Reading Responses, Arts Based Research

As I read the materials for this course, I am struck by a repeated theme of 'translation'; how can the data collected through arts based research be communicated in ways that make sense to a wide variety of audiences. How can we communicate the effectiveness of this work to scientists? policy makers? foundations? education administrators? There are so many people who could benefit and would like to understand, but it's an immense challenge to translate the information so that others not in the field can understand. In another course, a guest panelist mentioned that 'people like us' have "drank the punch", and it's a constant battle to explain the nature of this work to those who have not.

Luckily, the arts have a way of moving people emotionally that raw data and numbers cannot. The fact that most of us are so comfortable with the arts as a means of dissemination means we have this skill on our side. The arts also can help us process the information we've discovered, or even help the subjects process it. The story that Lisa told in class about the teenagers working on the Playwright Mentoring project at Barrington Stage is such a wonderful example. Sean McNiff wrote that:

...the arts help us improve the way we interact with others by learning how to let go of negative attitudes and excessive needs for control, learning how to foster more open and original ways of perceiving situations and problems, gaining new insights and sensitivities towards others, learning how the slip stream of group expression can carry us to places where we cannot go alone, learning how to create supportive environments that inspire creative thought...

Often the translating that is most important is from what is in our heads as ideas to tangible concepts.

Another interested concept discussed in the reading is that arts projects tend to be multidisciplinary. Does this help with my translating issue? In Chapter 1 of our text, Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor writes:

Blurred genres tend to have the goal to speak to diverse audiences both within and outside the academy. The use of accessible, vernacular, and aesthetic language and image, helps to explicity reach out to larger, more diverse audiences...

I've decided that this concept of using the arts to assist in articulating an intangible process is what I want to focus on this semester. How do we make our results valid and useful? When the process is often more important than the product, how do you measure that? Often this type of research just presents more questions than answers. This is SO hard for me and I find that it is so hard for the class as well. More on this in my next post, on my research topic.