About TARG

Trent Arts Research Group

The Arts Imperative

Eco-social justice and Indigenous perspectives converge in the arts and community action. As a social practice, arts-based research integrates seemingly disparate disciplines through primarily qualitative research projects that serve individuals and communities and their development. Arts are integral to our collective human experience; they are the ways in which we can better understand ourselves and develop mutual empathy and cultural understanding of others (Eisner, 2008).

The arts and arts-based research can foster relationships and collaboration through art as methodology and as ways of knowing. Art has the capacity to transport us into the realm of imagination by suspending conventional notions of truth and evidence through its hermeneutic qualities and possibilities. Essentially, the arts encourage an interpretation and representation of human experience that no other methodology can provide.

To this effect, William Pinar (1995) writes: “To understand the role of the imagination in the development of the intellect, to cultivate the capacity to know aesthetically, to comprehend the teacher and his or her work as inherently aesthetic: these are among aspirations of that scholarship which seeks to understand curriculum as aesthetic text” (p. 604).He further credits the work of Tom Barone, John Dewey, Elliot Eisner, Maxine Greene, Elizabeth Vallance, among others, in a forum of educational research that presupposes that: “…the arts challenge formalism, dialecticism and eliticism” (Ibid., p. 604). The arts perform this challenge through inquiry into the ways in which works of art and our affective deeply felt engagement with poetry (Leggo, 2008), narrative (Dunlop, 2002), art (Sullivan, 2008), music (Cherry-Reid, 2020), and other artistic genres shift us toward an embodied knowledge.

Within these domains, our vision for this group is to highlight the ways in which ecological sustainability, social justice and Indigenous perspectives can converge in the arts and community action.

The Vision

The aim of the research group is to explore the ways in which the arts and arts-based research can foster relationships and collaboration among educators and community members for eco-social justice and reconciliation. As a social practice, arts-based research integrates seemingly disparate disciplines through primarily qualitative research projects that serve individuals and communities and their development. Given our current lived experiences with the global pandemic, we have learned of the importance of the arts in our society and the importance of commitment to long term projects. It’s clear that we need to support this type of work in our community through arts and action.

The Group

Trent Arts Research Group (TARG) is an interdisciplinary research group of educators, practitioners and theorists engaged in arts-based research and practice. The purpose of the research group is to support research dissemination and project development by creating a collective space for people in the arts at Trent to work together, to move from fragmented individuals to a community of researchers. By incorporating a collective approach (Cardwell, 2020) we engage in co-collaboration that includes faculty and students to focus on research and knowledge mobilization for creative practices through arts-based research.

References

Cardwell, N. (2020). Methodology as a practice: Methodologies in motion across Toronto and Coventry. In K. Gallagher, D. J. Rodricks, & K. Jacobson (Eds.), Global youth citizenry and radical hope: Enacting community-engaged research through performative methodologies (pp. 175-196). Springer.

Cherry-Reid, K. (2020). Music to Our Ears: Using a Queer Folk Song Pedagogy to do Gender and Sexuality Education. University of Toronto. [Dissertation]

Dunlop, R. (2002). A story of her own: Female bildungsroman as arts-based educational research. The Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 48(3), 215-228.

Eisner, Eliot. (2008). Art and knowledge. In Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues, edited by J. Gary Knowles and Ardra L. Cole, 3–12. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Leggo, C. (2008). Astonishing silence. In A. L Cole, & G. Knowles (Eds.), Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues, (pp. 165-174). Sage.

Pinar, W., Reynolds, W., Slattery, P., & Taubman, P. (1995). Understanding curriculum. Peter Lang.

Sullivan, G. (2008). Painting as research. In A. L Cole, & G. Knowles (Eds.), Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues, (pp. 239-250). Sage.