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Teachers College, Columbia University
Teachers College
Columbia University

April 24, 2006 Conference

Ways

"Ways of Doing: Re-Conceptualizing Research Practices in Arts and Humanities"

This center is generously supported through the Florence H. and Eugene E. Myers Charitable Remainders Unitrust.

Ways of Doing - Spencer Grant Training Program

Overview of Project

This project is intended to put in place a program to consolidate the philosophies and practices of research across the arts and humanities. A basic tenet of this project is to bring together a community of practices that would dispel a number of myths and prejudices within the fields and practices of educational research. A challenge to arts and humanities research comes from a number of assumptions, such as:

  • The fallacy that robust educational research is either excluded by the speculative nature of arts inquiry, or should in turn exclude speculative methods of research;

  • The myth that arts and humanities could only gain legitimacy if its methods of research could externalize its ways of doing research in terms of evidence, number, statistic or tendency;

  • The overstated need for arts education research to borrow from social science paradigms as a kind of methodological surrogacy - as if arts education has not yet achieved its own methodological legitimacy in its diverse forms of practice.

    		•  Photo courtesy of Daniel Cuesta www.dphchallenge.com

    Objectives

    This project has a number of goals, namely:

  • To address the need for arts and humanities graduate students to enhance the skills by which they articulate, justify and make accountable the philosophies and practices of their research.

  • To locate arts and humanities research and practice within a broader paradigmatic spectrum to help teachers, academics and arts-practitioners re-define research within contemporary contexts and interdisciplinary interests.

  • To reinforce the arts and humanities cross-disciplinary ethos in the light of the research polities that continue to challenge the justification of arts and humanities education in the United States and beyond.

  • To present a coherent and fluent argument that arts and humanities research makes use of diverse platforms of research design, implementation, and accountability.

  • To apply in research contexts the array of pedagogical philosophies that the arts and humanities present with respect to social equity, ethnic cohesion, cultural difference, gender equality, and their recognition of diversity in creed, inclination, preference and action.