Epistemology and Arts-Based Pedagogy: Pictures from a Doctoral Classroom

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses a doctoral level epistemology course in social work, the course design and the arts-based methods used to help students conceptualize and transform their ideas around epistemology, research, and practice. The paper also includes students’ first hand accounts of their art-making experiences in the class, their learning process and epistemological reasoning. The students provide narratives illustrating their struggles and evolution in their epistemological positioning and how the teaching methods and art-making helped them in their learning process. The paper ends summarizing a typology of “artful values” infused in the course and uses the students’ experiences to capture epistemological education as an evolving artful process.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemology
• social work knowledge
• arts-based education
• pedagogy
• qualitative research

Disclosure statement

<N>No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.