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Vol. 43, No. 1, Summer 2017
Born Digital Issue

 
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Cultivating Research Through Digital Ecosystems

Mary Hafeli
Teachers College, Columbia University

Juan Carlos Castro
Concordia University

Julia Marshall
San Francisco State University

Chris Grodoski
Franklin Middle School

 

The research culture of art education is an ecosystem of ideas and inquiry. This ecosystem of research extends into the varied forms of digital mediation. Now in its fourth year, the National Art Education Association Research Commission’s objective is to cultivate, connect, and amplify art education research. In this essay, we theorize the analogy of research ecosystems and use the example of our Interactive Café as a space that fosters research culture. Digital forums such as the Interactive Café function as a place where individuals who produce and use research can interact and exchange ideas. Our position is that digital mediation needs to strengthen interdependence and vibrancy through spaces and events that connect a diversity of knowledge producers and stakeholders. For the Research Commission, research that is born digital is ripe with potential to connect, evolve, and amplify throughout the field.


 
Figure 1
Figure 1. Julia Marshall, 2016, Research Ecosystem [Collage].
 

From tropical rainforests to Apple products, the concept of ecosystems is used to describe collectives of biological agents to interacting digital hardware and software: ecosystems are complex systems of interdependent agents acting together in a specific context. In its fourth year, the National Art Education Association Research Commission views the field of art education research as an ecosystem. Part of the Research Commission’s mission is to cultivate the research ecosystem in art education, and this extends to research cultures that are “born digital.” In this essay, as members of the Research Commission, we seek to outline how we understand the Commission’s role as a cultivator, and in particular, its recent initiatives to grow research communities through our Interactive Café, webinars, and an evolving Web presence. We begin our essay with a review of our brief history as a commission, then discuss our understandings of ecosystems, and finally present an in-depth look at our Interactive Café—an online gathering place for research-based conversations and presentations open to anyone wishing to join. We conclude by contemplating the role of online research ecosystems and the role of the Research Commission in participating in these new forms of digital contexts.

Research Commission

The Research Commission was officially launched at the 2012 NAEA National Convention. The 2011-2014 NAEA Strategic Plan called for creation of the Commission to: “conduct research and generate knowledge that enriches and expands visual arts education and widely share that research and knowledge” (as cited by the NAEA Research Commission, n.d.). Commissioners represent the research needs and interests of each division of the NAEA membership—Elementary, Middle Level, Secondary, Higher Education, Preservice, Supervision/Administration, and Museum Education. This purposeful cross-sector alliance both enables and mobilizes our charge of connecting research, practice, advocacy, and policy through our programs and services, coordinating working groups and inviting partnerships to encourage sound, ethical research, and leading efforts to provide professional development for art education researchers in varied contexts.

Participating in Research Cultures

The art education research community is expansive, diverse, and complex. It includes art educators, general classroom teachers, museum educators, school and district administrators, artists, and university researchers—any practitioner who sees her/his work as an attempt to advance knowledge, deepen understanding of our purpose and constituency, re-envision our role and place in broader systems, and generate new practices. We view the Research Commission’s role in this community as building capacity within a research ecosystem. Cultivating a fertile space, like the agar in a petri dish, we seek to strengthen, amplify, and connect existing and emerging research cultures.

     The Research Commission’s embrace of the ecosystem metaphor connects our vision of community and research to the overarching concept of system. According to General Systems Theory (von Bertalanffy, 1968), a system is a web of interdependent parts, each of which contributes to the function and viability of the whole. Moreover, systems are complex living structures with many moving parts, and they are dynamic, functioning through multiple interactions or feedback loops among those parts.

     As a dynamic system, the art education research ecosystem thrives through a complex, multidimensional system of feedback loops, which includes the core loop: the cycle of research, theory, and practice. These loops cycle through the network, opening new spaces, generating new ideas and practices, and ultimately moving the system forward. As a result, the Research Commission understands the importance of keeping these loops visible, accessible, open, active, and always expanding. In ecosystems, there is no one organism that exerts purposeful control over the whole. The morphology of an ecosystem is flat—decentralized. Movement, change, and evolution occur through recurrent cycles of elaboration and feedback.

     To be clear, we are not conceptualizing the Research Commission as the ecosystem; rather, we see the Commission as one of the many connectors in this network. Decentralized morphologies are made up of many nodes in a network, some more connected than others. The term “decentralized” itself is misleading, as it is not meant to suggest a total abandonment of centers, but rather, many centers of varying connectedness (Davis & Sumara, 2006). Further, as members of the Research Commission, we acknowledge that we are part of a larger institution: The National Art Education Association. The NAEA has goals and initiatives for research that encompass all of its members, and the generality of these research goals may at times diverge from those of subgroups, such as art education researchers in academia. This tension between general and specific research interests, and between research needs of different communities within the NAEA (for example, museum educators, teachers in schools, cultural leaders) is at the heart of the Research Commission’s vision and goals. With this in mind, we approach the Commission’s work, especially in digital scholarship, as creating the conditions for cultivating open systems of exchange, elaboration, and connection.

     Systems theory also highlights the purposeful nature of systems. Systems have intention, whether it is to reproduce and sustain life, as in living organisms or, as in our case, to generate new knowledge, practices, and strategies in research (Capra & Luisi, 2014). Art education research is a productive system; it generates new ideas, new knowledge, and new practices. A corollary to this is that it is often unpredictable. The generative nature of research in art education manifests system theory’s notions of organic growth and creative adaptation and invention. Above all, the art education research community is a vital system with strong similarities to living organisms. Living systems are autopoietic (Maturana & Varela, 1980). This means they self-create and self-organize, and the structure they generate is one of interdependency and collaboration. Autopoietic systems thrive only when each part of the network functions well. Autopoiesis, therefore, is particularly important for social systems such as our art education community because it reveals how critical each player is to the ongoing viability and vitality of the entire system. June King McFee (1991) used the network, a similar flat and dynamic hierarchy, to describe the field of art education—this aligns with our notions of a research ecology. Our overarching goal for the Research Commission is to keep this autopoietic, dynamic, and ever-emerging system healthy and growing. Like the agar in a petri dish, we seek to create fertile spaces to support scholar/practitioners, and invite them to participate in and contribute to the health, dynamism, and generativity of the field’s larger collective ecosystem.

An Example: The Research Commission’s Interactive Café

The Research Commission similarly views digital research systems as part of a larger constellation in developing a vibrant culture of research. Our Interactive Café embodies these ideas about digital art education scholarship with a focus on networking and conversation. The networking and conversation of the Interactive Café serve to increase interaction between the diverse NAEA membership and individual members’ and groups’ wide-ranging research questions and knowledge. Through the Café, the Commission seeks to develop an ecosystem that is nonlinear and nonhierarchical, with codependent spaces that set the conditions for different approaches to research, but do not impose any particular research approach to the exclusion of others.


 
Figure 2
Figure 1. Screenshot of research conversation events on the NAEA Research Commission Interactive Café.
 

     We originally envisioned the Café as a virtual gathering place for visitors to join in dialogue with one or a group of researchers from different professional contexts. Extending the metaphor of a café, we imagined this virtual space as various “tables” of conversation. At one table, museum and community educators, high school art teachers, and higher education faculty could share research on teaching approaches that engage teens with contemporary art works (see Figure 2). At another table, district art supervisors, art department chairs, P<EN>-12 art teachers, and university faculty might discuss the best research methods to collect and analyze examples of student learning in art class. Art, museum, and community educators at other tables would be discussing a diverse range of other topics, sharing research approaches and findings gleaned from philosophical, theoretical, historical, qualitative, quantitative, mixed method, art-based, or any number of other research practices. Our vision, in short, was to welcome NAEA members from all contexts—art teachers in schools and colleges, program leaders and supervisors, teacher educators in higher education, museum and community educators, policymakers—to join our collective and ongoing research-focused dialogues in the Café.

     Over the past 2 years, the Research Commission has shaped this vision in a pilot of targeted Café programming. We curated Café conversation topics and invited co-hosts from mixed teams of researchers and practitioners drawn from Museum, Elementary, Middle Level, Secondary, and Higher Education divisions. Conversations focused on school programs in the art museum, the promise of art-based research, assessing creativity in the visual arts, assessing cross-disciplinary learning in the visual arts, assessing learning in students’ responses to works of art, and feminist issues in art education. In the space of the Café, a conversation contains initial posts (which are often collaboratively developed by members from across divisions), responses to posts, as well as the application of art, Web links, and (of course) research as citations to explain and explore the topics at hand. Our intention was that prepared posts by conversation hosts would motivate responses from not only other event hosts and their invited participants, but also interested art educators from the now over 1,000-member Café community. We found that some of the liveliest conversations and debates happened among art educators from differing contexts. We are carrying this networking and conversation model forward in our current redesign of the Research Café and its events.

     Obviously, the Research Commission recognizes that research is both dialogic, in that it invites response and ongoing conversation, and discursive, in that it addresses many topics and approaches simultaneously. Our Café pilot programming conversations show how research can extend rhizomatically among different networks of researchers and contexts of professional practice. As the work of research enters into new contexts, each context provides a turn of the kaleidoscope by which an idea can be reconsidered.

     The Research Commission’s digital research spaces—our website, research-based webinars, and Interactive Café—are linked to nondigital research forums such as our NAEA conference sessions and research-based pre-conferences. The Commission’s website, webinars, and Café are open to people from across the NAEA organization. We invite members to share their own scholarship as well as respond to, learn from, question and challenge, and elaborate on work from other researchers. The topics and forms of our digital spaces, in particular, are emergent and adaptive by design. They respond to individual NAEA members’ particular research needs and interests, and to members’ varied experiences and backgrounds.

Connectivity and Vibrancy

Digital scholarship will continue to expand in and through the diverse individuals and contexts associated with art education research cultures. The role of the Research Commission, through the connectivity provided by digital technology, is to promote interconnections that acknowledge our interdependence. Moreover, it is not just about maintaining static relationships—for us, a primary concern is how connection promotes intellectual life and organizational vibrancy. Connectivity, both on and offline, is a catalyst to deepening the diversity of thinking and inquiry in art education.

     The Research Commission’s desire to connect research practices and cultures in art education is a concern for cultivating heterogeneous forms of ideation and inquiry. Julia Marshall’s Research Ecosystem collage, which opens this article, illustrates our vision for amplifying research cultures. What an organizational structure like the Research Commission can do is create conditions, like the agar in petri dishes, to cultivate research cultures. An ecosystem’s morphology is decentralized, meaning there is no central controller to dictate the growth of the system. In terms of digital scholarship, an initiative like the Interactive Café is one example of how we are working to connect and then amplify research inquiry in art education. Other developing initiatives we have supported are the Commission’s Digital Visualization Working Group and the creation of research databases that connect art education with related research.

     The Research Commission is one of many centers in a network of art education research. We believe that creating opportunities and platforms for connectivity is necessary for advancing research in art education. When we reference art education as a field, we also question what a field is and who defines a field. Returning to June King McFee’s (1991) description of art education as a network, we add the ecological perspective that the network of art education is decentralized, that is to say, its hierarchy is flat and dynamic. The potential of digital forms of scholarship resides in its ability to connect research communities, discourses, and ideas across time and space.

References

Capra, F., & Luisi, P. (2014). The systems view of life: A unifying vision. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Davis, B., & Sumara, D. (2006). Complexity and education: Inquiries into learning, teaching, and research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Maturana, H., & Varela, F. (1980). Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel.

McFee, J. K. (1991). Art education progress: A field of dichotomies or a network of mutual support. Studies in Art Education, 32(2), 70–82.

NAEA Research Commission. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.arteducators.org/research/naea-research-commission

von Bertalanffy, L. (1968). General system theory: Foundations, development, applications. New York, NY: George Braziller.

 

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