It is my honour to be invited to write the foreword of Volume II of Perspectives on Arts Education Research in Canada. I fully concur with John Guiney Yallop’s foreword in Volume 1, that Dr. Bernard W. (Bernie) Andrews is perfectly situated to edit such a collection. As the 1998 founding president of the Arts Researchers and Teachers Society (ARTS)/La societé des chercheurs et des enseignants des arts (SCEA), Bernie offers decades of expertise and experience to generations of scholars who integrate the arts in their meaning-making. ARTS/SCEA is a special interest group within the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (CACS), which is a constituent association of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education (CSSE), the largest and foremost body representing Canadian professors, students, researchers and practitioners in education. As such, Bernie Andrew’s reputation, involvement, and leadership have been instrumental in the development of the Canadian landscape of arts education research. In this volume, he has assembled chapters that demonstrate the social and methodological reach arts education research has had across research disciplines in Canada. I reflect on this growth through the perspectives of vision, collective goodness, coalescence, mentorship and culture building.
Vision
In 2010, when I was the ARTS President, Bernie Andrews was already speaking about the need for these books. His vision to capture points in time in the Canadian journey of arts education research offers scholars an orientation to the evolution of the field. Over the last two decades, there has been a burgeoning growth, acknowledgement, and acceptance of the power of integrating the arts in research. Not very long ago, universities did not accept the kind of innovations Canadian arts researchers are now regularly incorporating into their research. A few years ago, I stood clapping for winners of various CACS awards at an annual event called the CACS Celebration of Scholarly and Artistic Works. Every award that particular year was won by curriculum scholars who privileged embodied learning, making, or integrating arts in their research processes. Canadian arts education scholars clearly have been setting world precedents for pressing the boundaries in research using fusions of narrative, poetic, visual, performative, sound, making, and embodied research methodologies. Compounding these advances, many arts educational researchers have also crossed into collaborative interdisciplinary research, believing that education and pedagogy fully underpin knowledge mobilization, research dissemination, and community transformation. Nurturing these varied literacies has subsequently fueled the continued expansion of arts integrated research in Canada.
Collective Goodness
One of my favourite memories was speaking with Bernie Andrews at a Celebration of Scholarly and Artistic Works quite some time ago. Like many of our colleagues, he knows the arts not only create beauty but enable us to see beauty in our lives. Arts education research in the Canadian curriculum landscape is thriving because we are able to generate joy from beauty.
I could feel my own joy brewing as I read through this collection. Lori Lynn Penny (Chapter 7) quotes Hungarian composer and philosopher, Zoltán Kodály, explaining that the pedagogue’s work is to open the path for “direct intuition” (Kodály et al., 1974, p. 124). This is what Canadian arts education scholars have been doing – generating examples for how new research literacies can be felt, expressed, rendered, and investigated through the body.
Coalescence
The freshness of seeing how these artist-researcher-teachers narrate their inquiries carried me as if musically flowing atop Lori Lynn Penny’s wavy word text. I imagined reclining, relishing this river ride when I’d suddenly sit up and say, “Stop! What was that?” Penny was talking about a “paper-and-pencil” musician sitting on the bank of a river doing music theory, learning about music but had never floated on this stream of notes, never been buoyed by directly intuiting the joy of the art. This joy is the flow Maia Giesbrect (Chapter 5) promotes in experiencing personal creativity. This is the joy of arts research.
In reading Kodály’s words I was taken back to my first teaching appointment more than three decades ago. I taught the Kodály method, hand signs used as visual cues to teach children to “see” the pitch of the notes they sang. Hired as a grade two classroom teacher, part of my assignment was conducting primary choir, 90 students ranging in age from 4–9 stood on risers, eyes glowing, expectant always, as we sang about wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings and silver-white winters that melt into springs (lyrics from “My Favourite Things,” a song from movie The Sound of Music directed by R. Wise, 1965). My first year of teaching was transformative. Surrounded by so many young people awaiting direction, I quickly learned that actions were more powerful than words. The quality of my hand signals for standing up, stepping up and back onto the risers, and returning to sitting position determined the precision of the choir’s actions. As teachers, our own reflexive practices, actions, and words are significant in enabling and supporting the actions and futures of students. Similarly, Kathy Browning (Chapter 6) draws parallels between personal learning and impacts on pedagogy, and Michelle Searle (Chapter 4) discusses how arts-informed inquiry ultimately develops individual and organizational capacity for evaluative thinking.
In the 2000s, a critical mass and convergence of arts integrated researchers across the country spurred the growth and acknowledgement of arts integrated research. Alison Shields and Rita Irwin (Chapter 2) offer a review of arts-based research at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in the art education program from 2006–2016. This is a significant review, building on Sinner et al.’s (2006) review of arts-based dissertations between 1997–2003. This latter review was led by Sinner, who like Shields, is also a UBC alumna. UBC, with several successful Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council team grants under the prodigious leadership of Rita Irwin, Carl Leggo, Peter Gouzouasis, and Kit Grauer, and along with other faculty, and cohorts of creatively distinct, successful graduate students, as well as many other prominent students from outside of Art Education at UBC from Language and Literacy Education and Curriculum and Pedagogy spurred on the movement. Additionally, this growth of energy was not only on the west coast of Canada, but also at the Ontario Institute for the Study of Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto, where Ardra Cole and J. Gary Knowles, along with outstanding graduate students created their own momentum through the Centre for Arts-Informed Research. From these sites graduates accepted tenure-track jobs across Canada and in the United States, and set about creating a field of scholarship that added story, life, music, poetry, salons, cafés, gallery exhibits, and performances, forging new literacies in the shape of academic discourse. To demonstrate, John Vitale (Chapter 3), in this volume, conveys his research findings of pre-service generalist teachers’ fears of taking a music education course and teaching music through a screenplay.
Mentorship and Cultures
As I consider my own doctoral work at UBC in the 2000s, I am humbled in the knowing of my privilege with my mentors – Anthony Clarke and Carl Leggo were my co-supervisors and Rita Irwin and Gary Knowles were my dissertation committee members. As I contemplate my indebtedness to my mentors and my connections to graduate peers across Canada and North America, I am cognizant of the mentorship and peer-support that have shaped my experience.
Mentorship is a critical aspect of the movement of arts education research across Canada. The sociocultural context of the ARTS community and the annual CSSE, CACS and ARTS conference gatherings created maps enculturating new generations of scholars. The importance of mentorship and knowledge transferral, such as Bernie Andrews’ (Chapter 9) inquiry into practitioners’ perspectives after working with artists is described here:
Teachers reported that the artists’ focus on personal creativity developed their innate artistic abilities. This enabled them to understand their students’ arts experiences and value diversity in learning … The integrated arts approach promoted the teachers’ cognitive and emotional development, enabled them to explore independent, self-directed learnings, fostered awareness of the interconnectedness of arts forms, and reinforced cross-curricular instruction through the arts.
When I first read these chapters in digital form (pre-layout), I opened Anita Sinner et al.’s (Chapter 8) paper and marvelled at my beautiful misreading of the file name. It was called “Becoming Final.” I thought how lovely the five authors’ voices merged in emotive gestural movements becoming fullness, a union and community in the way the word final feels secure. This research methodology of métissage, a Canadian methodology, supports individual, diverse stories drawn together in a community of practice. This non-assimilative focus but collective consolidation also comes through Shelley M. Griffin et al.’s (Chapter 1) research on finding personal value in community by re-positioning the self. Laura Nemoy (Chapter 10) confirms this wholeness that is attained through the incorporation of music research in medical education, attesting to the balance needed in the biomedical paradigm. So while these innovations are common for many in this field, there are still many scholars/disciplines that are unaware of or are unable to epistemologically accept this kind of scholarship and that too, is understandable and acceptable in a grand curriculum of participatory interrelation.
Perspectives on Arts Education Research in Canada, Vol. 2 collates a diverse representation of theoretical, methodological, and multi-modal arts research in Canada. It clearly demonstrates how impactfully arts education research shapes pedagogy and practice across divergent content areas in the Canadian education landscape.
References
Kodály, Z., Bónis, F., Halápy, L., & Macnicol, F. (1974). The selected writings of Zoltan Kodály. New York, NY: Boosey & Hawkes.
Sinner, A., Leggo, C., Irwin, R., Gouzouasis, P., & Grauer, K. (2006). Arts-based educational research dissertations: Reviewing the practices of new scholars. Canadian Journal of Education, 29(4), 1223–1270.
Wise, R. (Producer & Director). (1965). The sound of music [Film]. United States: Twentieth Century-Fox.