participatory action, students created a mural drawing inspired by Sol Lewitt's wall drawings, as well as photo pairs on the theme of body and nature inspired by a lithograph by Uta Barth. The drawings and photographs created by the students in Honduras were presented at an event in the Exchange space of the Tate gallery in Liverpool as visual provocation for the creation of drawings and visual metaphors. The concept of visual dialogue, which we define as ‘to teach human beings to have visual conversations with other humans through the visual content of images’, helps us to consider images as questions which are answered with new images whose meaning is subsequently transformed in function of artistic, school and social contexts.

A research photo essay in visual a/r/tography is a coherent, systematic, and original group of visual images about education (or any other social science). This relatively recent research methodology essentially produces new visual images about educational questions. Like any other research methodology, visual a/r/tography assumes (a) certain basic epistemological positions, (b) distinctive methodological strategies, and (c) specific quality criteria. We suggest five different paths to identify assessment criteria, the most important of these residing in the development of a framework of correspondences between quality criteria usually applied to research reports based on words (sentences, paragraphs, verbal thinking) and those based on visual images (photos, photo essays, visual thinking).

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Arts based Research (Investigación basada en Artes, in Spanish) uses Artistic Research Methodologies (ARM), which are founded in the forms of inquiry used by professional in literature, visual arts, music, theatre, dance, etc. The main distinctive feature of the ARM is that the final investigation report may consist, essentially, in a poem, a fictional story, a group of drawings or paintings, a song, a dance or a movie. The ARM main objective is to improve the knowledge of phenomena and human events through processes of inquiry, forms of communication and representation systems that put the emphasis on artistic and aesthetic qualities of both, the process and the final results of the research. A descriptive table show the recent and most relevant university textbooks, professional journals, research groups and professional associations about Research in Art Education, in the general context of Research in Humanities and Research in Visual Arts. A Photo essay explains the artistic processes of teaching and learning, after the film Los olvidados [The Young and the Damned in U.S.A.] by Buñuel, with our primary teacher’s training students on how film represents violence and school.