Arts-Based Research Between Literacies

• In Event: 16.022 - Critically Dramatic Conversations: Complications in Drama/Theater Research for Social Justice and Equity

Abstract

In arts-based education linked to literacies learning, the particular puzzle of assessment functions on multiple levels, many tacitly (Taylor 2006). Looking across three different arts-and-literacies initiatives in one urban area, this paper asks: How is assessment constructed, by whom, for what purpose/s and toward which audience/s? This inquiry sits inside an orientation to assessment as constructed by and influencing a learning environment that is richly layered (Bronfenbrenner 1994), but operating in an educational context that equates assessment with discrete skills and competencies.

The three focus projects are united in that they all examine multimodal literacies and the arts, and I have served as primary investigator for each. The first is an arts-based sustainability and oral history inquiry that includes several local school and community sites as well as global partners. The second is a school-based arts-integration program designed to use the arts and storytelling to improve writing. The third is a professional development initiative supporting schools and families to explore the productive overlap between artistic and multilingual pedagogies as embodied and multimodal.

Each of the research projects employed a strong a/r/tographic (Irwin 2008) element in implementation, yielding arts-based literacies activity as formative and summative forms. Each study accumulated artifacts, analyzed and symbolized for meaning made. Each study relied on participant interviews for multi-voiced accounts. In each study, assessment was present in varied forces and forms, though not always named, articulated and interrogated.

In this paper, I revisit each study and use the concept of assessment construction actions as a unit of analysis. Through a recursive critical discourse (Fairclough et al 2011) and artifact (Pahl & Rowsell 2011) analysis, I tell the assessment story within and across each study, grounded in a multimodal (Jewett 2009) orientation to unpack and describe arts-based assessment in practice with a grass-roots articulation from multiple perspectives, and their ensuing upshots, implications and implications for future inquiries.

Author

• Elizabeth Murray, University of North Carolina - Charlotte