Arts-informed Research Research Articles

Exploring Language Learning Experiences of Kurdish and Turkish Asylum Claimants in Canada Through Arts-Informed Research

According to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the highest level of displacement on record was reached in 2019 with 79.5 million people being forced to migrate (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2020). Although there is a significant influx of asylum seekers arriving in Canada from Turkey, there have been no studies completed in Canada that focus on the experiences of Kurdish and Turkish refugee claimants. Asylum seekers’ lived experiences need to be further investigated because their precarious legal status together with changing governmental policies may limit their access to language education and resettlement programs. Grounded in the arts, this paper analyzes the role of languages and language-learning experiences on Turkish and Kurdish asylum seekers and their integration into Canadian life. Participants were given the opportunity to document their challenges, needs, concerns and successes related to their integration and language-learning experiences by creating different art forms. Analysis of the data is made through the lens of Cooper’s (2011) Bridging Multiple Worlds Theory and Freire’s (1972) concept of critical consciousness. This research will be informative for educators and policy makers involved in the education of young adults from refugee backgrounds.

Assembling threads of identity: installation as a professional learning site for teachers

ABSTRACT This article presents installation as a professional learning site for early childhood teachers to visualise relationships between key events, people and places influencing their professional identity journeys. Aesthetic processes of collecting, creating and representing the ways teachers see their evolving identities offer opportunities to reveal connections and influences that impact identity development. This investigation of teachers’ unfolding stories provoked the methodological design of seven ‘aesthetic frames’ for uncovering and sharing what was revealed about self-as-teacher. Contributions from six early childhood teachers were shared with the primary researcher over a period of 14 weeks before being assembled and viewed collectively in a final focus group as installation. Selected frames are offered in this article as storied forms of visual narrative that present participating teachers with opportunities for critical reflection. As an arts-informed research process, installation provided teachers with a uniquely aesthetic model for understanding and transforming their identity journeys. The immediacy of lived teaching experience captured through image and text also prompting teachers to see with refreshed perspective, new ways for expressing and evaluating pedagogy–practice connections.

Examination of Contemporary and Promising Research Strategies in Art Therapy

Questioning whether the hierarchy of evidence is a good fit for the art therapy profession furthers the scholarly climate of art therapy research practices. Contemporary art therapy research practices are reviewed in 8 notable areas: effectiveness, salience, functionality, appropriateness, safeness, cost-effectiveness, program satisfaction, and acceptance. Substantiating the knowledge base in these areas will expand the evidence base for art therapy and provide practical strategies for future studies. Recommendations for integrating arts-informed and arts-based research are considered. Alternatives to the hierarchical model ensure that heterogenous data are understood as interlocking and complementary.

Arts-Informed Inquiry: Possibilities and Potential for Decolonising Methodology

This paper explores the potential and contextual difficulties of experimenting with arts-informed research as a methodology through a decolonizing transnational feminist lens in the context of Pakistan. The approach was applied as part of a study with community development workers to explore the theory and practice or praxis of empowerment in development discourse. Although challenging, I believe that the approach has the potential to make research more relevant, accessible, and community-centered, honouring diverse ways of knowing. It can facilitate critical collaborative meaning-making in every day contexts, which is important for community development, women’s movements, and feminist theorizing.

“A Space Where People Get It”: A Methodological Reflection of Arts-Informed Community-Based Participatory Research With Nonbinary Youth

This article is a methodological reflection of Bye Bye Binary, a community-based participatory research project (CBPR) that explored nonbinary youths’ experiences of identity development, engagement in activism, discrimination, and mental health in Ontario, Canada. The arts-informed method of body mapping was employed in a workshop format to garner the experiences of 10 nonbinary youth (aged 16–25), in conjunction with additional qualitative methods (i.e., individual interviews and reflective notes). Findings suggest that the body-mapping workshop fostered a safe environment that promoted idea generation, affirmation, self-exploration, and connections through a shared identity, thus creating “a space where people get it.” Methodological challenges that arose throughout the process are discussed, including engagement in art as “awkward,” barriers of limited time and funding, participant recruitment, and collaboration and integration. Lastly, the authors reflect on their learnings engaging in CBPR and provide insights into how researchers can move forward and apply these methods and processes into their own work engaging in arts-informed research or with nonbinary individuals.

Teaching Lives: An Arts-Informed Exploration of Teacher Experience

With this article we connect the knowledge and experiences of two retired schoolteachers to present-day paradigms of learning and teaching in schools through narrative and arts-informed research processes. By extracting meaning from narratives of teacher experience and representing those meanings using musical and visual art media and methods, we hope to engage percipients in a form of “empathetic participation” that may lead to new and/or revitalized conceptions of teaching and learning, inform current pedagogical practices, and enhance teachers’ sense of belonging to an intergenerational community of educators.

Walking through Theory

This article describes my experiences teaching the graduate research course, “Research Survey,” where I used an artfully imagined assignment focused on the development of theoretical frameworks. Through practitioner and arts-informed inquiry, I explore how students reflected and made sense of their theoretical frameworks by creating three-dimensional miniature spaces. This inquiry seeks deeper understanding of the usefulness of arts- and image-based practices in student and teacher negotiation of complex knowledge formation in higher education contexts. The goal of the research is to answer the question: How might the creation of three-dimensional miniature spaces allow students to develop and understand their theoretical research frameworks?

Oasis in a concrete jungle: arts-informed methods in social work classrooms

ABSTRACTThis article presents a qualitative arts-informed inquiry on teaching and learning in social work education. Using arts-informed research methodology and grounded theory methodology, the research analyses ten interviews of social work educators in two Canadian provinces. This article focused on how university educators use arts-informed methods of teaching about social justice through anti-racist and decolonizing lenses; also discussed are the educators’ personal and professional transformation and development within this process. The main findings discuss the importance of creating an ‘artful’ space as a platform for experiential, embodied and emotive learning, which offers an innovative, more holistic and comprehensive way of teaching social justice. This way of teaching emphasizes personal transformation, giving space to marginalized voices and expression; as well as collective co-creation of meaning and creating practical tools for future social change. The study also touches upon challenges and gaps in using an arts-informed approach, which include student resistance to alternative ways of education, expressed specifically by racialized educators and ambiguity related to assessing artful works in an academic setting. The paper ends with recommendations for social work education.

Expanding the Role of Digital Photographs in Evaluation Practice: Documenting, Sense-Making, and Imagining

Abstract: Program stakeholders and evaluators routinely generate and share digital photographs. Three frameworks for using photographs in evaluation practice are discussed: documenting social change, facilitating sense-making, and inspiring and imagining social change. These are rooted in scholarship from arts-informed inquiry and visual sociology and anthropology. Using this framework, a review of existing literature demonstrates an extensive use of photographs for documentation and a growing use of photographs for sense-making and inspiring and imagining social change in evaluation practice. The paper concludes with a case example of how an evaluation team used digital photographs in an evaluation of a teacher professional development program.

Enclothed Knowledge: The Fashion Show as a Method of Dissemination in Arts-Informed Research

In this article, I investigate the processes, benefits, and dilemmas of producing a fashion show as a method of dissemination in arts-informed qualitative research. I examine a project that used a fashion show to analyze and represent interview findings about men’s understandings and performances of masculinities. Fashion shows facilitate the dissemination of new qualitative data — what I coin “enclothed knowledge” — that is embodied and inaccessible through static or verbal descriptions. Fashion shows also enable participants to shape knowledge circulation and allow researchers to engage diverse audiences. Despite these benefits, researchers have to be mindful of ethical dilemmas that occur from the absence of anonymity inherent in public performances; therefore, I suggest strategies to mitigate these threats to research ethics. Ultimately, I argue that fashion shows advance social justice because the platform can transform narrow, stereotypical understandings of marginalized identities.

Arts-Informed Research with Children and Youth in a Post-flood Community

Arts-Informed Research with Children and Youth in a Post-flood Community

Play-making with migrant farm workers in Ontario, Canada: a kinesthetic and embodied approach to qualitative research

This article is a reflection on the use of theatre creation in qualitative research with migrant farm workers in Ontario, Canada. In this article I examine how the fundamentally embodied and kinesthetic dimensions of seasonal agricultural workers’ lives in Canada highlight the need to seek out and develop corresponding embodied approaches that are able to access and accurately represent the fraught and dynamic nature of workers’ experiences. I bring together ideas from both arts-informed research and participatory action research, and I examine how engaging research participants directly in collective theatre creation can effectively disrupt accepted ways of being and offer an important intervention on worker habitus. I reflect on how through incorporating an element of play-creation in the qualitative research process, I was able to a) access forms of knowledge that may otherwise have remained tacit and b) offer a disruption of the norms of isolation and antagonism endemic to daily life in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. This article contributes to debates concerning the role of the arts in qualitative and action research, as well as to those researchers who are seeking innovative ways of designing and implementing qualitative research in the areas of precarious work and citizenship.

EXHIBITING CREATIVE STRENGTH IN THE COMMUNITY: FAMILIAL CAREGIVING, THE ARTS AND DEMENTIA

This research took place in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada between 2012 and 2014. This qualitative arts-informed research elicited the stories of ten individuals with the experience of caring for a loved-one with dementia. Beginning with one on one semi-structured interviews, the participants described their caregiving journey and their understanding of creativity as well as its connection to dementia and dementia care. Following the interviews, the participants engaged in the process of creating a piece for an exhibit in the community. Through poetry, photo, painting, short story, geo-caching, mixed media, digital story, singing and song-writing, the ten participants exhibited their creative strengths. Findings show that encouraging creativity in caregivers addresses the health and well-being of caregivers, those living with dementia, and the community. This paper explores the potential of a strengths-based perspective when combined with creativity. This talk provides an overview of the arts-informed research process, a photographic walk-through of the “Care-full Pieces of Creativity” exhibit, and a discussion of its impact.

Rendering the paradoxes and pleasures of academic life: using images, poetry and drama to speak back to the measured university

ABSTRACTMeasurement of academic work has become more significant than the intellectual, pedagogical, cultural, political and social practices in which academics and students engage. This shifting emphasis creates paradoxes for academics. They experience a growing sense of disconnection between their desires to develop students into engaged, disciplined and critical citizens and the activities that appear to count in the enterprise university. As measurement discourses preclude the possibilities of human emotion and hinder intellectual labour, we embarked on an arts-informed research project that established new creative spaces for our colleagues to illustrate the pleasures and paradoxes of their academic work. In the research project, we developed critical pedagogies through art and poetry that enabled academics to speak back to university management – and each other – about how they experience their work. In this paper, we draw upon poststructural ‘micro-physics’ of power, the poststructuralist ‘politics of reinscription’, and art, poetry and drama as critical pedagogies to interrogate the potential of arts-informed research to speak back to the measured university. The key contribution of this article is to recommend arts-informed methodologies as a forum for dissent and resistance at a time when the spaces of collegiality, pleasure and democracy in the measured university are under attack.

Teaching is … opening up spaces to explore academic work in fluid and volatile times

ABSTRACTUniversities are built upon the collaborative work of academic staff and students, yet the nature of this work has been undergoing profound and rapid change. Pressures within Australia’s higher education sector have led to a fracturing of traditional academic roles and growing feelings of disconnection. While there have been many narrative, ethnographic and autoethnographic explorations of academic work, few studies have employed visual arts-informed methodologies to interrogate the ways in which academics represent their teaching, research and community engagement work. In this article we outline findings about academics’ views of their teaching work. These findings surfaced from an arts-informed participatory research project, that sought to open up a space for (re)presentations of academic work. With a focus on teaching, three through lines emerged during the analysis: voicing absences and resistances; initiating layers of reflexive moments and expressing complexity through collage. We argue that the academics’ responses allow us to trace the emotional terrain of contemporary academic work. They also open up ways to unpack, express and make visible academics’ complex thoughts, feelings and ideas about teaching practices.

Creating Spaces for Arts-Informed Responses in Teacher Education Programs

We address the bene ts and challenges of using an arts-informed response in an undergraduate teacher education course from the perspective of a teacher and two students. Feminist pedagogies provide the theoretical lens through which our experiences are analyzed. From the teacher’s perspective, this arts-informed approach modeled to pre-service teachers how they could use arts-informed inquiry in their future classrooms, to engage in conscious raising about inequality, while meeting di erent learning styles in their classrooms. From the students’ perspective, it was surprising to be invited to do an arts-informed reading response. Acceptance depended on the perception of risk. Our conclusion is that more space should be created for arts-informed approaches in undergraduate teacher education programs.

Encouraging a Curiosity of Learning: Reflecting on Arts-Informed Spaces Within the Classroom

It is through imagination that we create arts-informed inquiry spaces of learning. Our teaching practices and research include being awake to would-be artistry by encouraging a curiosity of learning. In these spaces we have learned to be open to surprise, play, and possibilities. As we make arts-informed methods integral to teaching and learning, we purposefully engage; in our classroom is where experiences call forth inquiry. In this paper we make visible four common threads. These threads include: considering the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of our practices; the signi cance of relationships; playfulness, imagination, and world travelling; and reconsidering our teaching and research practices.

Capturing the Imagination: Arts-Informed Inquiry as a Method in Program Evaluation

Abstract: Qualitative approaches in evaluation continue to expand, and this article focuses on the potential for the Arts to contribute to innovation in evaluation. Arts-informed inquiry is an approach that works within, augments, and extends traditional forms of qualitative approaches. This study documents an educational program evaluation that intentionally plans for, uses, and reflects upon arts-informed inquiry. Three considerations found central to arts-informed inquiry are presented: (a) working with layers of context, (b) enhancing access and engagement, and (c) supporting differentiated communication. Arts-informed inquiry emerged as a purposeful methodology that enhances the processes and forms of representation within the field of evaluation.

Beyond normative ethics: Ethics of arts-based disability research

In Western culture, the pervading medical model of disability has characterized disability as a problem in need of a solution: an unwanted condition that demands a cure. Even the word “disability” is unavoidably negative: structurally it signifies a loss or a lack, a state that exists only because it falls short of something better. Contrary to mainstream thinking, disability is not a natural state of inferiority or a stroke of misfortune; rather, disability is a culturally fabricated narrative of embodiment. As Scully (2008) observes, representations of disability, created in the main by non-disabled people, tell normative bodies what they want to know – or think they want to know about non-disabled people. Arts-based mediums have the potential to effect positive change and alter prevailing perceptions of embodiment. Disability arts provide individuals living with disabilities with opportunities to communicate their perspectives in sustainable ways and speak back to culturally dominant images and stories. One such initiative, Project Re•Vision, uses the power of arts-informed research to tell stories from the position and leadership of those who embody difference. In doing so, the project seeks to challenge conventional understandings of disability as an ailment to be cured. Although much academic discussion has focused on arts-informed research ethics, there has been little consideration of the ethics of conducting “disability” arts-informed research. Our paper will therefore explore what is distinct about disability arts-informed research, as well as the unique ethical issues that arise when working with non-normative bodies. Le modèle médical du handicap, qui envahit la culture occidentale, caractérise le handicap comme un problème en besoin d’une solution : une condition indésirable qui exige un remède. Le mot handicap lui-même est construit de façon inévitablement négatif : structurellement, il signifie une perte ou un manque, un état qui existe seulement en ne pas être à la hauteur de quelque chose de mieux. Mais le handicap, contrairement à la pensée dominante, n’est pas un état naturel d’infériorité ou d’un coup de malheur ; plutôt, le handicap est un récit culturellement fabriqué et incarné corporellement (corporéité). Comme Scully (2008) remarque, les représentations du handicap, créées en général par des personnes non handicapées, disent aux organismes normatifs ce qu’ils veulent savoir – ou pensent qu’ils veulent savoir sur les personnes handicapées. Les médiums artistiques ont le potentiel d’effectuer des changements positifs et modifier les perceptions dominantes de corporéité. Disability Arts permettent à des personnes vivant avec un handicap la possibilité de communiquer leurs points de vue de manière durable et de parler de nouveau à des images et des histoires culturellement dominantes. Une telle initiative, le Projet Re•Vision, utilise la puissance de la recherche guidée par les arts pour raconter les histoires générées par les gens qui incarnent la différence. En ce faisant, le projet vise à contester l’interprétation conventionnelle du handicap comme une maladie à guérir. Bien que beaucoup de discussions académiques mettent l’accent sur la manière dont un déontologie artistique peut guider la recherche, il y a peu de considération de comment un déontologie « disability arts » peut être mobilisé dans la recherche. Notre article vise à clarifier comment le « disability arts » peut guider l’entreprise de la recherche, ainsi que les questions déontologiques qui se posent lorsque l’on travaille avec et dans des corps non-normatifs.

Challenging interpretive privilege in elite and professional sport: one [athlete’s] story, revised, reshaped and reclaimed

This performance autoethnography explores some of the tensions, contradictions and consequences of stories in elite sport. Using my embodied experience, the performance questions how the socially constructed physical ‘I’ is created by those with interpretive privilege. Sports news media, collected over a 14-year period – stories about me – provide one strand of a dialogical narrative in which the focus is sporting excellence. Contrasting these stories, I draw on diary extracts, stories, poems and songs, written by me, to weave a second reflexive understanding of my self, identity and life-playing professional sport. The justification for turning to arts-informed research practice was to explore and include creative, embodied, subjective and emotional aspects of life, identities and selves which can be too easily obscured or omitted through traditional methodological approaches. This approach makes possible a more holistic portrayal of identity development, selfhood and relationships, and therefore provides some unusual, if not unique, insights regarding how athletes’ lives can be interpreted, shaped, edited, revised and reclaimed. I hope the performance, and its textual representation here, contributes to the expanding use of arts-informed research by showing the relevance to practitioners in elite and professional sport.