Creating Research Questions from Strategies and Perspectives of Contemporary Art

Authors(s): G. Thomas Fox and Judith Geichman

Source: Curriculum Inquiry, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Spring, 2001), pp. 33-49
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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 Creating Research Questions from

Strategies and Perspectives of

Contemporary Art

G. THOMAS FOX

National-Louis University

Chicago, Illinois

with

JUDITH GEICHMAN

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago, llinois

ABSTRACT

This essay considers how strategies and perspectives from contemporary art can

suggest new questions for educational research. Although arts-based research has

become more prominent lately, the concern of this paper is that the arts have

become used primarily as decorative features to educational research (to further

illuminate, depict, and explain the ambiguities and complexities of educational

practices, see Donmoyer 1997), rather than deeply moving or disorientating per-

spectives on education. Another stimulant for looking into contemporary art is the

concern that education must focus more on the edges of what is understood, rather

than on the centers (see, for example, Fox 1995). The essay uses examples to

demonstrate how a number of themes from contemporary art can be interpreted

to redirect our curiosity about educational practices, policies, and theories. The

paper concludes that further consideration of contemporary art can move research-

ers to ask more varied questions, especially about the wisdom of our progressive,

critical, or humanistic views of students and learning that we have built over this

century.

INTRODUCTION

Purpose

Instead of using arts-based research to illuminate our current wisdom of

educational thought, I suggest we apply more rigorously the capacity of art

to stop us in our tracks, to break the momentum of current themes in

educational research, in educational practices, and in educational theory.

Eisner refers to the arts as providing "coherence, imagery, and particular-

ity" (1995, p. 15), and Donmoyer (1997) as well as Eisner (1993) point out

? 2001 by The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Curriculum Inquiry 31:1 (2001)

Published by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road,

Oxford OX4 1JF, UK.

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 34 G. THOMAS FOX WITH JUDITH GEICHMAN

the need for the arts in educational research to further illuminate, depict,

and explain the complexities and ambiguities in educational practices and

their consequences. As a long-time user of the arts in educational research

(Fox 1976, 1981, 1986b), I have been thrilled by the recent trends in AERA

and other settings that have encouraged not only the use of the arts in

reporting research, but also in the analysis of data (see, for example, the

entire issue of Educational Theory, edited by Bresler 1995). The concern of

this essay, however, is that the arts in educational research have become

used primarily as decorative features, rather than as deeply moving or

disorienting perspectives on our educational practices. This is not damning

criticism since one theme of art, contemporary art included, is the deco-

rative. The same can be said of education, as Eisner repeatedly reminds us;

it is important to depict certain physical and emotional realities of students

and teachers engaging with educational contexts that can best be picked

up through artistic means. Yet I try to demonstrate in this essay that re-

search can apply other features of contemporary arts to the benefit of

educational inquiry. In particular, I argue that contemporary art can sug-

gest a greater openness to what we consider education, as well as more

shock, deeper conflict, and greater variety in the questions being asked in

our educational research.

Rationale and Perspective

Before I begin, you might be asking why should contemporary art help us

ask new questions in educational research? I offer four answers. First,

contemporary art is dealing with similar post-modern phenomena that we

educational researchers are dealing with, a point made well by Grumet

(1995), and many others including Maxine Green. Second, we in educa-

tional research are undergoing similar unhealthy institutional malaise as is

art. Third, we have experienced a similar removal of "experts" from ordi-

nary public discourse as art criticism has. Fourth, as has the arts, we edu-

cational researchers need something to shake us out of our collective

intellectual lethargy, as Stronach and MacLure (1997) have tried to do in

form as well as in message. In short, contemporary artists and educational

researchers inhabit a similar context at the turn into the 21st century.

Approaches used effectively by one may also be effective for the other.

In education, as in art, this is a time of challenge like few others in

history. In art, the challenge is the extent to which the visual has become

immersed in the mundane lives of us all. In education, one challenge is our

students' access to expert information, regardless of background or train-

ing, which is demanding approaches we educators have not yet imagined.

Neither the culturally oriented questioning of Dewey, nor the scaffolding

guidance of Bruner, will do because neither has dealt directly with the

overpowering realities of many students being at or beyond the expertise of

experts. The importance of new educational questions being stimulated

from contemporary art is that they may push us beyond the current im-

passes of why educating others is so difficult, especially in this age of

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RESEARCH AND CONTEMPORARY ART 35

knowledge explosion. Stepping beyond our ignorance will be absolutely

necessary if those who take our places will ever make a difference to school-

ing in the 21st century.

The edge of ignorance that I bring to this topic stems from my concern

that education must focus more on the edges of what is understood rather

than on the centers (see, for example, Fox 1995). I have been focusing on

the in-between, on the "boundary conditions" that we encounter when we

leave behind our expert understandings, trying to reach for more. "Bound-

ary conditions" is a phrase from chaos theory referring to conditions where

something jumps between two different states, as molecules made of hydro-

gen and oxygen atoms do when they jump between water and steam at

certain temperatures (see Waldrop 1992). The theme is recognized by

Brockman (1995) as he describes the writings of experts bringing neophyte

readers to the edges of specific domain knowledge, or Serres' (1995) in-

terest in prepositions as between words, or the folding of time, making

events from different epochs and cultures simultaneous. We all have ex-

perienced many of our students being in boundary conditions of knowing,

no matter what level we teach, from graduate school to primary school.

My particular interest in this essay is in the boundary conditions of we

who teach and do research, and what we can do not only to bring others

to the same edges of understanding that leave us perplexed, but to extend

beyond us. Strategies and perspectives of contemporary art may help edu-

cators who both teach and do research approach educational understand-

ings in new and disorienting ways. The use of contemporary arts in

educational research can further develop our intent as educational re-

searchers to bring neophytes beyond the edges of our understandings.

The shape of my inquiry is an essay where I take themes and samples

from contemporary art and demonstrate how they may stimulate new re-

search questions on educational practices, policies, and theoretical out-

looks. I begin by acknowledging that "contemporary art" has a range of

interpretations of what it is, and is not, and of what its identifying themes

are, or, indeed, if it has any. As an example, a source book of artists'

writings edited by Stiles and Selz (1996) brings a number of indicators that

the editors associate with contemporary art. These include transcendence

and shock; material culture and everyday life; art and technology; instal-

lations, environments, and sites; process; performance art; language and

concepts; and testing the borderlines between art and non-art. You will see

some of these indicators repeated here as strategies and perspectives, but

I feel that an alternative list provided by Geichman provides us with more

focus on what is done in contemporary art, and less with presentation

formats. Both are essential in understanding the nature and wonderful

inconsistencies of contemporary art. Since my purpose is to imagine new

questions for investigating education, however, I have emphasized process

features over presentation styles, verbal phrases rather than nouns. In

keeping with my theme that all of us can operate at edges beyond our

expertise, I must add that I am a neophyte in analyzing contemporary art.

I am neither artist nor critic. The process that I have used as a neophyte in

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 36 G. THOMAS FOX WITH JUDITH GEICHMAN

contemporary art is to periodically check Geichman's phrases with other

contemporary artists and to ask them for examples from contemporary art

that demonstrate these phrases in action. I will refer to some examples

from contemporary art as I connect these verbal phrases to educational

research. Geichman, on the other hand, is an artist and an educator, but

she does not identify herself as a critic or as an art historian.

Speaking of art history, there is one feature of art today that is important

to the perspective of this paper. Through 40 millennia (probably more), art

has been used to depict sacred understandings. But art now can be used for

purposes other than to carry messages. After carrying religious themes for

nearly 2000 years, for example, western art has secularized itself, and with

that has come other purposes, such as forming new meanings and new

connections. Stake and Kerr (1995) have emphasized the constructivism of

art by using the example of Magritte, and relate Magritte's work to the

constructivism of educational research. The assumption of this paper is

that art can similarly be secularized from the religions of education, in-

cluding, by the way, constructivism. The following are nine strategies and

perspectives from contemporary art that may redirect our research ques-

tions in education.

STRATEGIES AND PERSPECTIVES FROM CONTEMPORARY ART

1. Focus on "In-Betweens," Recognizing No Boundaries,

Blurring Edges of Experience

One strategy from contemporary art is to focus on the "in-betweens," the

blurring of boundaries, the ambiguities at the edges. Examples can include

Susan Rothenburg's "First Horse," 1974, and Ross Bleckner's "The Sense of

Ending," 1983. In education, this intent can be applied to questions at the

near-learnings of students, or with a focus on what happens when both the

student and teacher are meeting the edges of the sources of accessible

information. Boundaries between domains of knowing are being blurred

in curriculum (for example, with integrated studies), but many more ques-

tions can be asked of educating in the betweens of knowing and of being.

What does happen when one knows one thing but acts another, as is so

often the case in moral education? In addition to focusing on gray areas

such as the skills that rest between decoding and encoding, what about the

boundaries between home and school? The school bus is an example of

such a boundary, but so, too, is the walk home, the windows of classrooms,

or between periods of study. These in-between times and events may tell us

much about the processes we are trying to understand on either side of

these events.

What about the boundaries of school? Is school seen as the building-

out the door and out of school-or does the nature of school carry further

than that, for example, does it take a block before the feeling of school

leaves the student, or less than that, for example, five feet inside the door.

Similarly, what are the boundaries of the classroom (which, by the way,

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RESEARCH AND CONTEMPORARY ART 37

would provide another way of considering "open" classrooms). When does

math anxiety manifest itself-with the presence of the teacher, with the

book, in the classroom, 20 feet before the room is entered, just before a

test? Kindergarten, of course, has long been investigated as a boundary

condition for students, as a place and time where, initially (the first week,

months, days, hour?), the students aren't quite school students and aren't

quite home. Daycare centers are similarly in-between, and so is entering a

new school at any time. What do we do with the boundaries of domains,

such as science and art? We have an AERA special interest group, but too

much is being done with the centers of these two fields rather than staying

on their respective peripheries. What about the adjuncts at our respective

universities, or the boundary between tenured and non-tenured faculty

(especially that last year)? Are there in-betweens that separate the research

of the faculty from the research of their students? (When I compare my

work with my students' work, I often find the research of my students to be

better, don't you?)

Being in an in-between state is different from either what one was or

what one will be. Maybe that is why the graduate student can do better

research. On an institutional level, for example, I studied schools that were

not quite universities and found them very different from either the school

they had been or the university that they were aiming to be. They each

were far more interesting educationally, more flexible and varied in roles

and outlooks toward their responsibilities than their ideal (Fox 1990, 1995).

Another boundary used by contemporary art is the physical excitement of the

maker, the physicality of the making. How the body is used in making very large

paintings, for example, can become a feature of the painting. The clearest

analogy with education is in activity-based learning, yet how often are we

really curious about the body of the learner, the ways in which the body is

(or is not) used in the physical actions of learning (for example, Wilson

1997 makes interesting connections between the hand and the brain). I

remember the first time that I had elementary students research their

schoolmates. How fascinated they were by, and how detailed was their

documentation of, the body movements of the individuals they studied-

regardless of the "ability" of the observed student! Can we consider phys-

icality as potential sources of information flow (for example, experiencing

physical features of the African Diaspora by making the classroom into a

slave ship), but also as the information itself, where making the classroom

into Chartres Cathedral could become part of the information being con-

sidered. How can the body, not only the brain, be applied to interpret and

understand? I have used Jell-O with sixth graders, for example, to have

them experience three dimensions. We often experience the physicality of

teaching, but how often have we researchers been curious about the phys-

ical nature of teaching? Or its impact on pedagogical interactions? We do

not have to hold a mind-body duality to ask questions about the physical-

ity of educating and being educated (see Stinson 1995). What is the phys-

icality of research? Is it in the data, in our gathering of the data, in our

analysis of the data, in our presentations, in our approach to asking ques-

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38 G. THOMAS FOX WITH JUDITH GEICHMAN

tions? The more physical I have been in these processes, the better has

been my research.

2. Aiming to Break Through, to Shock

One strategy of art since before the 20th century has been to shock, to stop

us in our tracks, to break through the borders of convention. The impres-

sionists began this trend, but it has gone through dadaists, cubists, futurists,

and certainly the ambition hasn't ended, and probably never will. We still

seem to be shockable, as Barbara Kruger's "Untitled (busy going crazy),"

1989, has shown, along with Cindy Sherman and Francis Bacon, to name a

few. Although breaking through common wisdom has been stated as one

reason for the arts in educational research for many years (e.g., Eisner

1978), most of the research applications of the arts exemplify and extend

our conventional understandings, such as those from progressive and human-

istic views of students and learning. What question might "shock" educa-

tional researchers? One shock would be to link directly the actions of

faculty at university colleges of education to specific children's learning in

specific classrooms. Take as one example faculties' actions that reflect their

assumption that knowledge is held by experts, and see to what extent this

message is carried directly to elementary school students with no inter-

mediaries. Neither text nor elementary teacher may need to hold this

assumption for it to be communicated to students. Such a connection

would be nearly as strange as Serres (1995) linking the fate of the Chal-

lenger with the Balinese rites of ceremonial sacrifice.

What is done to encourage students to break through, to shock, the

curriculum? One shock that I have begun to hear from teachers is when

their students enter the classroom beyond the teacher and her resources

right from the start. Like contemporary art, to aim for shock we must

question our pet ideas, our own projects, our wise approaches. One project

that shocked me a number of years ago was an experiment with results that

suggested that training student teachers only in philosophy made them

better teachers than those trained in pedagogy or psychology. Another

suggestion for teacher education that shocks me is that, instead of training

in pedagogy, student teachers be trained to be good observers, interviewers

of children and youth, excellent collectors and analyzers of data about

children and youth; that all training in teaching methods be forgone until

after the student teacher begins teaching. I am aiming my questions at

some of my pet understandings, including the significance of "experience"

that underpins my reliance on constructivism. Bressler and Davidson (1995)

offer a fascinating analysis of a constructivism based on the word, rather

than on experience. Another shock to me a few years ago was how many

unusual models of teacher education could be imagined within a develop-

ing country (Fox 1990).

The point to the contemporary artist is being gutsy and out there, not

necessarily worrying about what others say, but about the vulnerability and

uncertainty of the artist herself. Gutsy possibilities for educational research-

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RESEARCH AND CONTEMPORARY ART 39

ers could include young children doing educational research, or forgetting

sequence in our university research curriculum by removing all "prereq-

uisites," and then seeing how quickly students can get to the edges of our

expertise, and beyond. By considering certain examples of contemporary

art, our graduate students may step beyond our own research boundaries,

rather than follow us. (Not incidentally, all too regularly students reflect

their teachers in art schools as well!) Some additional questions that we

educational researchers can ask of ourselves are: Do our graduate students

really extend beyond us? What is the distance between our students' work

and our own? What does "shock" mean to us in educational research? Why

aren't we shocking ourselves more?

3. Mixing Up and Mixing Media

Paint, chalk, pencil, wax, crayon, with paper on canvas can be on the label

of a work, along with dirt, sand, gravel, or dung. Examples of contempo-

rary art can include Joan Snyder's "Paint the House," 1971, and Bill Viola's

"The Theater of Memory," 1985. What if we considered mixing up the

"media" of education, or of educational research? This parallels what Eis-

ner (1995) and others have called "multiple modes of representation," but

with a greater kick, a wider sense of "multiple" and more rough contrasts.

We can begin by taking the various "media" of education to describe the

student, such as descriptions of her "intelligences," her learning styles, and

other features that may begin to capture her as a complex individual within

the educational system (or outside of it). But we would also have to include

a range of descriptors well outside of education. Like Schaefer (1976), I

don't value adjectives as much as verbs and adverbs to describe the active

and intentional natures of the persons in our studies in education. The

more variety of actions that we can supply, the more we can mix up the

media of our educational descriptions of the student, and the more we can

begin to capture the realities of the individual, or the groups, that we need

to understand in our educational contexts.

In addition to the "media" of the student, we can imagine mixing the

media of the curriculum. Here we may be more resistant, since I would

expect we would have to include some possible perspectives of curriculum

that we find anathema. For myself, that would include perspectives of the

curriculum that are highly linear, tightly structured, pre-determined,

sequential, and inalterably "known."

It is the contrast as well as the working together of disparate materials

that can make contemporary art successful. Similarly, educational research

may be enhanced by the inclusion of conflicting views, conflicting ap-

proaches to understanding educational processes and contexts. Contem-

porary art may stimulate us to try to include a range of the "media" we use

in educational research and evaluation. We have seen case study used with

surveys, for example, time-series analysis used with naturalistic inquiries,

calls for more "integration" of qualitative with quantitative research. Ex-

amples from contemporary art can provide educational researchers with

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40 G. THOMAS FOX WITH JUDITH GEICHMAN

alternative ways of combining media that are not normally worked to-

gether, like paint and dirt. (Where, by the way, is the dirt in education?) We

researchers look for seamless integration. We create a "middle" ground

where qualitative and quantitative approaches do not compete, don't look

so harsh as they contrast with one another; for example, by putting qual-

itative description into a reader's digest type form, or by including survey

analysis within the narrative. What if we disregarded our own aesthetic of

smooth integration of unlike approaches and instead just placed them

together with their prickly underlying assumptions showing? If we mixed

the media of our research and evaluation approaches together, keeping

them intact rather than trying to soften their distinctiveness, what might

our research look like? Couldn't a study apply action research along with

experimental or quasi-experimental approaches, along with some meta-

analyses and causal-comparative work? What would MRI studies look like in

the classroom, with classroom teachers determining what would be MRI-ed?

Within this general theme of mixing media, we can also consider the

ways contemporary art joins things together that don't normally go together. We

have referred to media in contemporary art, but there are other significant

features of art, such as subject matter, purpose, or objects of analysis that

may be included in a single work but are strange to our expectations, such

as comparing Susan Rothenburg's "White Horse," 1974, with an Altamira

cave horse painted about 30,000 years earlier. What if we put a discussion

of Foucault in Boys' Life, for example, or placed a piece of Michael Apple's

work in Reader's Digest? What if we included an educational analysis of high

school cheerleaders with recent critical theorists? In addition to bringing

assumed ideologies together that aren't normally in the same focus, we

could join ages, curriculum content, research paradigms, and educational

roles that aren't usually placed in close proximity. After teaching a fifth

and sixth grade combined class, I requested a sixth grade-kindergarten

mix, for example, but was (wisely?) turned down. Mixing literature with

social studies is a natural, but so, too, may other combinations of curricu-

lum provide new understandings of how each is formed and shaped in

human affairs, such as science with spirituality or mathematics with wom-

en's studies. As we become more specialized in educational research, the

potential grows for mixing disparate approaches to inquiry, yet seldom do

we cross boundaries. What are the more outrageous combinations that we

can imagine in our educational research? Why haven't we tried to join

these together in the past?

Another feature of contemporary art that might be considered in this

vein of introducing like with unlike is the play of time in contemporary art,

particularly how events considered far apart in time can become simultaneous.

Linking the caves of Lascaux, for example, with 20th century Montana.

Time becomes curved and torn, not linear or sequential; events or per-

spectives separated by years and years turn up side by side. We could play

with time by moving it backward, doing a casual comparative study on

whether the end result of an instructional unit (e.g., an exam) caused the

behaviors leading up to it. (Few of us would be surprised if it did.) Another

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RESEARCH AND CONTEMPORARY ART 41

possibility might be comparing the reading schedules of tenured profes-

sors with a third-grade student, or designing an effective curriculum for

Boston in 1898, or designing the curriculum for ourselves as second grad-

ers. Perhaps that is what we have been doing all along. What are the

possibilities for playing with time, for encouraging simultaneous events of

all sorts to occur, through our educational research?

4. Using Kitsch, Playing on the Ordinary

Contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons or Robert Rauschenburg respect

popular sentimental taste, kitsch, as a contextual feature of our visual

worlds, and then play with that respect. There certainly is enough kitsch in

our common visual environment to play on, from the faces of celebrities

(e.g., Koons, "Pink Panther," 1988) to the statements and corresponding

actions of comic book heroes (e.g., Rauschenburg, "Untitled," 1985). Where

is the kitsch in education, and do we play on it, use it to our own educa-

tional aesthetics? I present the following as possible candidates for kitsch,

that is, they are sentimental, popular, inferior, and pretentious statements

that I have made, along with many others: the classroom (school) is real, theory

is not; back to the (real) basics; I teach the child, not the subject; democratic class-

rooms; activity-based learning; constructive knowledge; student decision making;

research must be useful. I refer to my own kitsch, my own sentimental and

popular views, because what is most significant about the play on kitsch by

contemporary artists is the play on their shared mundane values. In edu-

cation, and often in contemporary art as well, we have been only too willing

to play with the kitsch of others. What would happen if we educational

researchers took our own forms of kitsch, from academic freedom to di-

versity, from paradigm to validity and reliability, from grounded theory to

reflectivity, and played with ourselves as agents in the educational stories

we tell?

It wouldn't be fair if we didn't include the sublime along with kitsch, the

exalted along with the ordinary. In contemporary art, nature is sublime, as

in Andy Goldsworthy's "Penpoint Dunsfriesshire: Front," 3 December, 1989

or in Barbara Cooper's "Cyclus," 1994. Within these works, the artist tries

to capture the elevated qualities, the spiritual grandeur of nature. Where is

the sublime in education? One place would be the genius we see in the

ordinary, as Oliver Sachs so often does in his work with "damaged minds."

I sometimes wonder why there are so few Oliver Sachses in our profession

of educational research, since so often we are dealing with the genius in us

all. Occasionally Gardner, Cole, or Kozol show us how to appreciate the

ordinary, but we educational researchers can do more. Why do we depend

on practitioners such as Paley to remind us of the sublime in classrooms?

Clearly, intellectual and moral worth can be better captured as we focus on

children, individual educators, the democracy that surrounds schools, or

the creative, expressive, and productive acts of bureaucracy. The sublime

that I find in education are the breakthroughs, the times when we, but

especially when our students, break through to a new understanding well

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 42 G. THOMAS FOX WITH JUDITH GEICHMAN

beyond us and the sources we have understood. How do we represent, how

do we capture, enhance, and communicate these sublime features that are

part of our everyday experience? If we did capture the sublime through our

educational research, could that enhance the educational lives of students?

What has stopped educational researchers from seeing the sublime in

schools and classrooms? What has stopped us from seeing the sublime in

our students or, indeed, in our own work?

5. Attending to Animation, Speed, Angles

Since the industrial revolution, speed has fascinated many visual artists.

Contemporary artists are especially intrigued with the effects of animation

and quick one-time views on our visual understandings. But speed has not

been very interesting to educational researchers, except perhaps by the

Legers of research: early 20th century time-study behaviorists, and those

educators throughout this century who wanted to vary the rate of comple-

tion within their "individualized instruction" programs. Animation, how-

ever, brings us to quick overviews, to a fast-forward curriculum, to jumping

through basics, to taking unusual angles on the movement of students

through education or education through students. We have "speed read-

ing," of course, and have probably damned (for good reason) the speeded

up curriculum of many "gifted" programs. But if educational researchers

were as fascinated with speed and animation as artists, we might be com-

pleting our research in days rather than in years. We could, for example,

apply a team of hundreds, including our graduate students, students, and

teachers, in schools and have a complex problem documented, analyzed,

and completed in an amount of time that would make our heads spin.

What keeps down our current rate of productivity in educational research

is more our attitudes (and pay scale) than levels of technology or careful

deliberation. Are there possibilities for animation in our research ap-

proaches, of quick jumps, of quantum moves in our inquiries that can fast

forward to results that can be respected? Or is time a hidden requirement

for validity?

What about the possibilities of speed and animation within our educa-

tional strategies? How fast can a normal student get through the curricu-

lum we have designed? How quickly can a child of 12, say, get to the edges

of astronomy, sociology, philosophy, or comparative literature? Certainly,

angles can be created to propel the average student to the edges of what is

known at speeds far greater than are considered today. Two years may be

a reasonable guess, rather than the 16 plus we consider reasonable. Do we

have to know everything before getting to the edges of a domain? I find

that I know much less about Darwinian evolution theories, for example,

than I have learned recently about neo-Darwinian approaches to creating

artificial evolution in computer programs. How fast can a 10 year old learn

knot theory? When I first started teaching almost 40 years ago, I taught the

graduate level dimension theory course I had completed in college to 11

year olds and to high school teachers at the same time. Not surprisingly

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RESEARCH AND CONTEMPORARY ART 43

(except to me at the time), the 11 year olds understood and were able to

play with the material much quicker than the high school teachers. Per-

haps we could compare fields on the speeds with which students can be-

come experts, or on the speeds with which students can reach their frontiers,

and extend them.

How fast do our graduate students become expert researchers? What is

the quickest study we can perform and still make a breakthrough in un-

derstanding? What angles can we set up for students to get to the edges of

expert understanding? What is lost if students get to the edges of informa-

tion in one-tenth the time it now takes? What is gained? How would edu-

cation be changed?

6. Capturing the Hustle-Bustle, the Energy, Leading to Breaking

Things Open

Capturing the energy, the quick changes, the pace of conflicting images

that cross our minds have become challenges to many contemporary art-

ists. Pat Steir is an example with her "Last Wave Painting (wave becoming

waterfall)," 1987-88, as is Robert Longo with his "White Riot series," 1982,

or Judith Geichman, "Untitled," 1991. Where is the hustle-bustle, the en-

ergy of education to be found? When going through schools, I have some-

times found energy in the gyms, but more often in the shop areas, seldom

in the sciences, occasionally in an English class, or math class, but a little

more often in bilingual classes, or in art and theater. Hallways between

classes are always full of energy. In elementary schools, one can feel the

electrical charge when a change in atmospheric pressure is passing through

the area, or when a new production activity has just been begun. Some-

times libraries are high energy areas, the computer rooms certainly are, at

least at first, and of course the bathrooms and the front door before and

after school. It would be interesting to locate just where the energy levels

of activity-based learning rise and fall by applying a sort of classroom "MRI"

to locate the hot spots, the high energy times and places. If we could do

that, perhaps we could find indications that about 100 pounds of brains are

working at those spots. If we described educational research processes by

the energy expended, where do you think the hustle-bustle would be? My

guess is in the proposal stage, or maybe at presentation time as we try to put

months or years into a few pages, or minutes! Or at the beginning and end

of data collection. Whatever our answer, I am sure it would differ from our

current descriptions of "method" in our research reports, or in our texts.

A respect for energy itself could change our notions of education. What

if we encouraged more hyperactivity, if we took ADHD as the norm, pushed

for more energy in our classrooms, not less, found ways to agitate our

students, not to calm them. Might we find less learning or more? And what

would happen to Csikszentmihalyi's view of "flow," creativity, and produc-

tivity? Do some approaches to arts-based research break open our educa-

tional perspectives, or tie them up? Eisner (1995) refers to "art as a process

of questioning," even as he refers to "coherence" as a major contribution

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44 G. THOMAS FOX WITH JUDITH GEICHMAN

of the arts. Stake and Kerr (1995) refer to art as "provocations of thought,"

but without examples of just what would provoke educational research. If

educators and educational researchers valued energy, how strange would

be our educational designs, our educational environments, our educa-

tional research?

A related theme in contemporary art is the aim to be free and playful when

expressing energy. Perhaps it is the combination of free and playful with

energy that would be the biggest leap for educational researchers. Our

energy is usually reserved for the solemn, the serious, the moral, the vir-

tuous, the principled. Energy placed elsewhere in our work seems irrever-

ent, dismissive, irresponsible, silly. Where is the laughter, the fun, the puns,

the making whoopee in our educational research? I tell my students of

research that if they do not hear laughter as they go through their data

together, if there is not silly banter and bursts of funny connections being

offered, they are not doing their research right-or they have awfully bad

data!

What is the most fun in my research is when my core beliefs, my long-

term understandings, are spun around by the data, become unstrung or

altered to a state I can barely imagine. Recognizing the non-expressed

absurdities in my beliefs, the cracks in my long-held understandings bring

energetic bursts of laughter. Sometimes my glee comes from unexpressed,

illegitimate, or raunchy connections I have never made public before. We

could apply similar play more consciously in our teaching. When I encour-

aged my sixth grade students to write poetry (I called it "concentrated

thoughts") and to share it with their classmates, some responded by read-

ing their classmates' poems backwards, delighting in the new creation of

meanings. We read educational research backwards, of course, but do we

admit it? Why have we not taken history backwards and considered causes

of unintended futures on previous events? (Serres 1995 asks similar ques-

tions about time.) Any time we play with the edges of our understandings,

at the borders of what we think we know, we get a bit silly, giddy with new

imaginary possibilities and connections, stepping off our soap boxes of

certainties, and occasionally floating in spaces we have never before con-

sidered. Why don't we do that more in our educational research, and in

our educational practices?

Another source of playful energy, of freedom, is to take some of our

most cherished beliefs from under our feet and toss them around, twist and

turn them. One thing that contemporary art teaches me is that nearly

anything can be questioned without our lives losing either meaning or

spiritual worth. We don't have to be afraid if the basis of our work becomes

a plaything. Why can't I play with "reflectivity," for example, a favorite

phrase I use for designing activities to challenge the experienced teachers

within my classes. What if I took learning to be a group function rather

than an individual one? I don't mean using the group to improve the

individual's sense of what is being considered (as is the case with cooper-

ative groups), but of considering and assessing the intelligence and pro-

ductivity of a group. Teachers do this informally, but without much support.

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RESEARCH AND CONTEMPORARY ART 45

What would happen if we had assessments of a group's intelligence rather

than an individual's? (I once had my sixth grade class make a class IQ score

by taking the majority's answers for each question. The IQ score for the

class was 132, perhaps about average for a class.)

Why is educational research so energy-less, so absent of freedom and

play? Where is the irreverence, the irrelevance, the energetic interpreta-

tions of what is considered sacrosanct? There is always the curriculum, our

tightly knit sequences of information strung concept by concept, unit by

unit, course by course, year by year, towards (eventual) ignorance. Where

is the play in our graduate programs? Where is the joy in education? Where

is the laughter in educational research, or indeed in this essay?

7. Playing Around with Goofy Images

I know, I am relying too much on the verb "play," but I can't think of

another, and it does reflect much of the free association that contemporary

art works with as it tries to respond to our visual and conceptual experi-

ences. Mike Kelly's "Eviscerated Corpse," 1989, is an example, as is Eliza-

beth Murray's "Kitchen Painting," 1985. The issue here, however, is more

with the adjective "goofy," the strange, the image that doesn't quite jell with

our own meaningful imagery, our own visual archetypes, such as Karl

Wirsum's "Me," 1985. When I worked with children in Iceland, I realized

how strong can be archetypal images, because their paintings of mountains

were the jagged topped, snow capped versions that we drew in Wisconsin

as children. The difference between Icelandic children and myself, how-

ever, was that they lived with mountains every day, and not one of those

mountains looked like the archetype! Most of the mountains in Iceland are

flat topped, like high mesas, but Icelandic children didn't draw a "moun-

tain" that way. Similarly, I think we have been predisposed to use basic

combinatorial features for our imagery of educational constructs: triangles,

circles, boxes, jagged or curved lines, imagery that celebrates continuity,

sequence, antecedents, linearity, and boundaries. We educational research-

ers could each draw most of the archetypal images that we use to organize

our research in less than five minutes.

I haven't seen many goofy images in education, and need to imagine

what they may be. I can think of a mobius strip as a useful image for

curriculum, where in combinatorial topology a mobius is a rectangle with

one side identified as the mirror image of the opposite side, thus forming

a twisted band rather than a smooth sided cylindrical band. A four dimen-

sional sphere would be another interesting image to portray the interlock-

ing and successive spiraling of events over time. If you think this is too

complex, Dante used this image in his rendering of paradise (actually, I

don't remember if it was paradise or hell). Lately, we have open to us a

whole new range of strange and goofy images that may be useful to the

vagaries, repetitions, discontinuities, and loss of boundaries that we can

find in education: the Mandelbrot set and fractals. These are images from

mathematics of chaos and complexity, but there may be a range of other

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 46 G. THOMAS FOX WITH JUDITH GEICHMAN

sources that could stimulate different images in our work. In addition to

contemporary art, which demonstrates rich alternative ways to connect,

there is advertising, objects of everyday life, architecture, the views from

our airplane seats, the imagery of comic strips, the break-up provided by

cubism, and the range of frantic images in computer games.

Since I tend to understand visually, I can also imagine goofy images

coming from considering "multiple ignorances" rather than "multiple intel-

ligences," or the image of a seven year old working with Stephen Hawking

on the meanings of black holes, or of graduate students in engineering

working with 11 year olds to design a new bridge, or an eight year old at a

blackboard with a range of teachers sitting at desks taking notes. I can

imagine edgy mathematics or boundary science being entertained in nor-

mal classrooms, preadolescents doing anthropological studies, compara-

tive literature engaged in by seven year olds, or teachers studying the

behavior of dogs. I am not sure exactly what images may capture these

actions, but I doubt if the archetypes we are now engaging in our educa-

tional research would do us well. What is the goofiest image you can

conjure for your current research study?

8. Being Fresh, Alive, Juicy

Adjectives that provide consistent praise for contemporary art are "fresh,

alive, juicy." Lucian Freud comes to mind, with his "Naked Man, Back

View," 1991-92, or Judy Pfaff's "Kabuki (formual atlantic)," 1980. When

have we ever heard our research in education described with these adjec-

tives? How often have we seen teaching and learning described as "juicy"?

We know that we can ask more questions about the lively and perhaps too

fresh aspects in educating others. Just as an example, how was educating

experienced by those students and teachers who fell in love with each

other? How do love and attraction figure in to pedagogy, to the teaching

and learning processes of different ages? Some may expect the answers to

be entirely expressed in terms of power and authority, but I am not so sure.

As far as I know, however, no one has yet asked the question, probably not

even those to whom it has happened. Wouldn't you love to see more juicy

educational research, not to titillate our senses, but to bring more of the

sensuality of the enterprises that engage teaching and learning? Research

and teaching are complex communicative acts where the nature of the

other becomes essential as educative acts are engaged in and as the other

is periodically reconstructed. That some of our studies have not been

curious about these relationships and their corresponding reconstructions

of teaching, learning, and research suggests to me that we are making

decisions to disregard these possibilities. Perhaps in the past, research was

not supposed to be fresh, alive, or juicy, but as all of us in progressive

education understand, these words certainly describe our fascination with

both education and with research much better than "dry, dead, and stale."

Don't they?

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RESEARCH AND CONTEMPORARY ART 47

9. Being Bombarded

Clearly, I have been trying to bombard you within this essay, and it is not

a strategy that I often apply either in my teaching or in my research reports.

But it is a way of throwing out images and concepts, encounters and en-

gagement that more and more of our fellow citizens, and students, find

comfortable to handle, or perhaps find the discomfort pleasurable. Chan-

nel surfing has expanded to how we engage each other and our surround-

ings, which suggests to me that this is one feature of contemporary art that

will remain, regardless of what succeeds "contemporary." "Bombardment"

may be more how my generation (and maybe the one following) experi-

ences the quick succession of differing images and concepts, the engage-

ment with partial stories found with little beginning or end, all middles. I

am not sure that that is how the new generations X, Y, or Z feel about

information glut. We may soon have many more examples of being bom-

barded, not only in schools and classrooms, but also at our educational

research meetings. What might "bombardment" mean to constructive knowl-

edge? What does bombardment feel like in educational research? Why do

we hide our own sense of being bombarded? Can we study information

overload as an educational process?

CONCLUSION

A consideration of contemporary art can enliven and vary our questions for

educational research. Taking strategies of contemporary art to educational

research can urge us to create new sets of questions that go beyond our

current approaches of inquiry into the practices, consequences, and theo-

ries of education. Such considerations may also encourage more rich imag-

inations be taken to educational actions. If we are stimulated by images and

approaches of contemporary art to conjure as yet unimagined approaches

to education and research, however, we may confront a similar problem as

has contemporary art. We may become less comfortable with what we have

done in the past as educational research.

Applying ourselves to our tasks with self-confidence similar to that of

contemporary artists, we educators can create new forms of education as

well as find new curiosities and new questions for our inquiries. Our in-

quiries would probably look and sound different than they do now, as

would education. Of course, if we apply similar self-confidence and similar

self-doubt of contemporary art, educational research may become just as

estranged from normal, everyday discourse in our materialistic post-

modern cultures as contemporary art has become. As horrible as that

sounds (at least to me), we may also become better educators as those who

are currently pushing at the borders of art are becoming better artists. As

a few contemporary artists have said about their work when asked about art

and life: "I try to stay in the gap between the two." Perhaps we can follow

their lead as we consider research and art, or education and life.

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 48 G. THOMAS FOX WITH JUDITH GEICHMAN

NOTE

Most of the strategies and perspectives from contemporary art in this article

were initially created by Ms. Geichman for a slide presentation to teachers, re-

sponding to questions the teachers raised about contemporary art. After con-

necting about 36 of Geichman's themes to contemporary education, I subsequently

tried to imagine how specific strategies and perspectives from contemporary art

could be applied to redirecting questions in educational research. I checked

these themes with other working artists as I requested suggestions for examples

of contemporary art in these themes. I then shared a rough draft of this ap-

proach with four of my colleagues at National-Louis University: Anne Sullivan,

Eleanor Binstock, Sue Hansen, and Bob Ackland. Their suggestions for tighten-

ing points raised were helpful, as was their support for the idea of the article,

and its playful spirit. This article was presented as a slide and paper presentation

at the 1998 AERA Annual Meeting in San Diego, April, 1998.

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