Researcher as Artist/Artist as Researcher

Abstract

This is a postmodern article that is nontraditional in its form, content, and mode of representation. Upon recognizing that we share interests and common experiences as artists, we decided to collect life history information from each other about our artistic experiences. Thus we have become, simultaneously, "the researched" and "the researcher. " In these conversations, we explore the ways in which we were each guided by our past, very strong aesthetic and artistic experiences. We also include the voices of other researchers and artists in our conversations as we explore the influences of art in the formation of our worldviews.The transcribed narratives in this text-representing portions of our conversations-are intensely personal accounts of how we (Susan and Gary) have each experienced similar kinds of feelings (affective knowing) as part of both research and artistic activity. As collaborators in a life history research project exploring the experiences of untenured university teacher educators, we are engaged in framing and reframing concepts appropriate for uncovering personal history influences on professional lives-ours included. Thus, in the process of reflecting on our joint, separate, and emerging research projects, we discovered that we were each guided in our research by our past, very strong aesthetic and artistic experiences. Upon recognizing that we share interests and common experiences as artists, we decided to collect life history information from each other about our artistic experiences. We would each become, simultaneously, &dquo;the researched&dquo; and &dquo;the researcher&dquo; (Cole, 1994). Our dual, reciprocal, and reflective roles would give us, we anticipated, insights into our practice as researchers and into other elements of our professional and personal selves. We were especially interested to discover and make more explicit how artistic and aesthetic experiences and events have shaped our thinking about research. We attempt to draw parallels between elements of our lives-between our artist and our researcher selves.

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Poetry Matters: A Case for Poetry in Social Work Practice

“…Ethnographic and other types of qualitative data help social workers understand the lived experiences of their clients. However, a great deal of quantitative data is dense and often difficult to penetrate with regards to the application to human emotion (Finley & Knowles, 1995). What social workers need is data that can provide the in-depth liveness of ethnographic studies yet be more condensed.…”

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“…Arts based educational research (ABER) (Carter, 2016;Finley & Knowles, 1995;Irwin, 2003;Kalin, 2014;Leavy, 2009) allows for the use of multiple qualitative methods to be used when approaching one's research. What makes ABER unique is the disposition of the researcher when engaging in arts based work.…”