“I Contain Multitudes”

We believe that the best arts based research aims to make a difference in the world.(Barone & Eisner, 2012, p. 153). Revelation of self can be argued as one of the central concerns of art. Self-study has informed art making to some degree for as long as we can know. Aesthetic philosophers, art critics and artists themselves have recognized self-portraiture, autobiography, memoir and confession as legitimate and often potent topics for artistic exploration. With this history of art practice in mind, what problem can there be for an arts-based educational researcher who wishes to engage in self- study? Of course, the artworld is not equal to the world of educational research, the latter of which is charged with the overarching social and ethical responsibilities to critically understand the problems within and work toward the improvement of teaching and learning. The rise of narrative inquiry, autobiography and arts-based educational research has opened up welcome spaces for the lives of teachers to be viewed as valuable and illuminating topics of investigation. That said, arts-based educational researchers who do not make clear and consistent connections between their life stories and the potential improvement of the chronically impoverished (if not in some places wholly broken) public education system could be critically viewed as side-stepping or shirking their core social and ethical responsibilities Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.) from Song of Myself by Walt Whitman, Verse 51 [O]ne cannot reflect on self (radically or otherwise) without an accompanying reflection on the nature of the world in which one exists. And one’s reflection on both one’s self and one’s world cannot be one’s own alone: you and your version of your world must be public, recognizable enough to be negotiable in the “conversation of lives.” (Bruner, 1993, p. 43) This essay participates in the “conversation of lives” that makes up the small but active community of arts-based researchers in education. Donald Blumenfeld-Jones posed the overarching topic that was the catalyst for this set of related essays in the wake of his jurying of a number of dissertation studies for the Arts-Based Educational Research (ABER) Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. I was co-chair of the dissertation award at this time, and Donald and I had some lengthy email dialogue around his growing concern that a number of the studies he was reading were self-studies that he saw as having little or no relation to the larger issues of education. The end result of that string of emails was Donald’s idea to propose an ABER panel on the topic of how autobiographical or autoethnographical arts-based work serves, or fails to serve, the mandate of educational research to strive toward the improvement of teaching and learning. My own research on poetic inquiry (Prendergast, 2007, 2009; Prendergast, Leggo & Sameshima, 2009) has shown me that self-study is undeniably a prominent, if not dominant, method in ABER praxis. To illustrate, almost 50% of the 182 peer-reviewed journal articles featuring poetry as part of their methodology I surveyed in 2006-2007 were coded as autobiographical or autoethnographical, at least in part (see Prendergast, 2009; Prendergast, Leggo & Sameshima, 2009). A 2012 survey update on the same topic shows a similar result (Clement & Prendergast, 2012). If this finding holds across other arts-based research approaches, then we can begin to ‘see’ ourselves as educational researchers who are deeply interested in and committed to arts-based forms of self-study. Yet the question arises: How does this interest in self-study serve, or fail to serve, the interests of the field of education and the mandate of educational research to work toward the improvement of teaching and learning? This essay consists of two sections followed by a brief conclusion. In Section One I consider the role of self-study—also called reflective practice, autobiography, autoethnography and life writing—in educational research in relation to how autobiography, memoir or self-portraiture plays a role in the artworld (Danto, 1964). I do this by placing a range of ABER practices on a continuum from more to less interested in self-study as a focus or component of a study. Section Two offers an autobiographical/autoethnographical poem I wrote as part of a previously published collaborative essay (Prendergast, Lymburner, Grauer, Irwin, Leggo & Gouzouasis, 2008). I am pulling the poem out of its prior context here to reflect on as an example of ABER self-study that might also be seen as doing the work of contributing to the betterment of understanding how education works…or fails to work. The conclusion invites readers to consider how a critical perspective on these issues may assist arts-based educational researchers in side-stepping charges that might potentially be directed at the ABER community of elitism, solipsism and navel-gazing from within a larger North American culture arguably addicted to confession, self-revelation, narcissism and voyeurism.

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