The Power of Arts-Based Research: Unveiling Its Transformative Benefits

Arts-based research is a vast and dynamic field. It can be challenging to disentangle the many threads and potentialities within this broad approach. Researchers have evolved diverse ways of using art-based inquiry’s powerful communicative and interpretive tools. These tools can help bypass participants’ discomfort with verbal expression, capture liminalities, complexities and ambiguities, and transform audience perceptions.

Empowering Participation

Arts-based research involves incorporating artistic activities within the research process. This can include using art as data collection, integrating creative methods in all phases of the research process and involving participants in creating art.

Research questions are asked from new angles and perspectives by empowering participants to create their work. This has led to a more inclusive and equitable way of knowing. By breaking down disciplinary boundaries, arts-based research Minneapolis MN, provides access to previously inaccessible or marginalized viewpoints. It can even lead to the creation of entirely new methodologies.

Transformative Learning

Unlike instrumental learning, which is more concerned with task-oriented education in a classroom setting, transformative learning involves changes in one’s perception and understanding. It also encourages self-reflection and meaningful experiences. According to Jack Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory, a person can undergo a transformative learning experience when an incident doesn’t match their existing meaning structures. This creates a disorienting dilemma and starts the process of transformation. During this phase, learners examine their past assumptions and critically assess them. This can happen in several ways, such as journaling and online discussions.

Insightful Communication

Insightful communication is key to empowering participants through the arts-based research paradigm. By connecting cognitive and emotional ways of knowing, art can help participants connect ideological abstractions to their personal experiences in meaningful ways. Moreover, art can empower participants to share their unique perspectives with other people. This allows for more diverse views of the research, bringing voice to nondominant narratives. This is particularly important in health care, where many patients deal with complex, personal issues. This may include feelings of guilt or shame about their illness.

Empowering Collaboration

Research with the arts encourages people to work together on a non-prescriptive and generative basis. This enables individuals to engage in collaborative dialogue and to create unforeseen opportunities for collaboration with others.

The use of the arts can extend access to ways of knowing beyond the privileged conceptual knowledge often referred to in research. This includes experiential and presentational expertise and the potential to transform artistic representations into practical applications of knowledge. This may support the re-visioning of subjective issues while fostering a move towards reconciliation, empowerment, adjustment and change.

Enhanced Creativity

Creativity teaches students to take risks, learn from mistakes and persist through challenges. It also helps students connect new information to their prior knowledge. In the process, students are taught the value of “productive struggle”—the gentler version of failure. Researchers in sustainability science and artists are increasingly drawing on arts-based research methods to develop novel artistic practices to tackle mounting socio-ecological challenges. The growing hybridization of these disciplines suggests a rich space for exploring art’s potential to transform approaches to knowing and becoming. This inquiry workshop will explore this potential through experiential learning in various art forms and a/r/tography.

Increased Engagement

Many studies reveal that arts-based research enhances creativity. Participants often find it easier to connect to the topic through a creative process – whether writing, drawing or painting – than through a traditional discussion.

This may be partly because art provides liminal spaces for exploration and renegotiation, providing thresholds for more imaginative thinking. Arts-based research facilitates access to a wider range of knowledge than the conceptual knowledge traditionally privileged in study, such as experiential and presentational know-how. Arts-based methods can also connect us with people – either as participants, co-researchers or audience – who might otherwise remain invisible. This is particularly true where the arts offer new ways of seeing and connecting to the world around us.

Enhanced Creativity

The capacity of arts to establish new connections and generate different meanings facilitates communication and awareness-raising. In addition, arts-based research can challenge assumptions and encourage questioning existing views and practices that may contribute to sustainability challenges. Furthermore, art can expand access to ways of knowing beyond propositional or conceptual knowledge, favoring presentational and practical forms. This was highlighted in the workshop’s experiences, where artists could translate experiential learning into expressive forms that could be applied to a specific context, thereby enabling a shift in social-ecological relations.