In this essay, first delivered as a keynote at the Von Mythen Zu Erkenntnissen? Gegenwart und Zukunft Empirischer Forschung Zur Kulturellen Bildung (From Myths to Insights? Present and Future Empirical Research on Cultural Education) conference, sponsored by the Rat für Kulturelle Bildung on October 25, 2016, at the Bundesakademie für Kulturelle Bildung, Wolfenbüttel, Gaztambide-Fernández offers a reflection on how to approach the problem of why and to what end we might engage arts education today as well some ideas about how to frame arts education research productively. The chapter challenges arts advocates to move beyond what Gaztambide-Fernández calls the “banal empiricism” of the rhetoric of effects that shapes mainstream approaches to the arts in education. Instead, he proposes that a rhetoric of cultural production might recast the fundamental assumptions we bring to both research and practice in arts education
