Formal Fascinations and Nagging Excerpts: The Challenge of the Arts to Curriculum and Inquiry

Abstract

This article examines challenges to discourses of curriculum research and practice by the growing fascination with alternative forms of representation. The author takes as a starting point a cluster of exchanges with students that were situated in a study of a classroom in which music and image joined word and number as essential sources for learning about a context irreducibly distant from students’ own: the past. In the study, what seemed to make painting, photography, film, and poetry potent sources of understanding was their capacity to bridge the gap between a remote, textbook past, and the sensory world of the students’ present; these forms expressed to students not only the outline of events, but also what the events signified and felt like. Yet, in juxtaposing students’ comments against discourses of historiography, philosophical aesthetics, and history teaching and learning, one soon recognizes that the very ability of the arts to communicate a sense of immediacy and human intention is what makes them problematic as sources of historical insight: in pushing out the boundaries of “acceptable” forms beyond discursive text, one also pushes up against assumptions about the nature and purposes of knowledge and inquiry. While the starting point of this article is historical inquiry, the author argues that the difficulties of representing experiences of persons in contexts removed in time or space, and of making sense of others’ representations, are relevant to other forms of inquiry; the challenge of the arts to historical inquiry is paralleled in other fields, and no less in educational research.