Service-Learning, the Arts, and Incarceration

This paper describes three different service-learning approaches the authors utilized in graduate art education students and incarcerated residents at a municipal jail facility. By situating our experiences within feminist theory, we analyze and unpack the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. Through an analysis of teacher and student journal entries we came to see that our level of responsiveness to residents needed to increase as compared to our considerations of the university students. We came to see the significant knowledge that the residents hold about excellence in teaching and created an opportunity for the university students and ourselves to learn from the residents. We also identified three areas, breaking stereotypes, awareness of privilege, and showing empathy, that created change in the university students. We believe that service-learning in pre-service teacher preparation programs allows university students to learn from and with residents, thus helping to create more empathetic future teachers

Channelling discomfort through the arts: A Covid-19 case study through an intercultural telecollaboration project

In this article we argue, in the context of the current dominance of the performative and instrumental drives characterizing the accountable university, that language and intercultural communication education in universities should also be humanistic, addressing ‘discomforting themes’ to sensitize students to issues of human suffering and engage them in constructive and creative responses to that suffering. We suggest that arts-based methods can be used and illustrate this with an intercultural telecollaboration project created in response to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. In this way language and intercultural communication education can become a site of personal and social transformation albeit modest and piecemeal as part of a longer process. Through arts-based methodologies and pedagogies of discomfort, Argentinian and US undergraduates explored how the theme of the Covid-19 crisis has been expressed artistically in their countries, and then communicated online, using English as their lingua franca, to design in mixed international groups artistic multimodal creations collaboratively to channel their suffering and trauma associated with the pandemic. This article analyses and evaluates the project. Data comprise the students’ artistic multimodal creations, their written statements describing their creations, and pre and post online surveys. Our findings indicate that students began a process of transformation of disturbing affective responses by creating artwork and engaging in therapeutic social and civic participation transnationally, sharing their artistic creations using social media. We highlight the powerful humanistic role of education involving artistic expression, movement, performativity, and community engagement in order to channel discomforting feelings productively at personal and social levels

Using the Arts for Food Research and Dialogue

This Briefing Paper is intended to share ideas and learning arising from the authors’ experiences of using arts-based methods in food research and engagement, as well as to give some insights into the issues that arose from a workshop for academics and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) developed by Brighton and Sussex Universities Food Network (BSUFN) and hosted by the Food Research Collaboration (FRC) in 2016. It examines the use of participatory and community-centred approaches to explore pressing food policy questions, as well as providing guidance on how to apply these methods in practice. It is intended to be relevant to academics, particularly those interested in using participatory action research methods, and CSOs working with community groups on food issues. The authors’ main interest is the way in which arts-based methods provide a set of tools which can reveal, and give voice to, perspectives on food issues which remain otherwise absent from research and policy debates. In the authors' experience, this happens either because community members are not asked for their views or because of the way in which much traditional/positivist/biomedical academic research is based around pre-determined research questions that do not provide adequate space for community members to explore and voice their own concerns. It could be said that to date, much food research has failed to meaningfully engage with the general public, both during the research process itself and in raising awareness and achieving changes in the food system, which the research evidence indicates needs to happen. The paper firstly outlines why food research is a necessary and important area of exploration. Following this it examines the development, lineage and underlying principles of participatory and arts-based methodologies as approaches to research. Three arts-based and participatory methods are then reviewed in greater detail: i. Photography and film ii. Drama, and iii. Collage. These three methods were the focus of the BSUFN/FRC workshop in 2016. For each of these three examples, theoretical and methodological implications and ethical issues are discussed, enabling readers to fully consider how and why they might apply these approaches. In reviewing these emerging and alternative approaches for engaging communities in research processes, this paper presents a consideration of ideas, narratives, positions and actions relating to food, research and knowledge construction. The authors believe this paper to be an important addition to debates around how arts based and participatory methods might improve the processes, impact and contribution of food research. The paper presents a collaborative effort between academics, researchers and civil society organisations (CSOs) all of whom are concerned with improving research, learning and engagement in relation to food. The paper concludes with recommendations and suggestions on how academics and CSOs might use these methods as part of their research and/or practice

Art Talk/Creative Talk Time (C.T.T): A Framework for Using Student-Teacher Conversation as an Instructional Tool

The purpose of this study was to use arts-based inquiry through portraiture methodology, observation, artmaking and group discussion to explore the contents of student conversations while artmaking. Using Bakhtin’s conversation theory to define the activity as verbal interaction which is dependent on response and often reflects a relationship between the participants of the conversation, my goal was to isolate and develop specific student-teacher, conversation-based engagement strategies that foster rapport through the integration of student-centered themes of conversation while they made art using collage self-portraiture. Reflective of Moll and Amanti’s (2006) funds of knowledge, research included the observation and examination of both academic (conversation related to art and art instruction, and scholastic matters) and non-academic (content unrelated to art, art instruction or other scholastic matters) patterns of conversation, uncovering and connecting their identities, experiences and meaning-making through portraiture, and the ways in which those elements showed up in their conversation during artmaking. My research questions were: (1) What topics emerge during student conversations while engaged in collage portraiture? (2) What topics/questions prompt positive student-teacher interactions that build rapport as an instructional tool? (3) What conversation-based strategies might promote student-teacher engagement/Art Talk in the art room? Using participant observation methods and portraiture methodology, a micro-ethnographic approach was used as my participants were of a particular social/cultural group. My research utilized a qualitative research process and product with the goal of procuring a cultural interpretation of language, conversations, patterns and themes (Wolcott, 2008). While I conducted my research within my own art classroom, I intentionally delved into student conversations to look for themes that took me out of the role as just their teacher. I also assumed the role of micro-ethnographer, as I looked for meanings within the conversations and artworks of my students, and how our conversational exchanges reflect their identities, what their interests were, and what they value (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992)

Communication and Non-Speaking Children with Physical Disabilities: Opportunities and Reflections from Design-Oriented Research

This thesis presents a series of design-oriented studies for investigating and describing communication involving children with severe speech and physical impairments (SSPIs). The overarching goal is to inform how designers conceptualise communication that involves children with SSPIs beyond a widely cited view that communication centres around speech and happens at the level of the individual through the transmission of information. Instead, by positioning communication as co-constructed, situated and multimodal, the goal is to stimulate how one designs for digitally mediated communication by applying multiple, alternative frames that acknowledge these features. In order to achieve this goal, qualitative empirical fieldwork is undertaken that examines the everyday communication experiences of five children who have SSPIs. Drawing on theoretical influences from multimodal social semiotics and participatory design, study one and two investigate child centred accounts of communication involving children with SSPIs and their peers. The focus is on investigating communication, first in formal learning contexts involving existing augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) technologies, then in broader contexts beyond AAC use. Multi-layered perspectives are generated that consider: 1. a child’s view, by attending to children’s values and choices of modes; 2. an interactional view that attends to how communication is co-constructed in situ with other people and material objects, and; 3. a structural view, that examines the orderings of people, material objects and activities within an environment. These layered understandings produce research frames that are then utilised in study three. A design documentary is created and used to motivate design work for supporting face to face communication involving children with SSPIs and their peers with a team of designers who do not hold fixed orientations to designing assistive technologies. The findings of the three studies make three new contributions to the fields of HCI and AAC. First, the findings produce a theoretical perspective on communication, acknowledging multiple modes and displacing the taken for granted centrality of language. Second, the findings reveal design opportunities for new and existing technologies. Third, the studies contribute methodological insights for design work by considering ways of involving both children and designers when designing with and for children with SSPIs

Visualizing Support Through Speculative Digital Spaces

Rape culture permeates all facets of society. It is a culture wherein sexual violence, especially sexual violence against women, is treated as a normal and acceptable part of our daily lives. While we know that rape culture impacts many people, over the past few years we have seen and heard first hand accounts of the impact of rape culture in an unprecedented way. Social media has become an important space for those impacted by rape culture to share stories of sexual violence and harassment with viral hashtags from #YesAllWomen to #MeToo. While these stories have provided insight into the ways in which rape culture permeates society, wholistic spaces of support have not manifested themselves in online spaces in the same way. Through my work I will demonstrate how the visualization of affective, qualitative data can be used to consider what wholistic spaces of support can look like in a digital context. I will discuss the development of my research-creation project What Do You Need? as an example of how non-traditional data visualization can be used to explore the diversity of ways that people imagine supportive and empowering environments. What Do You Need? is a visualization of imaginative spaces of support that uses participant submitted visual data to make computer generated collages. Through participatory design methods and a combination of collage and computation I explore how multidisciplinary approaches to qualitative data visualization can be used to gain insight into complex issues

Leave blank (2009/2010)

Leave blank (2009/2010