Incorporating Digital Research Methods Into Arts-Based Inquiry

• In Event: Updating Eisner: Incorporating Indigenous and Digital Inquiry Into Arts-Based Educational Research

Abstract

Although there have been attempts to expand Eisner’s notion of arts-based inquiry to include theatrical performance (Citation Redacted), the product produced by arts-based researchers continues to be primarily written text. Given that we now live in a digital age, it seems important to consider the role that video can play in educational inquiry.

The third presentation focuses on—and provides examples of—the presenter’s attempts to expand the definition of arts-based inquiry to include research done with and reported by video.
The presenter will note that the use of video in the research process is not unusual in other fields (Bredbenner & Simon, 2019)., or even in the educational research field, generally. Micro-ethnographers in Education, for example, have used video for decades (Erikson, 2011); indeed, it is unlikely they could do their close-up analyses of human interactions without video data. A review of this literature, however, suggests that micro-ethnographers have used video almost exclusively for data collection purposes. Even when video data are analyzed, many micro-ethnographers transcribe video content and analyze the written transcripts.

Eisner’s conception of arts-based research opens the door for a different use of video, one that uses the grammar of film to explicate and communicate meaning. The presenter, who had an MFA in film from one of the country’s most highly rated film programs before entering a Ph.D. program, will use excerpts from the studies he has been conducting over the past several years to illustrate how film techniques can be used to give “form to feeling” (Langer, 1977).

Some of these studies examined the past and current experiences of the members of the first U.S. Naval Academy class to include females (Citation Redacted). (The presenter was a male member of that class.) Recently, this presenter wanted to compare the experiences of the women in the naval academy’s first class with the current culture of the academy and the role that women play in that culture. He discovered that a substantial number of midshipmen [sic.] have posted surprisingly artistic vlogs (i.e., video blogs) of their experiences online. These vlogs became his data for his most recent study, and he also reported the results of his analysis of the vlogs as a series of vlogs. He will share one of the vlogs-about-the-vlogs in his presentation.

What is interesting is that the presenter confronted many of the same issues Eisner and his students confronted when developing the concept of arts-based inquiry. For example, he reconstructed his original video about the experiences of the females in the original naval academy class to insert an on-screen narrator discussing the insights various theories provide about what had happened. There were aesthetic costs, to say the least, much as one of Eisner’s students, Tom Barone, years ago noted that there were significant costs to Eisner’s insistence that references to social science theory be included in the interpretation sections of educational criticisms so educational criticism could be differentiated from journalism. This and other comparisons will be made during the presentation.

Author

• Peter A. Shaner, University of San Diego