Sculpting the Contours of Arts-Based Educational Research Within a Discourse Community

Within the field of education, arts-based research is emerging as an inquiry tradition that reaches beyond disciplinary boundaries—creating innovative junctures among art, education, and research. Individuals with diverse talents and interests are being drawn to this newly coalescing discourse community and, in turn, are engendering rich and multifocal conversations not only about specific examples of arts-based research but also about the broader meanings of this approach to educational inquiry. These meanings, the authors contend, represent different positions within the field, and as the positions are articulated and debated, the contours of the discourse begin to take form. For this reason, the authors call on members of the arts-based discourse community to offer logics-of-justification for their work and thereby contribute to an evolving culture of inquiry grounded in aesthetic rather than scientific ways of knowing.