Arts-based Methodology Research Articles

Feeling well, feeling cared for? Using participatory and arts-engaged research to improve understanding and professional responses to the mental health needs of care-experienced young people

ABSTRACT Care-experienced young people face significant levels of mental distress yet the nature and lived reality of this is poorly understood and undermines the degree to which professional caregivers can provide effective support. This is exacerbated by the lack of ‘voice’ and control care-experienced young people have as active producers of knowledge through research. Using a small-scale, knowledge exchange project, we sought to address these concerns by employing coproduction and participatory action research with care-experienced young people to articulate their experiences of mental distress and the kind of supports they need. Their insights were used to develop and co-deliver an online training programme to professional care givers. An arts-based methodology involving sound was utilised to enhance learning and emotional connection. The findings illustrate that: professional caregivers lack knowledge about mental health and need adequate training to support the mental health of care-experienced young people; communication and relationship-building skills are central to improving mental wellbeing; systemic change is also required; and hearing directly from young people in mental health training and amplifying their voice through the creative use of sound increases impact. These findings endorse creative, coproduced training as a valuable means of effecting the type of culture and systemic change required to significantly improve the support for care-experienced young people’s mental health and wellbeing.

Implementing Readers Theatre as an arts-based participatory research method in exploring Asian-Canadian youth identities

This article provides an overview of our experiences implementing Readers Theatre within the study “Asian-Canadian youth identities in a pandemic era: Arts-based research”. Led by Dr. Nazilla Khanlou, Principal Investigator (PI), this research uses arts-based methodologies (visual arts and dramatic arts) to explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Asian-Canadian youth identities (Khanlou et al., 2021). As part of the ongoing research, two virtual Readers Theatre workshops were conducted with 24 Asian-Canadian youth aged 16-24. The participants were divided into four groups of six youth and asked to create Readers Theatre scripts illuminating the impact of the pandemic on Asian-Canadian youth and their wellbeing. Preliminary findings from the virtual workshops highlighted mental health challenges, complex family dynamics, and the resilience of Asian-Canadian youth. The Readers Theatre scripts were rich in cultural references and personal narratives and facilitated meaningful dialogue among youth participants. This method proved effective in capturing the identities and experiences of Asian-Canadian youth during the pandemic, offering valuable insights for youth-centred practice, policy, and scholarship. Keywords: Arts-based methodologies, youth, identity, drama, Readers Theatre, COVID-19.

Globally Marginalized People Shifting Temporalities Through Arts-Based Methodologies in Educational Research

This multimodal essay represents the authors’ meditations on the power and potential of arts-based methodologies that attend to the creative traditions of Globally Marginalized People (GMP). We consider how engaging our own breadth of literacies, cultural wealth, and wells of embodied and experiential knowledges informs our research and praxis. Specifically, we investigate how harnessing these ways of knowing and being enables temporal shifting that can lead to vivid, robust, and visionary theorizations and understandings of justice for GMP. To illustrate our own temporal shifting, we offer multimodal autohistoria-teoría to illustrate how arts serve our theoretical and empirical work.

The Importance of Arts in Continuous Professional Development in Health

This paper examines the integral role of arts in continuous professional development (CPD) for healthcare professionals. The incorporation of arts such as visual arts, music, drama, and dance—into healthcare settings offers multidimensional benefits that transcend conventional training. These benefits include enhanced communication skills, empathy, emotional resilience, and creativity. By fostering these qualities, arts-based CPD initiatives support healthcare professionals in adapting to complex, emotionally charged, and ethically nuanced situations they encounter in practice. Furthermore, case studies illustrate how the arts have positively impacted clinical outcomes and healthcare team cohesion, indicating the potential of arts as an innovative tool in CPD. The paper also addresses challenges, including funding constraints and resistance to integration, and outlines future directions for establishing a robust framework to incorporate the arts into health education. The findings advocate for a broader adoption of arts-based methodologies to nurture a resilient, compassionate, and holistic healthcare workforce. Keywords: Arts in Healthcare, Continuous Professional Development (CPD), Creativity in Medicine, Arts-based Training, Healthcare Professional Development.

Creating deeper attachments: Reflections on developing arts-based pedagogy and practice within psychology

In this article we explore the potential of arts-based methodologies to contribute to pedagogy and practice in psychology. Drawing on insights developed by Elliot Eisner (2008) related to what education can learn from the arts, we first explore how Eisner's ideas, along with our experiences, might infuse research supervision. Through ‘applied practice’ we then identify some of the potential benefits and challenges of including arts-based methods during supervision. Reflections show how important it is to create a safe space, deconstruct hierarchies, and provide examples of arts-based research, along with an opportunity to experiment and share. Together, these seem to support the development of trusting mature relationships that can lead to personal growth and transformation. While we have become advocates for the potential of arts-based research in psychology our reflections also identify a number of challenges and conditions to realising such benefits.

Engaging Queer Joy Through Art With 2SLGBTQIA+ Atlantic Canadians to Challenge Gender-Based Violence

Queer and trans communities face increasing rates of gender-based violence (GBV) in North America, yet efforts to address GBV often fail to be inclusive. This article draws on a study that uses a participatory arts-based methodology to engage in intergenerational dialogue with queer and trans folks ages 14 to 50+ that highlighted queer joy as a method of resisting the oppressive cultural norms and policies that lead to GBV. We ask: What might queer joy offer art educators? We argue that, through the production and exhibition of over 300 images with queer and trans participants, we highlight queer joy and show the limits of cisheteropatriarchy—and systems that support it like settler colonialism and ableism—to offer an expansive vision of queer joy that centers solidarity building and queer temporality.

The Autoimmune Library: An Arts-Based Approach to Women of Color’s (Counter)Narratives of Chronic Illness

ABSTRACT Guided by critical race theorizing (CRT) and arts-based methodologies (i.e., metaphor and pictorial narrative mapping [PNM]), the present study analyzed the healthcare (counter)narratives of 150 United States (U.S.) women of color (i.e., Black/African American, Hispanic/Latina, Native American/Alaska Native, and Multiracial) who have autoimmune disease. Sensitized by the metaphor of a library book, participants were asked to story their healthcare journey through identification of a title, chapters, genre, and book cover description (i.e., [Illness] Storybook Survey). Using critical thematic analysis, we first identified dominant and counter-narratives present in participant storybooks, categorized by literary supra-themes of characters (i.e., dominant narrative of me versus my body, counter-narratives of me versus the system and illness as lineal), plot (i.e., dominant narrative of a hero’s journey, counter-narrative of chaos), and tone (i.e., dominant narrative of inspiration, counter-narratives of tangible self-help and humor). Next, guided by PNM, a data visualization technique, each author illustrated one counter-narrative within each literary supra-theme. Our analysis interrogates how participants’ stories both reify and resist ideological and structural power at the intersections of their racial, gender, and illness identities. Collectively, this study offers unique contributions to critical, intersectional, and arts-based approaches to communication research, and forwards new methods for studying health narratives historically located in the margins.

‘We live to write, from our life, the best of stories’: exploring Colombian women’s embodied narratives of displacement through body mapping

Drawing on research conducted in June 2019, this article explores the narratives produced by eight Colombian women to examine the embodied nature of their experiences of displacement and trauma. We frame this examination both through recent feminist geographic scholarship on displacement, trauma, and the body, as well as through the concept of territorio cuerpo-tierra, which has recently emerged from Latin American feminist communitarianism. These narratives used in this research were produced through the process of body mapping conducted as a part of an eight-day workshop in which research participants engaged in multiple arts-based methodologies. The results of this research underscore how the concept of territorio cuerpo-tierra is materialized in the experiences of displaced women through a sustained connection of self and place. They also highlight the ways that displacement and trauma connect the body/territory; refuse to be spatially or temporally contained; and provide the resources for healing, emplacement, and spatial repossession.

‘After All the Years of Separation’: Musically Representing Author L.M. Montgomery’s Suspended Romances

Canadian author L.M. Montgomery did not set out to write stories about romance. As she indicated in her journals, she wrote character-driven stories of young girls navigating their way through girlhood. However, she understood that the public, and her publishers, expected these girls to experience romance that culminated in marriage, following the societal traditions of the time. Montgomery managed this dichotomy by having many characters experience a suspended romance, delaying the romantic aspect of the relationship for as long as possible. Arts-based practice is a mode of analysis and offers the opportunity to find a new way of understanding and communicating Montgomery’s type of suspended romance. Music is, in many ways, considered romantic, so it is an appropriate medium to communicate Montgomery’s romantic narrative structures. This paper investigates Montgomery’s use of suspended romance in her novels and how this delay provided her characters with time to develop other areas of their lives. An arts-based methodology was used to identify and analyse recurring themes in Montgomery’s work, as the question is not can Montgomery’s theme of romance be musically represented but how. The result of this creative experimentation is a new musical composition that articulates these suspended romances using six different musical devices. This creative work exemplifies the intertextual link that exists between Montgomery’s work and new musical compositions.

Eating Disorder and Autism Collaborative project outline: promoting eating disorder research embedded in a neurodiversity-affirming culture.

EDAC (Eating Disorders and Autism Collaborative) is an innovative project aiming to increase research capacity by supporting collaboration in the fields of eating disorders and autism. EDAC comprises four integrated workstreams to co-produce interdisciplinary research, directed by Autistic individuals with lived experience of eating disorders. Workstream 1 will outline best collaborative practices, informing the research network. Workstream 2 will use arts-based methodologies to set research priorities, with emphasis on the perspectives of underrepresented groups. Workstream 3 will support interdisciplinary collaborations to develop innovative research. Finally, workstream 4 will maximise knowledge mobilisation with the aim of reducing barriers to rapid incorporation of research into policy and clinical practice. A core aim of EDAC is to embed a neurodiversity-affirming culture within eating disorder research and to support the development of a new generation of researchers conducting innovative and meaningful research with the potential to improve clinical outcomes.

Reframing Relationality as Cultural Work in the Global South: Moving History into the Present, and the Future.

The Global South was popularised during the 1970s in recognition of the greater economic and political power of the ‘Third World’ and as a reaction to pejorative expressions. Nevertheless, as a terminology it is formed within the colonial/modern world-system imagery and manifests multiple subaltern subjectivities and different articulations of power and resistances. In this chapter, we use the practice of talanoa as a decolonizing community arts-based methodology which is an integral part of Pacific dialogic engagement to re-narrate histories and experiences of oppression as we draw on the colonizing experiences of (hetero) gender and Whiteness shaped how these coloured our agencies. In this paper we put to work the practice and potential of talanoa as a heterodox decolonizing methodology that challenges the orthodoxies of the Global North who habitually rewards normative methodological processes. This paper located in part in the 1970s considers questions of how positionality, power and relationships are experienced and re-negotiated through the talanoa and also explores the relationship between voice and participation. Our experiences of participation articulated in this chapter take the form of narratives with an intent to interrupt, subvert and counter the orthodoxic use of analytical tools and theoretical frameworks habitually deployed and modelled across the academy in the Global North. We consider the power the talanoa has for re-negotiating cultural differences and histories situating affective intensities to guide, dis/connect, excite, divert, inspire, distract, startle, surprise, and re-orient thinking to move history into the present, and the future.

Envisioning futures through decolonised tacit knowledge: The In, Out and On method

This paper presents a method for future-building based on the journey we undertook as Design and Arts researchers in POR EL Páramo project (2021–2022) in our aim to bring closer the different actors involved in the Paramos (high Andean moorlands in Boyacá region, Colombia). We did this by understanding their everyday life better, and co-designing potential pathways towards holistic sustainable futures that serve the various communities’ needs. Through a series of social innovation workshops, we applied transdisciplinary approaches aimed at decolonising the methodologies used and its facilitation dynamics. The outcomes include our contribution to design and arts-based methodologies that aids continuity to the process of reflection: In(ward), Out(ward) and On(ward). In deploying this decolonisation-based methodology, a more powerful underlying principle came to light too: the use of arts mobilises forms of knowledge that are rather unconscious, but also extremely efficacious in generating proactive mindsets and generating bottom-up ideas. In this paper we build on and argue further, from an empirical perspective, for the utilisation of the tacit knowledge that can be transmitted through non-verbal means in social research dealing with contexts of conflict, reconciliation, and future building.

The Role of Technology in Enhancing Adaptive Behavior Skills for Students with Intellectual Disabilities

The current study documents key contributions in teaching students with intellectual disabilities using an integrative STEAM approach. This study aimed to understand the role of technology and arts-based methodologies in improving adaptive behavior skills for students with intellectual disabilities. The researcher used descriptive analytical methods to review, analyze, compare, and interpret related theories and literature. The study highlights how technology and arts-based approaches enhance adaptive skills and support development in self-care, mobility, educational skills, independence, performance, and community integration for these students. The promising finding is that an integrative STEAM approach, incorporating technology and arts-based learning, improves adaptive behavior skills for students with intellectual disabilities. Based on the results, the researcher recommends that the Ministry of Education provide guidance, counseling, seminars, and workshops for teachers on using assistive technology and arts-based methodologies due to their importance in rehabilitating and educating individuals with intellectual disabilities.

Using Arts-Based Methodologies: Facilitating First-Year Pre-Service Teachers' Collaborative Teaching of Cell Biology

Even with well-prepared lectures, some of my students still struggled to understand some of the concepts of cell biology. I therefore wondered if an exploration of teaching methods involving the arts would help them to engage with the subject content in ways that made it more accessible, and help them to understand the concepts better. Building on earlier approaches of using collaborative learning, I requested students to discuss, plan, and present to each other on cell biology concepts using arts-based teaching methods. In groups of 4-6 members, they could use any strategy such as dance, drama, music, poetry, and drawing to teach the concepts. The students collaboratively prepared content for a concept of their choice and presented it using their chosen and developed teaching strategy. Some of the strategies that students seemed to enjoy using included rapping the concepts, songs, dance, role play, and poetry. A few students resorted to individual PowerPoint presentations. The hope was that the enjoyment would translate into students' familiarisation with and understanding of the concepts better than through traditional teaching. Although the approach demonstrated that students could teach these concepts in versatile and fun ways, it did not assess their understanding of the concepts presented.

Using Arts-Based Methodologies: Facilitating First-Year Pre-Service Teachers' Collaborative Teaching of Cell Biology

Using Arts-Based Methodologies: Facilitating First-Year Pre-Service Teachers' Collaborative Teaching of Cell Biology

What Got Us Here Won't Get Us There: Critical History in Radical Black Re-imaginations of Canadian Nursing Histories.

As a "foursome" of nursing history students and scholars, upcoming, junior, and seasoned, we presented a panel on new work and possibilities related to histories of Blackness and Black nurses in Canadian nursing history. Our presentation was the 2023 keynote Hannah Panel Presentation for the joint Canadian Society for the History of Medicine (CSHM-SCHM) and the Canadian Association for the History of Nursing (CAHN-ACHN) conference. Reflecting and expanding our perspectives, we share the relevance and significance of engaging with histories of Canadian Blackness and (in)visibility of Blackness in nursing history. This paper considers the overarching question of how does engaging with histories of Canadian Blackness serve as an anti-racist strategy when examining, analyzing and understanding the history of nursing and health care? A core tenant of this work aims at acknowledging how institutional relationships of power are reproduced within scholarship unless there is space for radical re-imaginations. The disruption to power is achieved by exploring the connections between nursing and history from the perspective of Black nurses' history or Black feminist thought. We also disrupt power by our form, in challenging expectations of scientific inquiry as the only format of valid knowledge production within the discipline. Possibilities of arts-based methodology as a site for democratization in nursing knowledge are evoked through the metaphoric language (water, fire, air and earth) interwoven within the text. We highlight how each of us engages with nursing history, further complicating previous narratives of our collective Canadian past. In publishing our thoughts on historical inquiry in a nursing journal, we hope to provoke more curiosity and interest in history within our discipline as a site for liberation!

Animating migration journeys from Colombia to Chile: expressing embodied experience through co-produced film

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the process of co-producing an animated film about the migration journeys of Colombian women resident in Antofagasta, Chile. It first establishes the relationship between feminist epistemologies and arts-based methodologies, which hinges on embodiment. It then turns to a detailed discussion of using film co-production as a research method for accessing and expressing embodied experiences of migration. This discussion highlights how moments of discomfort (Gokariksel, Hawkins, Neubert, and Smith, 2021) experienced by the researcher motivated the search for a more collaborative methodological approach that was better attuned to lived experience. This included striving towards more inclusive practices with respect to recruitment, anonymity, and confidentiality. Moments of discomfort also revealed how care and caring responsibilities are entangled with research, and how they gender possibilities of participation and production for community co-producers and artists, as well as for researchers. Finally, through discomfort, lessons were learned about the politics of representing experiences of migration, violence, and endurance, as well as joy. The paper concludes that, whilst by no means a panacea, collaborative arts-based research methods can offer an innovative toolset for exploring embodied experience and for navigating the relational and representational complexities attendant to research.

245 Drawing on Arts-Based Methodologies to Elicit Transgender and Gender Diverse (TGD) Children’s Experiences in Health Care

OBJECTIVES/GOALS: Understand how prepubescent TGD children experience pediatric care with a dual purpose of informing clinical practice and presenting alternative methods for research with children. Centering their perspectives is critical to improving care for this age group, ultimately improving TGD health. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: A participatory arts-based study involving drawing, photo elicitation, and narrative interviews with prepubescent TGD children (n=15) in the Pacific Northwest. Participants will make photos and draw a picture of their most recent pediatric visit. Participants guide the analysis and interpretation of their artwork, informing subsequent interviews. Interviews are coded and interpreted using inductive thematic analysis at the semantic level, and verified by participants and near-peer community partners. The combination of multiple data sources that represent both stimuli and verifiers of perceptions provide methodological triangulation. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Early pilot data with community partners suggest that TGD children do not feel sufficiently supported in pediatric settings, which impacts their sense of safety and agency in the clinical context. Findings will inform changes to clinical practice to improve gender affirmation for prepubescent children, positively impact child-caregiver relationships, and ultimately improve health care and wellbeing for TGD people. Observations related to the implementation of novel methodologies will inform future research practices intended to include younger children as active agents in the knowledge production process. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE: There are missed opportunities to positively impact children’s health and caregiver-child relationships when gender affirming care is overlooked in the pediatric context. This study provides first-hand multi-media perspectives to inform improvements in prepubescent gender affirming pediatric care.

Towards attentive, playful arts-based methodology with children

This paper shares methodological insights from our research which sought to centre children in the production of knowledge during the 2020 global pandemic to consider how this can inform research with children beyond the crisis. Drawing on our longitudinal participatory arts-based research with 30 children aged 9–12 during 2020–22, the paper illustrates our response to the shifting research landscape which included navigating social restrictions to develop child-centred ways of working with socially distanced arts-based methods and technologies. The paper sets out key principles focused on foregrounding children’s ways of knowing and attentive seeing which underpinned our reframing of the research encounter from one in which adults are intent on extracting children’s ready-made thoughts to a space in which knowledge generation is recognised as a process of co-construction and engagement with children. Central to this process is our commitment to feminist care ethics and the application of principles from early childhood research and pedagogy which prioritise attentiveness to younger children’s rhythms and pace. Our aim, in setting out an approach which makes a space for playfulness with older children, is to elaborate the potential of slower, attentive methods and to offer a methodological framework to address to wider questions about what arts-based methods do.

Portraits of Resistance: Exploring Intra-personal, Social, and Institutional Resistances through the Use of Arts-Based Research among Racialized Parents of Autistic Children and Youth

The lives of children who live at the intersectional nexus between childhood autism and race may be considered as “shadow stories” that have remained silenced in autism literature. We explored the experiences of racialized parents who provide care to autistic children. We drew on a theoretical framework known as DisCrit and decolonizing arts-based methodologies. Racialized parents of autistic children demonstrated resistance along various themes, including fighting the system, protecting my child, and creating cultural communities. We join black girlhood studies, critical race theory, and disabled children’s childhood studies by continuing the journey of decentering Whiteness in childhood disability research. We demonstrate how disabled racialized communities engage in activism and social justice while forming powerful counter-discourses.