James Haywood Rolling

A Paradigm Analysis of Arts-Based Research and Implications for Education.

This article represents a paradigm analysis of the characteristics of arts-based research (ABR) in an effort to reconceptualize the potential of arts-based practices in generating new curriculum approaches for general education practice and the development of the learner. Arts-based theoretical models—or art for scholarship’s sake—are characteristically poststructural, prestructural, performative, pluralistic, proliferative, and postparadigmatic, offering the promise of divergent pedagogical pathways worthy of new exploration.

Messing Around with Identity Constructs: Pursuing a Poststructural and Poetic Aesthetic

Kenneth Gergen saw identity crises as endemic to the current human condition and has termed the malady “multiphrenia.” It is described as being symptomatic of nations with these particular traits of the postmodern era: a populace of multilocal people—people with attachments to more than one place or community and with increasingly disconnected relationships; cosmopolitan communities with a plurality of cultures, including transplanted colonies from other lands; and an explosion of information systems and a multimedia visual culture. Using an autoethnographic framework, this article examines the author’s own identity crisis after the death of his father and as reconstituted in this article, his namesake. The article explores modernist, postmodernist, and poststructural methodologies available for the construction and reconstitution of identity constructs in the current era.

Searching Self-Image: Identities To Be Self-Evident

Naming can alternatively be a definition of identity or a source of stigma. Un-naming can alter a story and serve to unhinge fixed definitions, initiating a democratic discourse that finds its own way of escaping the thrall of hegemony and dominating canons. Can qualitative research serve to un-name axiomatic frameworks of identity? This article is written to follow up to the author’s Messing Around With Identity Constructs and continues his effort to establish the efficacy of a poststructural and poetic aesthetic in research writing.

Circumventing the Imposed Ceiling: Art Education as Resistance Narrative

This article stems from a story of arts education advocacy in the midst of a bureaucracy that misunderstood the purpose of art education at the launch of a new elementary school. Contemporary visual arts education practices overlap a unique period of change in neighboring social science disciplines, a turn of the tide that involves the embrace of narrative methods to rewrite prevailing working models and paradigms of social science practice. Here at the start of the 21st century, art education continues to be practiced in the thrall of a scientific paradigm that misunderstands the greater potential of the arts in education, often imposing a ceiling ill-fitted for arts praxis, arts-based research, or arts pedagogy. The author argues that art education is also at a turn of the tide and surmises some of the unexpected outcomes when new and ex-centric stories of learning and a “pedagogy of possibility” are more thoroughly explored, allowing practitioners to fully rethink an art education practice without taxonomic ceilings and within the shelter of the unexplored labyrinth.

Arts-Based Research: Systems and Strategies

Arts practices are no less dynamic, experimental, and deeply observed; they are organizing systems for the most human information of all—data impressed with social imperatives and emotional meaning. Th e idea that scientifi c knowledge is best is a powerful story, but science is only one story of many that may be told about how humans have historically created and recorded new knowledge about the world we experience and the elements and relationships that comprise it (Rolling, 2013). Human beings are immersed in and sustained by systems. In her remarkable book Th inking in Systems, Donella H. Meadows (2008) defi nes a system as a “set of elements or parts that is coherently organized and interconnected in a pattern or structure” that becomes more than the sum of its parts and “produces a characteristic set of behaviors” classifi ed as its “function” or “purpose” (p. 188). Meadows eloquently describes how many kinds of systems surround us everyday and how simply and elegantly they behave:

Sacred Structures: Narrating Lifeworlds and Implications for Urban Arts Education Practice.

This article utilizes the story of an art studio project involving 2nd-grade students in a new urban elementary school as they explored and engaged with architectural spaces in their community during their yearlong study of the theme of “Community.” The purpose of this writing is to theorize and codify some major tenets of a narrative and reinterpretive approach to urban arts and design education pedagogy—one that recognizes and draws upon the colliding experiences and environments of urban living as an asset to the (re) constitution of identity and community.

Secular Blasphemy Utter(ed) Transgressions Against Names and Fathers in the Postmodern Era

Unnaming the axiomatic constructs of a named identity-that which is thought to be fitting within a given regime of definition-becomes then an act of secular blasphemy, a performance of decanonizing translation that discursively relocates and reinscribes communicated meaning from power, prefix, and prefigurement to perpetual movement. Departing from Homi Bhabhas description of blasphemy as a transgressive act, this article blasphemes the certainty of definition in research writing, illuminating the performance of blasphemy as a source of new social names and the migration of norms and meaning. This article is the third in a trilogy of research forays exploring the intersection of autoethnography, critical race theory, and performance studies. This new research, written to follow up Rolling (2004a, 2004b), is a continuation of the authors effort to establish the efficacy of a poststructural and poetic aesthetic in qualitative research writing.Unnaming the axiomatic constructs of a named identity—that which is thought to be fitting within a given regime of definition—becomes then an act of secular blasphemy, a performance of decanonizing translation that discursively relocates and reinscribes communicated meaning from power, prefix, and prefigurement to perpetual movement. Departing from Homi Bhabhas description of blasphemy as a transgressive act, this article blasphemes the certainty of definition in research writing, illuminating the performance of blasphemy as a source of new social names and the migration of norms and meaning. This article is the third in a trilogy of research forays exploring the intersection of autoethnography, critical race theory, and performance studies. This new research, written to follow up Rolling (2004a, 2004b), is a continuation of the authors effort to establish the efficacy of a poststructural and poetic aesthetic in qualitative research writing.

Reinventing the STEAM Engine for Art + Design Education

If we work every day as K–12 art + design teachers, arts coordinators, museum professionals, or university teacher educators, why should science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM) matter? STEAM matters because we are more than just instructors of art and art education. While most of our students year in and year out will not become professional artists, we are nevertheless arguably the primary teachers of creativity our students will ever have throughout their education. Fundamentally, our job is to instigate and foster arts practice and design thinking as a means for individual learning, social responsibility, and creative problem solving—mediating ideas and materials toward meaningful and enduring solutions. The art studio is one of the very few spaces in school or society where widely divergent outcomes are encouraged and never-before-imagined design solutions are valued. As an acronym for educational imagination, STEAM promises the enhancement of divergent outcomes emerging from the art + design studio by immersing students in a diversity of knowledge bases across contributing domains of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math. Moreover, one of the best things about STEAM education is that you do not have to figure out how to invent the STEAM engine for innovation alone. Diverse collaborations and resources equip STEAM classrooms for locomotion.

Contesting Content, or How the Emperor Sheds His Old Clothes: Guest Editor's Introduction

This brief article is written as an introduction to this Qualitative Inquiry special thematic issue, exploring the intersection of performance studies, critical race theory, and autoethnography. What do these forms of inquiry look like? The guest editor, a visual artist, has chosen the strategy of showing rather than merely telling.This brief article is written as an introduction to this Qualitative Inquiry special thematic issue, exploring the intersection of performance studies, critical race theory, and autoethnography. What do these forms of inquiry look like? The guest editor, a visual artist, has chosen the strategy of showing rather than merely telling.

Visual culture archaeology: A criti/politi/cal methodology of image and identity

This study argues the efficacy of the liberatory cultural work of a visual culture archaeology that reveals a political and critical identity, resistant to domination, authoring social change and its own agency through multiple and incommensurable positions. Built on Foucauldian premises, visual culture archaeology is developed as a methodology for discursive un-naming and renaming and emerges from the inherence and attenuation of inscripted meanings in the reinterpretation of identity during a postmodern confluence of ideas and images. The hybridized representation of the African American in Western visual culture has been unique in the effort by some to define us over significant periods as less than human, less than American, or less than statistically significant in the purpose to maintain an unequal relation of economic and political power. This article continues the authors effort to establish the efficacy of a poststructural and poetic aesthetic in qualitative research writing.