Speaking in Tongues: The Uncommon Ground of Arts-Based Research

In this article, we explore whether or not arts-based research engages different ideas and processes—different nouns and verbs—when the art form is understood as design, craft, or “fine” art. We propose that the fine, craft, and design arts each provide opportunities for conducting research, that their identities are built upon mutual support and willful self-separation—“I am a crafts artist not a designer;” that the distinctions mark the boundaries of our research but aren’t fixed; and, that they provide a framework for a comprehensive art education program in which the disjunctions among the three disciplines provide opportunities for critical discourse. The disorder, the complexity, and the contradiction that the three disciplines of craft, design, and fine arts bring to one another is further complicated by art educators’ and their students’ knowledge, primarily the memories and cultural histories that they bring to their craft, design, and fine art making practices and research. In doing so, the discourse about craft, design, and fine art making is forever unfinished in the classroom. This article is the authors’ attempt at introducing a writing style that best exemplifies the ambiguities and incompleteness of arts-based research. We have chosen aphoristic writing to provide art educators opportunities to enter the fray, to intervene in the openings between our writing by reading between the aphorisms that follow.