International Journal of Education & the Arts

Volume 14 Review 6

November 17, 2013

PICTURING RESEARCH: A Review Essay

Leslie Rech
University of Georgia, USA

Book Reviewed: Theron, L., Mitchell, C., Smith, A., & Stuart, J. (Eds.). (2011). Picturing research: Drawing as visual methodology. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Citation: Rech, L. (2013). Picturing research: A review essay of Theron, L., Mitchell, C., Smith, A., & Stuart, J. (Eds.). (2011). Picturing research: Drawing as visual methodology. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 14(Review 6). Retrieved [date] from http://www.ijea.org/v14r6/.

Abstract
Those of us interested in articulating spaces where the arts meet research find ourselves in a healthy discourse on practices and problems in the qualitative genre. What started with Elliot Eisner in the 1990's as educational criticism has multiplied into a garden of diverse theories and methods; blurred genre, arts based research, arts based inquiry, a/r/tography, scholARTistry, arts based educational research, etc. (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegusmund, 2008). Barone and Eisner (2012) see arts based research as a tool to provoke investigation, re-presentation, and disequilibrium. What is common to most approaches is the idea that the arts can articulate nuances in lived experience over which academic language may stutter. In Picturing Research, editors/authors Linda Theron, Claudia Mitchell, Ann Smith and Jean Stuart fluently illustrate ways in which drawing can be used as a research tool in a variety of qualitative methods. They focus on studies in which researchers use drawing as vehicle for participants to generate meaning or dialogue. With diverse backgrounds in education, language and literacy, visual methodology, educational psychology, and feminist literary theory, their approach is distinctively reflexive.

Visual Abstract

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