FORMAL FASCINATIONS AND NAGGING EXCERPTS - THE CHALLENGE OF THE ARTS TO CURRICULUM AND INQUIRY

This article examines challenges to discourses of curriculum research and practice by the growing fascination with alternative forms of repr esentation. The author takes as a starting point a cluster of exchange s with students that were situated in a study of a classroom in which music and image joined word and number as essential sources for learni ng about a context irreducibly distant from students' own: the past. I n the study, what seemed to make painting, photography, film, and poet ry potent sources of understanding was their capacity to bridge the ga p between a remote, textbook past, and the sensory world of die studen ts' present; these forms expressed to students not only the outline of events, but also what the events signified and felt like. Yet, in jux taposing students' comments against discourses of historiography, phil osophical aesthetics, and history teaching and learning, one soon reco gnizes that the very ability of the arts to communicate a sense of imm ediacy and human intention is what makes them problematic as sources o f historical insight: in pushing out the boundaries of ''acceptable'' forms beyond discursive text, one also pushes up against assumptions a bout the nature and purposes of knowledge and inquiry. While the start ing point of this article is historical inquiry, the author argues tha t the difficulties of representing experiences of persons in contexts removed in time or space, and of making sense of others' representatio ns, are relevant to other forms of inquiry; the challenge of the arts to historical inquiry is paralleled in other fields, and no less in ed ucational research.