Shifting paradigms in environmental research methods through the visual arts

Abstract

Arts-based research offers a potentially valuable approach for students trained in the positivist tradition of environmental issues to expand their repertoire. This article traces the experience of students in an undergraduate course that examines the US food system through immersive photography, using arts-based research as the core methodological theme of exploration and inquiry. The research approach to assessing student growth and integration of this model builds on both quantitative and qualitative designs, offering a triangulated look at interdisciplinarity. The article contemplates the ways in which situated learning through visual immersion helps students construct new ways of understanding the world around them. Further, this research promotes opportunities for research-grounded paradigm shifts with the help of supportive environments, scaffolding embodied knowledge through creative experience.

Keywords

Arts-based research interdisciplinarity environmental studies visual immersion measurement situated learning visual arts

Introduction

Environmental issues require multiple perspectives in learning, understanding, and problem solving. Traditional positivist and post-positivist approaches offer important foundations, but are insufficient in provoking creative outlets and artistic ways of knowing. Arts-based research offers a potentially valuable approach for students trained in these pre-dominantly positivist traditions of environmental–related inquiry. This article examines the experience of students in an undergraduate research methodology course offered by an environmental studies program within a small liberal arts college located in the Midwest United States. In this course, students explored environmental issues related to the US food system. The course used fine art photography as the medium through which students addressed their individual research questions.

As the designer and instructor of this course, I undertook my own inquiry to maximize student growth as a co-learner on multiple levels. I sought to determine how an arts-based approach might be integrated into an environmental studies curriculum, and to imagine how this pedagogy could appropriately meet the program’s methods course requirements.

That inquiry was guided by the following research question: how does visual immersion and artistic expression within a traditionally positivist domain impact student understanding about course content? This question was answered by drawing on situated learning theory (SLT) and using a mixed methods approach to data collection and analysis.

My findings reinforced the extent to which a cross-section of students entered the course with deeply ingrained positivistic perspectives and skepticism about art’s relevance to research. The immersive nature of the course helped to shift that orientation, and the supportive environment of an exploratory and reflexive engagement with inherently interesting subject matter (e.g., food) opened up potential to build on prior learning and see in new ways.

Interdisciplinary context

In recent years, the concept of arts-based research has been skillfully developed by a cadre of scholars, including many who advocate for art making as a research practice (e.g., Barone and Eisner, 2012; Eisner, 2006; Gerber et al., 2012; Leavy, 2015). Among this group are scholars who work from the assumption that arts-based research has achieved a certain level of acceptance. Their focus has more to do with the relationship between an arts-based research paradigm and other worldviews in the realm of social and natural science, and the potential for theory building in different models of understanding (e.g., Pearse, 1983; Rolling, 2008, 2013).

As a fine arts photographer and professor in an interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (ES) program at a Midwestern liberal arts college, my interest in arts-based research aligns me somewhat equally with both groups of scholars. With extensive training as a quantitative social scientist in energy analysis and urban planning, my background situates me firmly in the post-positivist view of objective researcher and a clear-headed pursuit of hypothesized truth through statistical analysis. In recent years, however, I have undergone a paradigmatic transition into the constructivist realm of the arts. Ten years ago, after studying with documentary photographer Gregory Spaid, I began teaching a course called Farmscape, which looks at the US food system through the lens of a camera. Over the last decade, as my own understanding of teaching through art evolved, I decided to give the course a research methods focus.

The current purpose of Farmscape is to engage students in exploring research questions related to the US food system through fine art photography. Ultimately, my intent is to expand the students’ conceptions about what research is and what it can do within the domain of ES. Because ES is a large, interdisciplinary domain that includes the social and natural sciences as well as the humanities, it is particularly important to support the growth of students’ understandings about the relationship between quantitative and qualitative paradigms.

At my institution, and many like it, environmental research methods courses traditionally focus on post-positivist models premised in the scientific method and permutations of experimental design. While there is certainly some willingness to include both inductive and deductive modes of inquiry, the dominant approach remains hypothesis-driven. Student researchers often are not taught to situate themselves within their research agenda. Instead, observational models that presume dispassionate objectivity are favored, and are judged partially on internal validity threats relating to bias.¹

As understanding about interdisciplinarity in general has developed in the last few decades, it has been argued that teaching interdisciplinary research processes cultivates students’ capacities to approach inquiry with an open-mindedness and cognitive flexibility not often emphasized in discipline-bound approaches (Szostak, 2007). Moreover, understanding the potential synergies between differing disciplines is foundational to students developing expertise in integrating across paradigmatic boundaries. For institutions of higher education seeking to advance their interdisciplinary profiles, it is important to develop frameworks that deliberately teach integrative inquiry, rather than leave success in this domain to chance (Szostak, 2007).

In recent years the most authoritative effort to define an “ideal” ES curriculum in the US highlighted exactly this challenge. In its study, Interdisciplinary Environmental and Sustainability Education on the Nation’s Campuses 2012: Curriculum Design, the US National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE) highlighted interdisciplinarity this way:

Biology, ecology and geosciences – along with policy and public administration, sustainability concepts … water systems and climate change – have the highest mean importance knowledge ratings across all undergraduate interdisciplinary environmental and sustainability (IES) programs. (NCSE, 2012: 13)

The NCSE report proposed a framework for ES understanding that included a Venn diagram of “Natural Systems,” “Social Systems,” and “Sustainability Solutions,” producing an overlapping area termed “Problem Solving.” The positivist approach that underlies the report is thorough, reinforced by the quantitative methods used to construct NCSE’s narrative.

This same mechanistic approach underpins conventional models of undergraduate education, both within environmental studies and beyond. I recognized that the positivism my students were bringing to my class was a stark mismatch to the exploratory work we were attempting to take on in this course. In order to bridge that abyss, I constructed the Farmscape curriculum to reframe research methods’ approaches, which has evolved into a focused investigation of arts-based research.

To explore the efficacy of this shift in my approach to teaching the course, I designed a mixed methods research study to explore this question: “what is the role of arts-based research in an environmental studies research methods course?” This led me to a second question, which was: “how do undergraduates in a traditionally positivistic area of study make sense of the relationship between positivistic science-based and subjectivist arts-based research methods?” Answering these questions involved an array of assessment and observational efforts on my part that inherently put my own research in the juxtaposition of research paradigms and epistemologies.

Theoretical framings

To answer my research questions, I drew on Lave and Wenger’s (1991) SLT, an outgrowth of Vygotsky’s (1978) socio-constructivist framework for understanding human thinking and development. Lave and Wenger (1991) argued that learners build knowledge when they participate in activities that are embedded in authentic contexts. When learners first begin to engage in such activities, they do so as novices in relation to those who are experts in the knowledges and practices that distinguish the context. The learner’s trajectory involves being guided by the experts from “legitimate peripheral participation” to full participation in the sociocultural practices of the context and its community. Along these lines, Rogoff (1990) referred to this guided process as an “apprenticeship in thinking.”

Understandably, SLT has been used extensively in the education field, where teaching and learning process is the domain’s most fundamental area of inquiry. It is, therefore, somewhat inevitable that within the broad terrain of Environmental Studies, SLT has had the most noteworthy impact in the realm of environmental education. SLT has been an important tool for environmental education scholars who have shifted the field from its early dependence on behaviorist models of learning (i.e., those that consider only learners’ observable behaviors and the use of memory as mechanisms for understanding human cognition). Instead, SLT has helped to advance the idea that cognition occurs first on the social plane and then subsequently on the individual, internal plane (Dillon, 2003).

Environmental education scholars (e.g., Griswold, 2017; Mullins, 2014; Singh, 2013) have used SLT to challenge traditional lecture-based pedagogical practices and argue instead for experiential learning. Experiential learning inherently recognizes that learning “is not separated from the world of action but exists in robust, complex, social environments made up of actors, actions, and situations” (Stein, 1998). This perspective advances the idea that learners should be immersed in experiences that are authentic to the object of study. For example, in the context of urban environmental education, Krasny et al. (2009) argued for the use of SLT based on its relationship to other interactive and social learning theories (e.g., Goel et al., 2010) that have been used successfully by other environmental education scholars (e.g., Blackmore et al., 2007; Grimm et al., 2000; Pahl-Wostl and Hare, 2004). Building on this work, Aguilar and Krasny (2011) explored how social learning frameworks could inform research about informal environmental education programs. Based on their findings in an after-school setting, they argued that SLT can be useful in understanding environmental education practices more broadly (e.g., beyond after-school settings).

Situating qualitative methods and visual arts in relation to ES research methods

Along with this sociocultural turn in environmental education, research approaches that embrace the subjective (i.e., qualitative methods) have recently become more common in the broader field of ES. For example, Author: Albrecht, Sartore and Connor et al. (2009) used both qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate how individuals experience distress when their home environments are impacted by environmental change. Other studies have relied on mixed methods approaches, such as using photograph-based surveys to analyze people’s perceptions of the environmental (e.g., Berman, 2014; Ryan, 2012).

In environmental resource management, Ashley and Boyd (2006) reviewed the growing body of literature produced through mixing qualitative and quantitative methods. In examining patterns across such studies, they demonstrated that quantitative research dominates the field. They positioned qualitative methods as a valuable addition to quantitative approaches, particularly when scholars seek to explore the social dimensions of environmental resource management. Ashley and Boyd also pointed out, however, that there is considerable variability in how these methods are used together in a single study. A positive outcome of this inconsistency is the development of new methodological approaches to mixing the quantitative and qualitative. Ten years after their study, another team reviewed hundreds of additional studies, and reaffirmed the idea that research agendas focused on the social aspects of environmental studies require a mixed method approach (Molina-Azorín and López-Gamero, 2016).

The organic quality of mixed methods research in ES is reflective of the trends in mixed methods more generally. As Creswell (2009) explains, what was once seen simply as two separate methodological strands that could run in parallel within a single study has now become more interdisciplinary. That interdisciplinarity is generally more methodologically self-aware than previous scholarship. As noted above, rather than idiosyncratic approaches, researchers now seek to strategically link the paradigms. Thus, a range of innovative methods have been developed.

The use of qualitative methods has not been confined solely to mixed methods’ approaches, however. Increasingly, researchers have designed studies in which qualitative methods alone are used to investigate important environmental topics. In the realm of biocultural conservation, Rozzi et al. (2008) used a case study approach that included the perspectives of ecologists and philosophers in order to more effectively address the social dimensions of climate change. In marine research, Daley et al. (2008) used archival documents and oral history sources (semi-structured interviews) to understand the drivers and contexts of changes to the Great Barrier Reef of Australia over time. Fish et al. (2016) employed both textual and arts-based methods in a study on cultural ecosystem services to assess conceptual understanding of environmental issues, in a scientific journal that typically preferences quantitative approaches (Fish et al., 2016).

Within the qualitative paradigm, the field of visual anthropology has emerged as an important methodological tool for understanding particular populations as an ethnographic tool (e.g., Collier, 1967). The examination of archival documents to collect qualitative data was, in fact, a significant early strategy for gathering data through aesthetic objects. In terms of photography specifically, Schwartz proposed the use of photographs as a formal ethnographic tool through a technique called “photo-elicitation” (Schwartz, 1989). In photo-elicitation, researchers gather data by presenting images and then asking study participants to examine and comment on them. In subsequent decades, this technique has become increasingly popular and gained widespread recognition as a powerful ethnographic method, particularly in the field of anthropology.

These antecedents help identify the particular qualities of arts-based research. Coming out of psychology and art therapy instead of anthropology, arts-based research focuses attention more centrally on the production of art—the systematic use of an artistic process—as a means for understanding and experiencing the world around us, as opposed to the ethnographic analysis of results from an artistic process. It is employed in narrative inquiry and poetry (e.g., Shields, 2015), as well as in music, dance, and other performing arts. It has also gained traction in the visual arts (Barone and Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2015; Rolling, 2013). While the approach has not made significant in-roads within the ES or environmental education fields, there is growing recognition of its valuable role in addressing questions in science, and as an interdisciplinary complement to quantitative studies (Leavy, 2015; see also Olmos-Penñela et al., 2015). Thus, this study endeavors to build on both of these facets to better understand the learning trajectory for non-art students immersed in an arts-based curriculum dealing with food and farming.

Methods of the study

This study employs a quantitative diagnostic stage of analysis using a pre–post questionnaire, followed by a qualitative approach to more fully understand student trajectories in learning and assimilating arts-based research. The pre-survey was administered during the initial class session of the semester, before any content had been discussed. The post-survey was administered on the last class day of the term. Questions related to research paradigms and artistic exploration were asked in closed-ended form using a Likert five-point scale.

Extensive data were collected for the qualitative assessment component of the project. These include the individual artist books created by the students for their main course assignment, the materials they submitted (artwork and artist statements) for the juried exhibition during each semester, written critiques of each other’s work, six individual syntheses assigned periodically during the term, final peer assessment documents, curatorial exercise outcomes, and the combination of text, images, and peer comments in a weekly blog assignment. For the present article, the qualitative evidence relies on the blog data, which offer lucid insight into the students’ abilities to synthesize word and image in a systematic forum on a regularized basis. During the 15-week semester, students were required to post to the community blog during 11 specific weeks. In 10 of the 11 weeks, each student posted both one of their own photographs taken during the class site visits (usually from the same week) along with a statement in response to a prompt by the instructor.

In the blog process and in class, I provided the students with instruction in photographic techniques, both in terms of basic camera mechanics and fundamental elements and principles of design (e.g., value, texture, pattern, balance, proportion, etc.). We discussed how the elements and principles can be used in the creation of photographic compositions. Other topics included hegemony and normative beauty as well as the qualities of fine art photography in relation to documentary photography. Despite many students’ attraction to the “gadgetry” of modern digital cameras, my curricular and instructional priorities were the interplay of aesthetic expression and knowledge construction.

For the qualitative aspects of this article, I chose to use a case study approach (e.g., Huss et al., 2015) focused on two students, one from each iteration of the course. Both were seniors (one male, one female) when they took the course, and both were typical in that they had chosen a traditional, largely-positivist major—one in Psychology and one with a double major in Economics and Mathematics. Neither came to the class with any formal art background, and both were nervous about their lack of preparation when they began the semester (the course has no art perquisites). Each was attentive to the regularity of the blog assignment, completing the assigned tasks each week. Both were varsity athletes, which was common among the students in both class sections. Overall, these students were representative of the students in the course across the two semesters in the study population.

The two students’ data were coded using the iterative process outlined by Agar (1991). After choosing my cases according to the criteria outlined above, I downloaded all of their blog entries (including images) for the semester. Because I wanted to look at any potential advancement in their understandings, I began by focusing intensely on their first and last entries from the semester, using “a little bit of data and a lot of right brain” (Agar, 1991: 194). After reading through the blog entries several times to orient myself, I coded the data, noting words and phrases that appeared repeatedly (Charmaz, 1983; Strauss, 1987). In an iterative process, I sought to identify recurring themes, making notes of ideas and concepts that stood out to me as interesting and distinctive (Corbin and Strauss, 1990). As I examined the two students’ materials, I attempted to straddle positivist and constructivist worldviews, considering the emerging codes as both objectivist and heuristic representations of the ideas in the data (Seidel, 1998). Ultimately, the codes that emerged revolved around themes of binary thinking, arms-length views of the food system, narrative construction, and personal transformation.

Quantitative results

Given the background of the students who enrolled in the Farmscape course, I went into each semester expecting that the many positivistically-trained undergraduates would ultimately devolve into two main groups: the skeptical and the intrigued. While my aspirations have never been to convert scientists into artists, my orientation is to create opportunities for researchers of all varieties to engage in a potentially new approach, and one that is rarely taught in an undergraduate setting. I was interested to compare the perceptions my students had about research, about art, and about the food system between the start and the end of the semester. While I did not go into my own investigation with formal hypotheses of my own, I did have some expectations.

First, I figured that students taught in the sciences might feel more comfortable with an arms-length relationship with their “data,” and that the emotional vulnerability that comes with artistic exploration could be disquieting. Second, I imagined that they would have misgivings about creativity in the realm of research and that I had the potential to complicate perceptions they might have about art belonging outside the definition of formalized research. Lastly, I worried that the positivist foundation often assumed in addressing current societal challenges could dampen student enthusiasm about art’s social relevance. As a result, I went into the pre–post assessment (i.e., administering the questionnaire the first day and last day of the semester with exactly the same questions) with considerable trepidation.

The pre–post questionnaire asked the students to respond to a series of statements and questions relating to artistic inquiry, research approaches, and the food system. I consolidated results from the two semesters (a total of 32 students, all of whom responded), with most responses being quite similar between the two course iterations. The questions noted here were asked using a five-point scale, ranging from “strongly disagree (1)” to “strongly agree (5)” or from “not very interested (1)” to “very interested (5).” The statistical test (t-test) assesses whether there is a pattern of responses that demonstrates a systematic difference between pre- and post-course answers.

For non-quantitative readers: The “p value” checks whether that difference is statistically significant, and any significance level smaller than 0.05 is considered to be statistically meaningful. The p value is a gatekeeper for assessing statistical confidence: when “p” is set at 0.05, that means 5% of the time we would accept a result having come about due to chance. Put another way, we would require that 95% of the time the result would be based on a systematic relationship. In the case of the Farmscape survey, the “systematic relationship” is the pattern of student responses to a particular survey question before and after the class. Is it by chance that responses are higher at the end of the course than at the beginning? We set the p value to a 95% tolerance level, and if the statistical test for pre–post difference reveals a level that is higher than 0.05, we reject its significance because it did not fall within our 5% range of acceptable randomness (After Salkind, 2016).

Additionally, the magnitude of change from pre-course to post is important to notice.² Intuitively speaking, if the average of all students increases from a “3” to a “4” on a five-point scale, that would be a substantial difference—it’s the difference between saying “I am neutral about this statement” to the commitment of “I agree with this statement.” While it is necessarily a statistical judgment call as to what constitutes a notable difference, I would suggest that a half-point shift up or down merits attention on a five-point scale, as long as it is statistically significant using the t-test. Note that all results are presented in aggregated form below.

One question listed five prospective facets of research, stating, “In order to do effective research…” using a five-point scale that ranged from “strongly disagree (1)” to “strongly agree (5)”. Here are the summary results for these items:

Item	Change	Sig (p = 0.05)
(a) Researchers need emotional attachment to the topic	0.76	0.000
(b) It is important to be very precise with data/findings	−0.57	0.022
(c) Quantitative data should be collected and analyzed	−0.67	0.002
(d) The narrative is equally important to the result(s)	0.32	0.057
(e) It is helpful to follow a creative, exploratory process	0.55	0.002

In other words, the average student at the start of the term was essentially neutral (3.1 on the 5-point scale) about researchers needing emotional attachment, and at the end of the semester the average rose to 3.9 when asked the same question—more than ¾ of a point increase. At the start of the term, the average student strongly agreed about the importance of precision (4.5 on the 5-point scale), but at the end of the term the average had fallen to 3.9, more than ½ point drop.

It is worth noting that neither the course readings nor in-class instruction ever diminished positivist approaches or drew direct methodological comparisons between qualitative and quantitative analyses. These readings were selected in order to present as balanced as possible a set of perspectives about the value of different modes of research.

Along these lines, another series of items asked about the usefulness of particular research methodologies (e.g., surveys, interviews, observation, anecdotal information, personal experience, and scientific experimentation). These items showed no change from pre- to post: students did not perceive these tools to be any more or less important at the end of the semester than they did at the start. This suggested that students were able to identify appropriate contexts for different kinds of research, which allayed my fear that they would either reject the arts-based model or become true believers in it. This kind of methodological self-awareness is also an important part of rigorous interdisciplinary research (Szostak, 2007).

The stable, measured perspective my students displayed on those questions was further supported by the results on questions about their personal connection to art as a practice. These five items were asked on an agree/disagree basis like the questions indicated above:

Item	Change	Sig (p = 0.05)
(a) Anyone can be an artist	0.19	0.206
(b) I am an artist	0.65	0.003
(c) Thinking creatively makes someone an artist	0.39	0.021
(d) I am a creative person	0.34	0.009
(e) I feel confident in my ability to assess a work of art	0.68	0.010

At the start of the semester, the average response to the statement “anyone can be an artist” was 4.3 on the five-point scale—essentially, the average student agreed with that statement. At the end of the term, the average went up very slightly to almost 4.5, and there was no significant difference between pre- and post-responses. In other words, statistically speaking, we have to say there was no change. But “I am an artist,” “Thinking creatively makes someone an artist,” “I am a creative person,” and “I feel confident in my ability to assess a work of art” all increased significantly across the semester. These results point to students developing greater acuity for the expressive potential in art making, and a fading fear about their perceptions of not being “good enough” to be artistic (a fear commonly expressed at the start of the term).

My curiosity about their personal attachment to art caused me to wonder about their perceptions regarding the import of artistic work in broader context, both as research tool and beyond. Returning to my worries about the positivist rejection of art as a mode of research, I wondered whether that view could contaminate students’ ideas about art’s role more generally. Here are the changes and significance levels for these items (note that the scale in this class is from “low interest (1)” to “high interest (5)”):

Item	Change	Sig (p = 0.05)
(a) Art’s place in society	0.00	1.000
(b) What art has to do with research	0.60	0.006
(c) Art’s connection to the environment	0.19	0.206
(d) Understanding what works of art really mean	0.15	0.437

The connection between art and research was the only of these items that produced an increase in interest during the semester. To me, this says that the broader implications of art as a form of social commentary and as an opportunity for meaning making were not impacted by the Farmscape class at all, and that the curricular impact was focused where I hoped it would be: on the arts-based research piece of the puzzle.

Lastly, students were asked “Can every photograph be a work of art?” In the pre-survey, most students answered “yes” but the majority shifted to “no” by the end of the term. I was pleased to see this result, because one of my course objectives was for students to develop understanding about, and respect for, art as an area of expertise. I also hoped to increase their aesthetic discernment skills. These results offer a hint at the broadened awareness students may have achieved through an immersive experience in the visual arts. Having to participate in regular peer critiques, weekly blogs that included sharing images, and a juried public exhibition, they saw in myriad ways that not every photograph can be art when examined through formal means. They not only built some discernment skills but were conscious about the value of those skills.

These many quantitative assessments are diagnostic at best: they provide hints at the kinds of changes that students did and did not achieve through the experience of the Farmscape course. What the quantitative measures do not provide is any kind of narrative about that experience. Taken together, these comparisons offer a benchmark of indicators for the kinds of shifts that might transpire when the positivist comes into contact with an arts-based constructivism. These signposts offer entry points for more careful qualitative analysis of the student experience. The qualitative case studies described below provide a more complete picture of how exactly arts-based immersion can shape and transform students’ paradigmatic orientations as it relates to environmental studies research.

Qualitative results

Adam and Lori (both names changed), as noted above, were each seniors when they enrolled in Farmscape. Both devoted their college careers to traditional social and physical sciences, majoring in Economics/Math and Psychology respectively. Both began the class with trepidation about their (self-reported) poor art background and neither had any personal camera equipment to use during the semester. (This was typical of students in the class and indicative of their novice status.)

On the first day of the semester, the class met in the dining hall, where we all ate lunch together. College-owned cameras were made available to all students in the class, and I purposefully offered very minimal orientation to the camera mechanics, artistic expression, and the course content. Next, the dining hall staff gave us a behind-the-scenes tour of the kitchen area (which none of the students had seen before). Each student was then given a unique quote relating to the food system. The quotes varied from the short and whimsical—such as Mark Twain’s line from Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), “Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education”—to a paragraph-long ode to “the immediacy of a taco” by Deborah Schneider (2010). In each case, I asked them to return to the food preparation area with the instruction that they capture the “essence” of their quote with an image. The blog prompt for that first week was to post the image they thought best represented their quote and to write a short statement about their thoughts and intentions.

Adam

Adam had a lengthy statement from Maria Rodale, author of the Organic Manifesto (2010). The statement advanced Rodale’s strident demands that organic food be made widely available. He took a photograph of the cardboard boxes used to “deliver” orange juice to students (Figure 1)

Figure 1.

Adam, Week 1.

To explain the image, Adam offered the following first blog post (all quotations marks were his):

With this photo, I tried to capture the flip side of this quote, the ugliness of unnatural, fabricated “food” consumed by many Americans. This “orange juice” that is piped through boxes and served in dining halls doesn't look healthy or edible – it looks industrial and machine-like.

Both Adam’s photograph and his statement indicated a novice relationship to the content and the photographic medium. He clearly thought in binary terms about distinctions between organic and industrial food choices. Industrial food comes in cardboard boxes, is ugly, unhealthy, machine-made (“fabricated”), and is questionable as actual food (thus his quotation marks around the word). By implication, organic food has none of those attributes in his view.

The accompanying photograph evidences a struggle to illustrate this binary thinking. The result is a confusing hodge-podge of unfocused objects, with little to recommend it in terms of design principles and overall composition. It appears to be more like a random snapshot, or even a mistake. This is all the more striking given that Adam specifically chose this particular image from the 28 photographs he took as part of the quote-illustration assignment. This lack of aesthetic discernment reinforces his novice status.

By the fifth week of the term, Adam showed signs of becoming more nuanced and less binary in his thinking. In his blog that week, he wrote:

Capturing the necessary context to broaden the potential audience can be a difficult objective for an arts-based researcher. Maybe it's not even possible with just one photo and no accompanying details. Perhaps we need a bit more information to elicit the full question-asking potential of a photograph. I'm not exactly sure what the answer to that question is either.

Adam’s state of confusion about “capture” is indicative of an early learning cycle, where the easy bifurcation of good and bad becomes less clear and new information clouds the straightforward picture. Just as driving a car looks easy until you first try it, and then it is immediately overwhelming, Adam had his first real chance to reflect on life in the driver’s seat, and he discovered he had many more questions than answers about how to proceed. This is an important and necessary step, and often one learners find frustrating.

The following week, Adam demonstrated a next step on the growth curve, as he began noticing a change in himself. He wrote, “This odd way of thinking was different for me. By humanizing and personifying inanimate objects, I came at them from a different and surprising angle.” He gave himself license to explore his own creative process. Describing the photograph he posted that week as “a packed bus ride to work” (Figure 2), Adam demonstrated his willingness to explore both conceptually and visually through his photographic experience.

Figure 2.

Adam, Week 6.

In the “bus ride” image, he captured a box of corn on a moving conveyor belt. The painterly quality of the work results from a slight double image seen at the intersection of the lower box line and the green corn husks. This likely resulted from Adam’s experimentation with manual control of the camera’s shutter speed, suggesting his willingness to further his technical ability. The central lighting suggests the use of flash, adding a patina layer to the image that also commends his purposeful use of specific photographic technique. In this Week-6 image, Adam’s sensibilities about composition and narrative were not fine-tuned, but his ability to illustrate an idea with some technical mastery definitely showed clear improvement since the first day of class.

Ten weeks into the semester, the class again met over lunch in the dining hall, and each student was issued the same quote and assignment they had received on the first day of class. This time, Adam took a photograph of mesclun (lettuce) mix being prepared for the salad bar (Figure 3)

Figure 3.

Adam, Week 10.

The image demonstrates his awareness of color and contrast, depth of field, repeating elements, and exposure to bring out the detail and the sense of scale relating to dining hall food service. In his blog post, he reflected on his expanding comprehension of the food system:

Last time around, I tried to capture the opposite of this quote – the perils of conventional. Here, I try to get at more of the benefits of organic. This photo tries to show the bounty that can be associated with organic food. Sometimes, I associate organic with bland, grainy, and earthy. Yet this spring mix appears vibrant and fulfilling. I also think that organic is associated with small scale operations, but this gets at more of the communal satiation that the above quote talks about; there's more than enough to go around.

This text shows Adam’s binary views of organic vs. industrial food starting to expand, as he relates his sometimes “bland” association with organic. He makes significant strides in articulating the evocative qualities of his everyday food, both in his descriptive terms—grainy, earthy, vibrant—and in his connection of the text to the illustrative image.

In the final blog post of the semester (Week 13), students were asked to find an image from a particular site visit that “really captures the place” and to write about what they felt it captures. Adam surprised everyone in the class with his still life of a honey jar and cloth on a dusty table in the corner of the Amish grain mill we visited (Figure 4)

Figure 4.

Adam, Week 13.

The image was one of the best in the entire class all semester, and exemplified Adam’s learning trajectory as an artist. The image conveyed so much about the role this mill played in the local community, its humble existence, and something of the loving negligence that the entire building conveys. Adam was able to embody a fine art perspective with the tonality of the photograph in a way he had not accomplished previously in the semester. When he wrote about the photograph in his blog, it was also clear that he related to his visual expression in new ways:

This photograph captures the essence of the Stutzman Mill. On one hand, it's a mechanized place of processing raw materials. Machines rumble and shake and grind grains into flour. There are switches, levels, and belts. And it is LOUD. But on the other hand, it's colorful, whimsical, and playful. The workers, who are dusted with flour from head to toe, scurry around and operate the machines with smiles.

Here, for the first time, he evoked a multi-sensory narrative about the photograph, connecting his visual engagement with the sounds of the grain mill. The descriptive paragraph suggests the kind of vibration that would produce exactly the sort of dusty image Adam produced, and the paragraph thus meshes nicely with the imagery.

Lori

Lori’s initial assignment in the dining hall involved a short quote by Wendell Berry, the acclaimed poet and essayist best known for his writings on agriculture, culture, and rural life. In a poem called “A Standing Ground,” Berry wrote, “Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet berries in a cup” (Berry, 1985). Rather than creating an exact illustration of the quote, Lori took a photograph of carrots in a large stirring bowl (Figure 5)

Figure 5.

Lori, Week 1.

Standing on its own, the image’s connection to the Berry quote is not obvious, having the clear qualities of a beginner photographer—which was how Lori self-identified. The bowl, its contents, and the ladle are all cut off at the edges of the shot, there is no clear focal subject, and the image is almost entirely out of focus. It suggests the effort of a passing documentary snapshot, and, interestingly, is the only photo among the 97 Lori took that afternoon which is out of focus.

To explain her thought process, Lori wrote on the issues she believed Berry to be addressing:

I think [the quote] represents much more than the concrete image many people imagine – going out to pick your own berries as the sun rises each morning for breakfast. More than that, this quote represents our relationship with the earth and the ways in which we treat it. I choose this image to represent the disengaged, mass-production direction … our food system has been transformed into. Many people enter grocery stores or restaurants not understanding the origin of their food, disinterested in the relationship between the food and the lands it was grown on. … [It] is clear that the significant relationship between our lands and our culture today is not respected as it should be. I choose this image … because … it encompasses the idea that we are getting most of our food at restaurants and dining halls second hand, on plates or bowls given to us, without much knowledge of the growth, packaging, processing, or preparation.

Lori’s text juxtaposed the idyllic qualities of picking berries with generalizations regarding society’s relationship with the food we eat, offering little between those poles, nor apparent recognition of the vast differences in food access across class and culture. Nonetheless, in both Lori’s image and her blog text, she sought an interpretive and metaphorical connection to the Berry quote, which demonstrates her ability to transcend the literal.

Lori’s developmental path took an intriguing turn as we visited food production facilities. Shifting from her generalizations about how people gain access to their food, she began to recognize the series of steps that move food from farm to table. In her writing, she shifted in her approach of telling about food disconnects to showing the connections she observed. Her growing interest in constructing a narrative about food production showed up in her writing about field trip experiences. She shifted from something of a victim of the industrial complex to proactive agent. In Week 4, she wrote about a conversation she had with an Amish farmer:

[He] made a comment about not really knowing what university is like, to which I thought to myself, I have no idea what living and working on a farm entails and the humbling experience it brings.

Lori continued to evidence her growing recognition about the complexities of the production process, the challenges faced by the people who work within that system, and her own role in the bigger picture. In Week 5, she acknowledged the extent of the system:

I chose because the processes were different from most of the places we have visited before, which involve many steps for the final product. This image … promotes the simplicity, even though I’m sure there are more steps than I am aware of … I think this image will enlighten the audience in where the food is coming from, but also make them wonder how the rest of the food in the grocery stores are grown.

This post showed Lori’s acknowledgment of a more complex system than she originally imagined, and a desire to share her exploration. I think the irony was not lost on her that her photograph that week was of a farmer’s feet (Figure 6), reinforcing the “many steps” she references in her text. This whimsical connection also demonstrated her greater attention to the content and meaning of her photography, moving away from the purely illustrative effort of her Week 1 image. Moreover, it has a clear focal plane, a sense of depth, and an interesting juxtaposition of human and natural systems.

Figure 6.

Lori, Week 5.

The next week, Lori wrote about “the stories we tell ourselves about where our food is coming from” and how the trip we took that week “really shed light on understanding the whole story”. Two weeks later, she riffed on the challenge of building a story through imagery this way:

When looking at the image there is no way the audience can understand the entire context or narrative that the image encompasses. It is tantalizing in the fact that there isn’t one explanation to what is going on.

Reading these lines, I was struck by Lori’s growing consciousness about her capacity as an artist to construct a complex narrative. The notion that there could be multiple explanations evidenced her growth, and it was exciting to watch her own that newfound freedom of expression. This was particularly notable when she returned to her original Wendell Berry quote in Week 10:

When I wrote [on this quote in Week 1] I discussed what I believed to be the essence: we must have respect for the earth and lands provided to us. I do still agree with [that] argument … however, [now] I looked more to the food industry side of this quote. It is important to remember that all the food we eat has an origin and a narrative. It is definitely something special to be able to pick your own berries (or grow, pick and process your own food) with knowledge of its true roots and effort it took to grow. I chose this image because I felt it really connected to the idea that everything we eat has an origin, whether we are aware of that origin or not. This image of grapes behind a plastic bin contrasts this idea, as we know these grapes have an origin, but are not made aware of the entire story; however, this represents most of our food industry. Those grapes … are given to us as students on a daily basis without many of us having any idea of the true origin. I think this image contrasts the full transparency one has by picking their own berries, both metaphorically, but also literally through the dirt and water along the plastic bin blocking a full view of the grapes.

Here, Lori re-conceptualized her initial position as outsider to an anonymous system, showing instead a willingness to attach her own identity to the “origin” story of food. The image she alludes to is a fascinating contrast with her Week 1 photograph. While both images are straightforward—a collection of carrots (Figure 5) and a clump of grapes (Figure 7)—they are vastly different in their technical and artistic qualities. This was also the first clear evidence of Lori’s writing and photographic work joining together into a unified whole.

Figure 7.

Lori, Week 10.

Lori’s final blog-post image of the term is a useful culmination of her learning trajectory. She shared a black-and-white image from the meat processing facility we had visited mid-semester (Figure 8), commenting that it “depicts the middle connection between processes and output … It is in b&w to exemplify the unknown aspects of the process.”

Figure 8.

Lori, Week 13.

She thus brought the narrative interests she had wrestled with over many weeks into alignment with a provocative image. It was my sense that she had endeavored to connect her own life with the story of the food system. She started by situating herself at arm’s length, as an outsider and passive consumer of the food system, and she ended by recognizing how her own actions as consumer and eater were intimately involved in that same system. As Pollan says, “we are what we eat” (Pollan, 2009).

Discussion and implications

The questions guiding this study were, “what is the role of arts-based research in an environmental studies research methods course?” and “how do undergraduates in a traditionally positivistic area of study make sense of the relationship between positivistic science-based and subjectivist arts-based research methods?” By investigating these questions, it was my hope to enhance creative problem solving in the environmental realm, and to uncover methods that can bridge the hypothesis-driven mode of traditional scientific research with the expressive possibilities of the arts.

As noted above, I began the research methods course by administering a quantitative pre-test to benchmark student abilities and interests regarding the themes we would address during the semester. The results showed how deeply ingrained positivistic perspectives were in this cross-section of students from majors across campus. They largely saw precision, quantitative analysis, and arms-length inquiry as the appropriate model for research. They were skeptical about art’s relevance to any research agenda. By the end of the term, their views on these issues clearly—and significantly—changed.

The question of how those views changed was answered through qualitative approaches. The case studies of Adam and Lori offer a way to understand that evolution, whereby they both began their arts-based research exploration with rule-driven norms about the food system: binary, absolute, and mostly external to themselves. Both were ready to prove their views through exposé-style photographs with little nuance. Then they were exposed to the arts-based research notion that sometimes instead of seeking answers to questions, we may benefit from questioning our answers (e.g., Rolling, 2013). Subsequently, both students made conscientious use of arts-based research to imagine an array of questions in response to the answers they initially firmly held. They discovered that their artistic exploration offered new ways of understanding phenomena, which previously had not been in their consciousness. In addition, both Adam and Lori demonstrated their capacity to build the very artistic skills they had originally suspected they could never possess.

Adam and Lori were in many ways typical Farmscape students, and as such, they can serve as representative models for the full population of students who took the course. Their positivist background, their scientific majors, their skepticism about the artistic orientation of the course, and their articulate ability to process complex new paradigms that questioned their well-honed approach to completing research tasks—these were all common themes in the two semesters included in this study. The shifts that I observed in these two particular students were similar to the large majority of students in the course. As a result, I have identified three core concepts that support the value of arts-based research in the environmental studies field:

Measurement and attribution depend on careful mixed methods

A study like mine has many potential traps and pitfalls. I have situated myself as instructor, learner, participant, artist, documentarian, and researcher simultaneously, and the students in the course were at points aware of my multiple roles (and gave their written permission to be part of the research project). None of them had ever heard of arts-based research before they enrolled in Farmscape, and many spent at least part of the semester carrying some degree of skepticism about it. From a measurement and observation perspective, this meant that the more chances I had to learn about their progress, the better my research could be. It was important to start and end with a quantitative assessment to establish a global picture of their perceptions about the ideas in the course. Those positivist bookends then provided a starting point for my own constructivist, qualitative inquiry into their arts-based investigations. The mixed methods approach crystallizes the multiple textual forms of data, revealing patterns worthy of conversation as well as the positionality I bring to the project (cf. Ellingson, 2009).

This kind of inquiry also points to the challenge of assessment in an interdisciplinary endeavor (Miles and Rainbird, 2015). While observing students’ evolution through the subject matter, I was offering them regular feedback about their work. I was asking them to be reflexive about their learning while I was being reflexive about my instruction and my research about the course. In a sense, this was my own “becoming pedagogical” as Irwin has suggested is necessary for a teacher of creative process (Irwin, 2013).

Visual immersion makes identity growth possible

“Becoming pedagogical” is, in essence, a question of identity construction. SLT reinforces this notion in the idea of communities of practice that emerge in the construction of knowledge as learners gain greater facility with the material at hand (Lave and Wenger, 1991)—and as the instructor co-learns through the same process. This cycle put me, as the teacher, in my own “legitimate peripheral participation” (Lave and Wenger, 1991) that began as more of an expert (or at least the perception of expertise) and shifted toward greater equilibrium as the students’ facility with the material grew. This mutual “becoming” was fundamentally rooted in the situated part of learning—the fact that we were constructing the experience jointly. In retrospect, these might have been obvious grounding points for the development of Farmscape, but in reality, these were surprises, as I had not previously experienced the degree of community learning in prior teaching experiences.

Thus, I found that somewhere between Deleuze’s ideas about “becoming” (e.g., Deleuze, 1995) and Dewey’s model of art as fundamentally about “experience” (Dewey, 1934) is the central idea that immersion fosters growth. As noted previously, this is foundational for SLT, and it is at the core of art as a practice. Further, as Irwin has aptly noted (2013), “becoming” is critical to research methodologies like arts-based research (Irwin, 2013).

This personal discovery led me further into the emotional realm of becoming as it relates to immersive experience: Deleuze and Guattari (1994) take this notion a step further when they reflect on the affective state of an artist, stating that “it is the painter that becomes blue” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 181). As they examine the nature of color in What is Philosophy, the theme of becoming is particularly powerful. That an artist can achieve such a depth of sensation as to become an affect him- or herself—i.e., that the painter can change colors through that experience—is one that may sometimes be difficult for a newcomer to the arts to embody. But it is through immersion that this kind of sensibility seems most promising. It also reinforces the importance of prioritizing artistic process as well as artistic product. As beginners, first-semester Farmscape students were not likely to produce work that carries the depth and meaning of a seasoned artist, but that does not in any way diminish their becoming, nor does it differentiate it from the becoming that any artist experiences over time.³

Paradigm shifts can happen with supportive environments

One of the deep challenges of teaching constructivist approaches to positivist-oriented learners is the incompatibilities—perceived and real—of the two paradigms. If “truth” is an objectively findable outcome of research, then the notion that it is ever-changeable and perhaps impossible to measure is necessarily problematic. So even if some degree of paradigm shift were possible in a single semester, the environment for opening up the space to explore these new ideas is a critical component (Kaplan and Basu, 2015).

Meeting students where they are is an important piece of this puzzle. The National Council for Science and the Environment definition of the “ideal” ES curriculum, cited at the outset of this paper, builds its approach entirely as a positivist paradigm. As such, it reminds us that students who have taken even introductory ES courses are likely to be conditioned by that approach and that way of thinking. If this is what defines interdisciplinarity for the typical student who enrolled in Farmscape, then the distance between their grounding and constructivist methodologies is great, indeed.

In the Farmscape course, focusing on the US food system, and on the students’ own relationship with agriculture, helps make their semester-long exploration personal and inherently interesting, since it focuses on a topic deeply connected to their own lives. Through a consistent mantra of “we’re all learning this together” (including myself) and no expectation of an art background, the potential for expansive learning increases manifold.

Like my students, I was engaged in a process of paradigm shifting and growth. I came into my own artistic exploration with a deeply positivistic orientation, and was situated at odds with any constructivist identity, so I could deeply empathize with the common background and training my students brought, at least in terms of these paradigmatic models. My experience, and my on-going evolution (see “becoming” above) likely provided a setting where students felt relatively safe to explore.

Furthermore, the fact that this course was not set up to counter the field of ES, but rather immerse students within it, gave them the sense that their learning could and should be integrated, and that arts-based research could help them understand the world in new—not exclusive—ways.

This setting opens up the possibility of hybridized spaces where students can be challenged to develop new models of research, not to reject their prior learning. This constructivist model scaffolds a more holistic set of entry points to learning in higher education that are too easily left undiscovered. Environmental studies present real-world situations that require many different problem solving and perspective-building models, and arts-based research adds tremendous value we should not leave behind.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr Kerry Dixon for introducing me to this paradigm and grounding me every step of the way. Thanks also to my Environmental Studies colleagues for giving me the freedom to teach in the arts, and to the Farmscape students who were down for the arts-based adventure.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declares no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Abram W Kaplan earned his PhD at UNC-Chapel Hill. He has taught at Denison University for 26 years, establishing and directing the Environmental Studies Program. His scholarship focuses on change processes, from policy and regional planning to conflict resolution and program evaluation. These themes have become the centerpiece of his art, using arts-based research to catalyze conversations about controversial socio-political issues. Kaplan has presented papers at both national and international professional conferences on these ideas.

He is a fine art photographer working in both 2- and 3-D. The latter includes direct printing techniques on metal, wood and other materials to create immersive works to encourage viewer participation. He has exhibited 2D work in more than 40 regional and national juried exhibitions, with jurors from leading contemporary art museums. His six solo exhibitions have examined the US food system and the generation of electricity.

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