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Figure 1. Julia Marshall, 2016, Research Ecosystem [Collage]. |
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From
tropical rainforests to Apple products, the concept of ecosystems is used to
describe collectives of biological agents to interacting digital hardware and
software: ecosystems are complex systems of interdependent agents acting
together in a specific context. In its fourth year, the National Art Education
Association Research Commission views the field of art education research as an
ecosystem. Part of the Research Commission’s mission is to cultivate the
research ecosystem in art education, and this extends to research cultures that
are “born digital.” In this essay, as members of the Research Commission, we
seek to outline how we understand the Commission’s role as a cultivator, and in
particular, its recent initiatives to grow research communities through our
Interactive Café, webinars, and an evolving Web presence. We begin our essay
with a review of our brief history as a commission, then discuss our
understandings of ecosystems, and finally present an in-depth look at our
Interactive Café—an online gathering place for research-based conversations and
presentations open to anyone wishing to join. We conclude by contemplating the
role of online research ecosystems and the role of the Research Commission in
participating in these new forms of digital contexts.
Research
Commission
The Research
Commission was officially launched at the 2012 NAEA National Convention. The
2011-2014 NAEA Strategic Plan called for creation of the Commission to:
“conduct research and generate knowledge that enriches and expands visual arts
education and widely share that research and knowledge” (as cited by the NAEA
Research Commission, n.d.). Commissioners represent
the research needs and interests of each division of the NAEA
membership—Elementary, Middle Level, Secondary, Higher Education, Preservice,
Supervision/Administration, and Museum Education. This purposeful cross-sector
alliance both enables and mobilizes our charge of connecting research,
practice, advocacy, and policy through our programs and services, coordinating
working groups and inviting partnerships to encourage sound, ethical research,
and leading efforts to provide professional development for art education
researchers in varied contexts.
Participating
in Research Cultures
The
art education research community is expansive, diverse, and complex. It
includes art educators, general classroom teachers, museum educators, school
and district administrators, artists, and university researchers—any
practitioner who sees her/his work as an attempt to advance knowledge, deepen
understanding of our purpose and constituency, re-envision our role and place
in broader systems, and generate new practices. We view the Research Commission’s
role in this community as building capacity within a research ecosystem.
Cultivating a fertile space, like the agar in a petri dish, we seek to
strengthen, amplify, and connect existing and emerging research cultures.
The
Research Commission’s embrace of the ecosystem metaphor connects our vision of
community and research to the overarching concept of system. According
to General Systems Theory (von Bertalanffy, 1968), a
system is a web of interdependent parts, each of which contributes to the
function and viability of the whole. Moreover, systems are complex living structures with many moving parts, and they are dynamic,
functioning through multiple interactions or feedback loops among those parts.
As
a dynamic system, the art education research ecosystem thrives through a
complex, multidimensional system of feedback loops, which includes the core
loop: the cycle of research, theory, and practice. These loops cycle through
the network, opening new spaces, generating new ideas and practices, and
ultimately moving the system forward. As a result, the Research Commission
understands the importance of keeping these loops visible, accessible, open,
active, and always expanding. In ecosystems, there is no one organism that
exerts purposeful control over the whole. The morphology of an ecosystem is
flat—decentralized. Movement, change, and evolution occur through recurrent cycles
of elaboration and feedback.
To
be clear, we are not conceptualizing the Research Commission as the ecosystem;
rather, we see the Commission as one of the many connectors in this network.
Decentralized morphologies are made up of many nodes in a network, some more
connected than others. The term “decentralized” itself is misleading, as it is
not meant to suggest a total abandonment of centers, but rather, many centers
of varying connectedness (Davis & Sumara, 2006).
Further, as members of the Research Commission, we acknowledge that we are part
of a larger institution: The National Art Education Association. The NAEA has
goals and initiatives for research that encompass all of its members, and the
generality of these research goals may at times diverge from those of
subgroups, such as art education researchers in academia. This tension between
general and specific research interests, and between research needs of
different communities within the NAEA (for example, museum educators, teachers
in schools, cultural leaders) is at the heart of the Research Commission’s
vision and goals. With this in mind, we approach the Commission’s work,
especially in digital scholarship, as creating the conditions for cultivating
open systems of exchange, elaboration, and connection.
Systems
theory also highlights the purposeful nature of systems. Systems have
intention, whether it is to reproduce and sustain life, as in living organisms
or, as in our case, to generate new knowledge, practices, and strategies in
research (Capra & Luisi, 2014). Art education
research is a productive system; it generates new ideas, new knowledge,
and new practices. A corollary to this is that it is often unpredictable. The
generative nature of research in art education manifests system theory’s
notions of organic growth and creative adaptation and invention. Above all, the
art education research community is a vital system with strong similarities to
living organisms. Living systems are autopoietic (Maturana & Varela, 1980). This means they self-create
and self-organize, and the structure they generate is one of interdependency
and collaboration. Autopoietic systems thrive only
when each part of the network functions well. Autopoiesis,
therefore, is particularly important for social systems such as our art
education community because it reveals how critical each player is to the
ongoing viability and vitality of the entire system. June King McFee (1991) used the network, a similar flat and dynamic
hierarchy, to describe the field of art education—this aligns with our notions
of a research ecology. Our overarching goal for the Research Commission is to
keep this autopoietic, dynamic, and ever-emerging
system healthy and growing. Like the agar in a petri dish, we seek to create
fertile spaces to support scholar/practitioners, and invite them to participate
in and contribute to the health, dynamism, and generativity of the field’s
larger collective ecosystem.
An
Example: The Research Commission’s Interactive Café
The
Research Commission similarly views digital research systems as part of a
larger constellation in developing a vibrant culture of research. Our
Interactive Café embodies these ideas about digital art education scholarship
with a focus on networking and conversation. The networking and conversation of
the Interactive Café serve to increase interaction between the diverse NAEA
membership and individual members’ and groups’ wide-ranging research questions
and knowledge. Through the Café, the Commission seeks to develop an ecosystem
that is nonlinear and nonhierarchical, with codependent spaces that set the
conditions for different approaches to research, but do not impose any
particular research approach to the exclusion of others.
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Figure 1. Screenshot of research conversation events on the NAEA Research Commission Interactive Café. |
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We
originally envisioned the Café as a virtual gathering place for visitors to
join in dialogue with one or a group of researchers from different professional
contexts. Extending the metaphor of a café, we imagined this virtual space as
various “tables” of conversation. At one table, museum and community educators,
high school art teachers, and higher education faculty could share research on
teaching approaches that engage teens with contemporary art works (see Figure
2). At another table, district art supervisors, art department chairs, P<EN>-12 art teachers, and
university faculty might discuss the best research methods to collect and
analyze examples of student learning in art class. Art, museum, and community educators
at other tables would be discussing a diverse range of other topics, sharing
research approaches and findings gleaned from philosophical, theoretical,
historical, qualitative, quantitative, mixed method, art-based, or any number
of other research practices. Our vision, in short, was to welcome NAEA members
from all contexts—art teachers in schools and colleges, program leaders and
supervisors, teacher educators in higher education, museum and community educators,
policymakers—to join our collective and ongoing research-focused dialogues in
the Café.
Over the past 2 years, the Research Commission has shaped
this vision in a pilot of targeted Café programming. We curated Café
conversation topics and invited co-hosts from mixed teams of researchers and
practitioners drawn from Museum, Elementary, Middle Level, Secondary, and
Higher Education divisions. Conversations focused on school programs in the art
museum, the promise of art-based research, assessing creativity in the visual
arts, assessing cross-disciplinary learning in the visual arts, assessing learning
in students’ responses to works of art, and feminist issues in art education. In
the space of the Café, a conversation contains initial posts (which are often
collaboratively developed by members from across divisions), responses to
posts, as well as the application of art, Web links, and (of course) research
as citations to explain and explore the topics at hand. Our intention was that
prepared posts by conversation hosts would motivate responses from not only
other event hosts and their invited participants, but also interested art
educators from the now over 1,000-member Café community. We found that some of
the liveliest conversations and debates happened among art educators from
differing contexts. We are carrying this networking and conversation model
forward in our current redesign of the Research Café and its events.
Obviously,
the Research Commission recognizes that research is both dialogic, in that it
invites response and ongoing conversation, and discursive, in that it addresses
many topics and approaches simultaneously. Our Café pilot programming
conversations show how research can extend rhizomatically among different networks of researchers and contexts of professional practice.
As the work of research enters into new contexts, each context provides a turn
of the kaleidoscope by which an idea can be reconsidered.
The
Research Commission’s digital research spaces—our website, research-based
webinars, and Interactive Café—are linked to nondigital research forums
such as our NAEA conference sessions and research-based pre-conferences. The
Commission’s website, webinars, and Café are open to people from across the
NAEA organization. We invite members to share their own scholarship as well as
respond to, learn from, question and challenge, and elaborate on work from
other researchers. The topics and forms of our digital spaces, in particular,
are emergent and adaptive by design. They respond to individual NAEA members’
particular research needs and interests, and to members’ varied experiences and
backgrounds.
Connectivity
and Vibrancy
Digital
scholarship will continue to expand in and through the diverse individuals and
contexts associated with art education research cultures. The role of the
Research Commission, through the connectivity provided by digital technology,
is to promote interconnections that acknowledge our interdependence. Moreover,
it is not just about maintaining static relationships—for us, a primary concern
is how connection promotes intellectual life and organizational vibrancy.
Connectivity, both on and offline, is a catalyst to deepening the diversity of
thinking and inquiry in art education.
The
Research Commission’s desire to connect research practices and cultures in art
education is a concern for cultivating heterogeneous forms of ideation and
inquiry. Julia Marshall’s Research Ecosystem collage, which opens this
article, illustrates our vision for amplifying research cultures. What an
organizational structure like the Research Commission can do is create
conditions, like the agar in petri dishes, to cultivate research cultures. An
ecosystem’s morphology is decentralized, meaning there is no central controller
to dictate the growth of the system. In terms of digital scholarship, an initiative
like the Interactive Café is one example of how we are working to connect and
then amplify research inquiry in art education. Other developing initiatives we
have supported are the Commission’s Digital Visualization Working Group and the
creation of research databases that connect art education with related
research.
The
Research Commission is one of many centers in a network of art education
research. We believe that creating opportunities and platforms for connectivity
is necessary for advancing research in art education. When we reference art
education as a field, we also question what a field is and who defines a field. Returning to June King McFee’s (1991) description of art education as a network, we add the ecological
perspective that the network of art education is decentralized, that is to say,
its hierarchy is flat and dynamic. The potential of digital forms of
scholarship resides in its ability to connect research communities, discourses,
and ideas across time and space.
References
Capra,
F., & Luisi, P. (2014). The systems view of
life: A unifying vision. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Davis, B., & Sumara, D.
(2006). Complexity and education: Inquiries into learning, teaching, and
research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Maturana, H., & Varela, F.
(1980). Autopoiesis and cognition: The
realization of the living. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel.
McFee, J. K. (1991). Art education
progress: A field of dichotomies or a network of mutual support. Studies in
Art Education, 32(2), 70–82.
NAEA Research Commission. (n.d.).
Retrieved from https://www.arteducators.org/research/naea-research-commission
von Bertalanffy, L. (1968). General
system theory: Foundations, development, applications. New York, NY: George Braziller.
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