Intercultural research (and intercultural teaching) always has to navigate the dangers of imposing the understandings of a mainstream culture, and consequent criteria of reference, onto the people being studied. Recently, some researchers are looking to art-based research as a tool that leaves more power for self-definition in the hands of participants.

This paper reports a group of drama-based projects in which the experiences of foreign students, immigrants and students belonging to minority cultures examined, analysed and reported aspects of their experience and learning.

While each of the projects had an individual focus relating to the specific group worked with and leading to specifically focused research questions, the cluster of projects shared a set of nested research questions.

The explicit and overarching question was:

• How can art processes facilitate the learning and the development of identity of participants characterised by cultural difference?

Further questions were either embedded or grew out of initial stages of the investigation.  These included:

·         How do participants interpret their experiences, conceptualise their learning goals, identify problems and possibilities?

·         What further development do they propose?

• What forms, traditionally cultural or contemporary western, best lend themselves to successive meanings and emerging questions?
• If some of the images created were to be used as dramatic symbols of important issues (to the participants), how might they inform further investigation?
• What was the relationship between the meanings the researchers/art-makers intended and those that were read by viewers? How might forms be refined to ensure the researchers/makers’ purposes (be they didactic or interrogative, explicit or deliberately ambivalent) were achieved?

In addition, the research team critically reflected on the projects in terms of the following question:

·         To what extent can research and collaborative learning occur simultaneously?

Arts –based research is a relatively new and emergent field at the academic level, but it has a long history within the traditions of making art work and at community level. Throughout history painters and dramatists have used their art to make sense of their own experiences and to analyse and critically interpret aspects of the society in which they live. Works such as Picasso’s Guernica and Brecht’s Mother Courage are notable examples of how art-based reports of investigation are used to provide a platform for public debate, strategic analysis and provocation for change. Boal’s work in legislative theatre in Brazil is an example at the highest political level of data gathering and analysis through art (Boal, 1998). The contemporary development of the academic domain of arts-based inquiry draws on conceptualisations by Eisner (1998) who argues that there are multiple ways of knowing, that knowledge is made not simply discovered and that inquiry will be more complete as researchers increase the range of ways in which they can investigate, describe and  interpret the world.  More recently Finley (2005) has placed art-based research squarely into the area of qualitative research and advocated arts-based inquiry as a means of community inclusion in social investigation and as a tool for political activism. 

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