Art-based Project Research Articles

Inclusive Education through the Lens of Diversity: A Case Study in an Arts School with a Focus on Chinese Students

The purpose of this research is to determine the influence of a collaborative art project between a museum and a public school on the process of inclusion and involvement of Chinese children and their families. This qualitative study is based on 9 months of observation of Art-Based Project (ABP) activities in the school and the museum, as well as interviews with parents, museum technicians, and instructors. The findings imply that the assimilation paradigm causes family separation among immigrants, which may be one reason for the high dropout rate in this population. As a result, the first technique for including immigrant children is to assist their parents. The Tandem Project, which employs the arts education model developed by the school and the museum: ABP, and the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) included in this art project have a positive impact on Chinese children's language ability, participation in school activities, furthermore, children's inclusion and family involvement has been improved.

Reflections of art history instructors on an educational digital game: A narrative case study

The current paper is based on a large art-based project that aims to explore the art history instructors’ practice-based reflections on their adoption, implementation, and use of the educational video game, ARTè: Lumiére, which is an exploration game designed to enhance art history and art appreciation courses in the context of the birth of French Impressionism. The data were gathered from three art history instructors teaching in higher education through semi-structured interviews with a particular focus on reflection on their undergraduate students’ engagement and learning experience during the gameplay. Results indicate that there were four major emergent themes, including self-reflection, reinforcement of learning, Lumiére as a game changer, and overcoming the obstacles. Regarding the instructors’ reflections and experiences, we suggest that instructors’ presence during the gameplay and the game design process might have a significant impact on the students’ learning experience.

Cultivating Art Inquiry Through Land-Based Thinking on Social Justice Art and Museum Praxis

Place has long been noticed, made, developed, and narrativized in favor of settler majorities’ economies and hegemonies. Disregarding Indigenous presence and land, the terror on the land continues in the form of dislocation and dispossession of Indigenous, Black, and other minoritized communities of color, along with racial segregation and alienation. Drawing on the scholarship of land-based and decolonizing education, this article provides the conceptual groundwork for a form of art education theory and practice concerned with place-based social justice and equity. Particularly, I propose land-based art inquiry as a decolonizing pedagogy that helps critically assess settler colonial ways of sharing and making place via spatial–temporal injustice and the normalization of settler colonial logics that pervade our daily lives. The art inquiry generates new and critical ways to engage with the land as a site of art and museum (educational) practice as exemplified in the three different sites—a graduate students’ collaborative art-based project, a contemporary artist’s praxis, and museum praxis. Graduate students’ site-specific installation and contemporary artist JeeYeun Lee’s mobile walking are artistic interventions to public places that critique settler narratives and re-story the place. They highlight the ways in which land-based art inquiry can help individuals (re)connect with and (un)learn the stories and politics of their relationships to the land, thus troubling the settler colonial territorial imperatives. Also, by bringing land-based art inquiry into the investigation of the museum as another settler colonial place seeks and brings understanding of contemporary Indigenous-led collaborative museum spatial design and (educational) praxis for decolonizing possibilities.

Play Tool Kit to Strengthen Prosocial Behaviour and Empathy among Attention-Deficit/Hyperactive Children

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects individuals’ ability to regulate their attention, impulses, and activity levels. It is commonly diagnosed in childhood but can persist into adolescence and adulthood. Children with such type of disorder are having copious problems related to social skills. Understanding these core symptoms is crucial in recognising and addressing the challenges faced by children with ADHD. Hence, some interventions has to be introduced in the form of a play toolkit, which has a significant effect on ADHD children’s prosocial behaviour and empathy. This play toolkit includes two components: play therapy and doodle therapy. Using play-based activities to enhance social skills, emotional regulation, problem-solving, and cooperation skills in a supportive and engaging environment is essential. Utilising creative activities like drawing, colouring, and art-based projects to facilitate self-expression, communication, and emotional understanding can indirectly improve social interactions. By incorporating these interventions into a comprehensive treatment plan, nurses and healthcare professionals can help children with ADHD develop essential social skills, improve their relationships with peers and adults, and enhance their overall well-being.

Art and Heritage Culture: A High-Quality Inclusive Educational Experience in One Public School in Barcelona

The goal of this study is to see how a joint art project between a museum and a public school affects the process of inclusion and involvement of Chinese students. This mixed-method study is based on a questionnaire as a pilot test, then following nine months of observing Art-Based Project (ABP) activities at the school and museum, as well as interviews with children. The Tandem Project, which employs the arts education model developed by the school and the museum ABP, as well as the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) included in this art project, have a positive impact on those aspects of Chinese children: heritage culture expression, participation in school activities, and interpersonal intelligence.

Ecological art pedagogy: co-creation for ecological transformation

ABSTRACT This research aims to investigate the pedagogical outcomes derived from the implementation of an environmental and art-based project within an after-school art programme. The study involved 18 participants between the ages of 9 and 13. Employing an art-based research approach integrated with phenomenology, the investigation sought to elucidate the participants’ emotional connections to the environment while evaluating the development of their environmentally conscious behaviours. The data were garnered through various means, including artistic works utilised in the learning process, reflective journals, worksheets, a researcher’s journal, and focus group interviews, and analyzed using an inductive approach. The research findings highlighted that ecological art inquiries exerted a significant impact on enhancing the students’ knowledge pertaining to the environment and notably fostering heightened environmental awareness. Additionally, the extracurricular activities undertaken by the students in non-classroom settings played a pivotal role in creating collective environmental consciousness, fostering a desire to participate in creative actions, questioning the nature-human relationship, developing empathy for other living beings, and making them realise that remedies for the planet’s future well-being reside intrinsically within themselves.

A monument to whom? Artist positionality in community art-based projects

Artistic interventions in the public domain are often legitimized as opportunities for the empowerment of local communities. However, the nature of such interventions is complex and cannot be inferred from stated intentions. The interaction between agents of cultural and artistic interventions and local communities is shaped by power relationships that are seldom made explicit, let alone negotiated. Here, we analyze The Gramsci Monument, a site-specific project by Thomas Hirschhorn that took place in the Forest House neighborhood (Bronx, New York) in 2013. The project has been celebrated as an example of an emancipatory practice that involved a disenfranchised local community. We show that it could be rather taken as an example of how art-driven space domestication may lead to forms of alienation and paternalism without actual sharing of creative responsibility and negotiation with the local community. We analyze the implications of this practice through a conceptual framework of artist positionality and deontological responsibility of artistic agency.

Pivots, arts practice and potentialities: Creative engagement, community well-being and arts-led research during COVID-19 in Australia

Pre-dating COVID-19 it was widely acknowledged that there was a loneliness epidemic and that prolonged loneliness and reduced human touch results in increased propensity to heart disease, stroke and clinical dementia. Given such statistics, and the use of isolation and shielding as a health response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is imperative that creative projects or research investigations embed strategies to address the potential fragmentation of community and increased difficulty of social connection. This discussion examines two Australian art-based projects – ‘A Place in Our Art’ and ‘Shorewell Presents … Dear Friend’ – to illustrate the use of arts and cultural activities to maintain and support social connection. The article draws on arts-health and performance theory to unpack project design and outcomes of using both physical and virtual creative art-based engagement strategies in a crisis to entice continued participation and support well-being.

Facilitating the Voice of Adolescents in Hospitals Through Art: A Case Report

Adolescence can be a challenging time, but even more so when diagnosed with a serious or chronic illness. Starlight Children's Foundation established the Livewire program after recognizing the unique needs of adolescents in hospitals. This article describes our experience of implementing an art-based project within the Livewire program, designed to facilitate the voice of adolescents with a serious or chronic illness and their siblings. We invited young people across Australia to contribute their artwork which would be used as the design for a deck of playing cards. The final 54 cards were a creative reflection of the unique interests, personalities, and experiences of 45 young people. In this article, we also share the experiences of two young people who contributed to this project. We conclude with our learnings in delivering an art-based project for young people that is not presented directly as “therapy”.

Using contemplative photography in transformative sustainability management education: Pedagogical applications in the United States, Russia, and Germany

Developing a sustainability mindset requires a transdisciplinary approach to business education that integrates a rational-analytic mode of thinking and an emotive-holistic understanding of the human mind. In order to cultivate the sustainability mindset of business students, we have designed a contemplative art-based project involving the creation of an electronic portfolio which consists of a student's digital photographs. We have integrated it into our teaching of management courses in the United States, Russia, and Germany, respectively. The project aims to enable business students to become more visually attentive and environmentally conscious, so that they will pay close attention to the process of building more sustainable relationships within their natural and social environments. From the interpretative phenomenological perspective, we have analyzed the students' e-portfolios in order to understand how business students make sense of environmental and human sustainability. While envisioning more transformative sustainability management education, we have also discussed the pedagogical implications of making the e-portfolios for enhancing the students' understanding of the sustainability mindset.

Re-touche

Creativity and affect in families with a family member, who is labelled as disabled, is central in this article. These families are often pinned down to individual, closed categories where everything revolves around the label “disability.” Our research goes beyond binary thinking in terms of abled/disabled and other linear explanations by using artistic processes as ethnography. We start from encounters between two people who both created something about their “non-ordinary” brothers. One (first author) made a shortfilm/documentary about her own family, the other (research participant) wrote a TV series about a man who takes care of his brother after their mother’s death, which was not autobiographical yet inspired by his own experiences. The first author distilled etchings from their encounters, which piece together different layers: the scenarist’s biographical story, the story of creating the series, the series’ script and the first author’s thoughts and readings. The concept of re-touche—of touching and being touched, and in this way returning to family fissures and creating something new from them—runs through this art-based project.

Tailor Made, Skylarking, and Making in the Humanities

Reacting to the symbolic features and historical artefacts that invite institutional self-reflection at the Royal Military College (RMC), I created a performance project leading to two storytelling events. Everyday campus life at RMC already offers opportunities for cultivating a meta-perspective – a higher-order awareness – of the institution, and the storytelling events called attention to such opportunities. I argue that, likewise, art-based projects in the humanities call attention to the creativity – the making – involved in the humanities more broadly. The first storytelling event, Tailor Made (2017), comprised stories focused on the uniform as a model and the body wearing it as an actual bearing out that model. Social and cultural life is made of the difference between models and actuals, and each story engaged the ways in which rules, systems, and practices meet with individuals in hurtful, inconvenient, funny, or messy ways. The second event, Skylarking (2018), included stories of the institutionally condoned pranks called “skylarks” and coincidentally occurred against the backdrop of a campus-wide punishment that elicited a skylark response. This event and its context showed that marking disruption with more disruption (marking failure with punishment and marking punishment with prank) is a recursion that invites higher-order thinking about existing orders.

Tailor Made, Skylarking, and Making in the Humanities

Reacting to the symbolic features and historical artefacts that invite institutional self-reflection at the Royal Military College (RMC), I created a performance project leading to two storytelling events. Everyday campus life at RMC already offers opportunities for cultivating a meta-perspective—a higher-order awareness—of the institution, and the storytelling events called attention to such opportunities. I argue that, likewise, art-based projects in the humanities call attention to the creativity—the making—involved in the humanities more broadly. The first storytelling event, Tailor Made (2017), comprised stories focused on the uniform as a model and the body wearing it as an actual bearing out that model. Social and cultural life is made of the difference between models and actuals, and each story engaged the ways that rules, systems, and practices meet with individuals in hurtful, inconvenient, funny or messy ways. The second event, Skylarking (2018), included stories of the institutionally condoned pranks called “skylarks” and coincidentally occurred against the backdrop of a campus-wide punishment that elicited a skylark response. This event and its context showed that marking disruption with more disruption (marking failure with punishment and marking punishment with prank) is a recursion that invites higher-order thinking about existing orders.

Inter-Weave: Creating a Translanguaging Space Through Community Art

This article discusses how art can contribute to the creation of a translanguaging space and how a community program can be a significant site for this collective and creative endeavor. Drawing on translanguaging theories, I founded the “Entretejer/Interweave Community School” program in collaboration with the Immigrant Resource Center, in Springdale, Arkansas to offer art-based bilingual classes. By sharing my pedagogical approach along with art-based project examples, I explore the intersection between an art-making and a translanguaging space as well as how art constitutes a key part of the translanguaging practice. First, I briefly discuss translanguaging theory and my pedagogical approaches. Next, I introduce background information about the community program and two art-based projects I facilitated as an example of art-based translanguaging pedagogy. By sharing my experience developing a community program, I attempt to initiate a dialogue on the possibilities of justice-oriented art and trans- languaging pedagogies.

Public-space tactical intervention as urban tourist allure

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze the art-based project of Full Llove Inn as a tactical urbanism intervention and urban tourist attraction. The project consisted of an elevated room-car, displayed in the public space of Amsterdam from August 2006 to September 2007.Design/methodology/approachThe research was conducted between December 2017 and November 2018 in Amsterdam. The study applied the methodological tools of semi-structured interviews, textual analysis and participatory observation.FindingsFull Llove Inn provided an extraordinary allure for visitors and residents. It created a sense of intra-personal and inter-personal existential authenticity for local and non-local guests, respectively, while introducing a pop-up hotel as a new form of tactical initiative.Research limitations/implicationsDue to the inability to contact non-local guests for interviews, the only source of data was based on tourist experiences about Full Llove Inn derived from the hotel guest book.Practical implicationsThe research suggests that pop-up hotels may be used by Destination Management Organizations as a means of strengthening the brand image and creating a competitive edge for cities.Social implicationsThe research indicates that art-inspired tactical interventions in the public space of civic environments could constitute a social capital while generating interactions between residents and visitors.Originality/valueFor the first time in the tourism literature, this study investigates the impact of tactical projects on destination branding from the perspective of both locals and visitors.

Participatory practice with queer refugees in Germany

Abstract Evidence shows that queer refugees in Germany neither have equal access to the health system, information, HIV-Testing and treatment, nor are they involved in HIV-Prevention. The community-based participatory health approach provides a valuable tool for building capacity and enabling queer refugees to create knowledge and develop appropriate prevention tools for their communities. “Your health, your rights” (2017-2018) is a 2-year community-based participatory health project, which aims to improve the involvement of queer refugees in HIV-Prevention, as well as to create appropriate prevention media in collaborative way. It is conducted by the National AIDS Organization in collaboration with partners from different immigrant organisations, queer refugees and AIDS service organisations - all based in Berlin. The components of the project include a multilingual participatory need assessment workshop, a series of capacity-building methodological workshops, a community-led art-based project and a participatory evaluation. 12 queer refuges choose to take part in the project and have been supported to document their lived experiences using community and concept mapping. Key topics and needs connected to sexual health have been jointly identified. Based on these results and in the framework of an art-based workshop participants created a design of multilingual website for queer refugees which delivers helpful information in appropriate way (www.queerrefugeeswelcome.de). The involvement of queer refugees in HIV-Prevention is possible, if it is enabled. The usage of participatory visual methods has opened up ways of participation of even highly traumatised refugees who otherwise are not able to verbally express their thoughts and enabled the communication between participants who don’t share the same language. Key messages The resources of queer refugees are identified and mobilised and community building processes are supported. The participants improved their competencies (empowerment). Service providers are able to tailor their services better to the needs of queer refugees.

Cultural participation for, with and by children – Enhancing children’s agency through art pedagogy, visual knowledge-building and learning

This article focuses on how children's rights in society can be manifested with cultural tools and through cultural participation. The article discusses cultural participation for, with and by children based on the core ideas of a Swedish governmentally initiated strategy implemented in the 1970s. The right for children to take part in cultural activities, to be culturally active and to express themselves is based on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). Art education and visual activities for children in formal and informal cultural environments and the use of contemporary art will be discussed. An art-based project in collaboration between a cultural institution and preschool and younger children is described. The main purpose of the article is to analyse what impact the use of cultural participation and cultural tools has on children's collective experience and learning, as well as to discuss and contextualise the relationship between culture, preschool and school as it is influenced by global and societal changes, particularly the increasing visual impact in society through the use of digital media and multimodality. The results show how an art gallery visit and the use of cultural narratives, such as art educational activities at a preschool based on work with a picture book, create visual knowledge and contribute to children’s agency and understanding of equity as one of the aims in the early childhood education curriculum.

参加型のアートプロジェクトによる学びの有効性に関する考察 : ≪放課後の学校クラブ≫の実践研究を通して

参加型のアートプロジェクトによる学びの有効性に関する考察 : ≪放課後の学校クラブ≫の実践研究を通して

Exploring alternative terrain in the rehabilitation and treatment of offenders: Findings from a prison-based music project

ABSTRACTThe arts in prison settings have provided an alternative or complimentary component to rehabilitation. Despite increased interest, studies capturing the voice of offenders participating in projects and the long-term impact are limited. Data from semistructured interviews with 18 men who had taken part in a music-based project while incarcerated, including one group of five participants who were tracked for 18 months with supplemented data from correctional staff and official documentation, is presented. Participants of the art-based projects comment on changes they believe to have derived from participating in the project, particularly relating to emotions, self-esteem, self-confidence, communication and social skills. An exoffender sample of participants reported that participation in art projects provide experiences that promote beneficial skills that have been useful for post prison life.

Empowering Unheard Voices through 'Theatre of the Oppressed': Reflections on the Legislative Theatre Project for Women in Afghanistan--Notes from the Field

The Taliban regime in Afghanistan helped create an image of Afghan women existing simply behind the burqa—a voiceless victim needing outsiders to rescue her. A review of western media reporting, campaigns and books and articles written about Afghan women illustrates an overwhelming tendency to exemplify—or symbolize— Afghan women with images of them dressed in the pleated blue burqa. This was particularly obvious right after the events of 11 September 2001, when books on Afghan women proliferated. This reflection is an attempt to echo those stories that often do not make it into the mainstream media. These stories come from an innovative, art-based project called ‘Legislative Theatre: Democratizing Women’s Rights in Afghanistan’—a form of participatory theatre or ‘theatre of the oppressed’, as developed by Augusto Boal. In a traditional society such as Afghanistan, where it is primarily men who occupy public spaces for discourse, women have few chances to gain access to the public sphere. As such, this lack of visibility, in and of itself, has made it easier to report on them as being helpless. During the last decade, however, certain opportunities presented themselves to broaden women’s participation in the public sphere, such as the genre of theatre under discussion here. This project therefore was an important platform to create opportunities for women to speak out and have their opinions heard. It also served as an occasion to see the other side: the enthusiasm, energy and bravery that many women exhibited in order to challenge norms and question the status quo in the face of formidable circumstances; the collective efforts and voices that are translated into political agency; and the strength coming from the inside—even if they are behind the blue garment.