I love that I open this book and it begins with an art image before any text from a photography series by Lexi Lasczik Cutcher who is co-editor of this edited book on arts-based educational research with Linda Knight. This is the first book in the series with Springer that has been a labour of love for an editorial board made up of artists, scholars and educators and myself. A special thanks to Sun Kim for providing the cover art art images. Below is my editor-in-chief introduction to the book. Published by Springer Dec. 2017.
New Connections and Directions for Arts, Research, Education: An Orientation
As I was about to bring my term as Chair of the Arts Based Educational Research Special Interest Group (ABER SIG) at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) term to an end in 2012, I was invited by Springer editor Jolanda Voogd to submit a proposal for a book series in the field of Arts Based Educational Research. Aware of the international conversation on ABER poised to take off, and with a desire to develop the field in a truly interdisciplinary fashion with this international press I gathered a wise editorial team around the series and thus began the extended dialogic process of developing a proposal for the series. What became clear as we worked on the proposal and the purpose and scope for the series was that the vantage point we wanted to forefront was the hinge of education that connects the arts and research in the ever morphing and developing field of Arts-Based Educational Research. It is fitting that the first book published in the series, by Australian-based co-editors Linda Knight and Lexi Lasczik Cutcher, takes on the connecting points between arts, research, and education in this thoughtfully edited, richly researched, and written volume.
Knight and Lasczik Cutcher bring together a diversity of international authors into a rich portfolio that they describe as giving “voice to a decidedly non-North American-centric authorship” in the field. The multiple authors in the volume unhinge and re-hinge our understandings of art, education and research throughout the chapters culminating in a rich array of philosophical, theoretical, and practice-based approaches to ABER. It is with great excitement that I welcome you to travel the pages of this book and engage the internationally fed discussion of ABER scholarship.