Expanding and Expounding Upon Forum Theater to Engage Spect-actors in Virtual Spaces

In this article, we analyze our experiences of jokering in online spaces during the pandemic. Our journey traversed the 2020/2021 academic year, engaging in Forum Theater work with a local university and community organization. During our planning, leading, and reflecting on these experiences themes emerged addressing the efficacy of practicing Forum Theater in an online setting, as well as recommendations for TO practitioners who wish to pursue online Forum Theater in the future

Transforming Data Through Literary Métissage: Learning Science Educators’ Leadership/Followership Style Toward Engagement in Science Education

This presentation focuses on critical arts-based research methodology to explore how science educators’ lead the next generation to become engaged in science. This study entailed analyzing their formative experience, understanding, and practice of engagement in science as well as how they understood socio-political and cultural factors that mediate how science identities are socialized and engaged in relationship to equity or inequity, engagement or disengagement, and leadership/followership. Literary métissage is a qualitative research tool. According to Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers and Leggo (2009), it both describes and interprets the participants’ experiences documented by the researcher. Métissage is an intentional combining of diverse ways of knowing fosters opportunities for critical conversations around difference linked to socio-historical formations (i.e. language, nation), colonization, and globalization. The presentation will focus on methodological processes and provide constructed métissages from the data. I discuss the 4 phases of data generation – individual (life writings) and collective (focus groups) using arts-based methods to illuminate a research strategy for describing, interpreting, and combining science educators’ experiences without erasing difference. I demonstrate weaving textual constructions originating from memory, drawings, image theatre, and story characterize how literary métissage strategic examinations of other factors (i.e. social, political, cultural), make meaning about lived experiences

Weaved Journeys: Life Writings of Leading and Engagement in Science Education

This study’s purpose was to explore science engagement and in/equity through science educators’ narratives of servant leadership at both the K-12 and higher education levels in the United States. The research question was: How have participants become and led others to become engaged in science? I took an arts-based approach using drawings and autobiographical data to initiate and create metissages focused on becoming engaged in science education. The findings were that: (1) Participants helped marginalized students understand the culture of science through pedagogical strategies that connected self and science; (2) Participants recognized and countered systemic forms of oppression for students who are marginalized in science education through outreach in STEM; and (3) Participants offset disengagement in science among underserved groups through meaningful relationships and presented non-dominant examples of scientific inquiry. I discuss their implications for professional development and provide recommendations for future research concerning leadership/followership aimed at promoting science equity

Embodied Apprehensions: Jokering and Brokering Physical Engagement

Like the qualitative researcher, jokers (using Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed to facilitate dialogue) help participants discover, understand and seek resolutions to problems. However, the idea of the joker is only a facilitator is misleading. Instead, the co-constructive nature involved jokering expands the research borders to a community effort of meaning making and therefore assuming the role of joker involves negotiating (brokering) ourselves and others in the roles of spectator, actor, and spectactor. This session provides embodied reflections, images we reconstruct, that illustrate some of the apprehensions we have encountered when jokering physical engagement. It raises questions about ethical leadership in a space of vulnerability and uncertainty. This session is congruent with the theme of the conference, which focuses on phenomenology, in that we offer a creative approach to sharing data on our lived experience with the practice of jokering and reflections as thoughts and images we narrative verbally and physically. This session offers a unique opportunity to see, hear, touch and reconstruct data

Goodbye to All That!: Symposium on the Special Issue

This session will act as the final peer review panel for TQR\u27s special issue on Charles Vanover and Andrew Babson\u27s ethnodrama, Goodbye to All That! Goodbye to All That! was performed for the TQR Editorial board at TQRC 2016 and then again in Saint Petersburg\u27s The Studio @ 620, The 2016 Annual Conference of the University Council of Educational Education, and at the University of South Florida\u27s Interdisciplinary Symposium on Qualitative Methodologies. The session will begin by presenting photos and excerpts from the TQRC 2016 performance, and then will present the performer\u27s responses that make up the content of the special issue. Vonzell Agosto, Cynthia Lubin Langtiw, and Charles Vanover will discuss the process of editing the different papers. Johnny Saldaña and Ron Chenile will respond to the work

Augmenting Mental Health Support for Patients Accessing Different Degrees of Formal Psychiatric Care through a Supportive Text Messaging Program: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial

Patients feel more vulnerable when accessing community mental health programs for the first time or after being discharged from psychiatric inpatient units. Long wait times for follow-up appointments, shortage of mental health professionals, lack of service integration, and scarcity of tailored support can weaken their connection to the health care system. As a result, patients can present low adherence, dissatisfaction with treatment, and recurrent hospitalizations. Finding solutions to avoid unnecessary high-cost services and providing tailored and cost-effective mental health interventions may reduce the health system burden and augment patient support. We propose implementing an add-on, supportive text messaging service (Text4Support), developed using cognitive–behavioural therapy (CBT) principles to augment mental health support for patients attending to or being discharged from psychiatric care in Nova Scotia, Canada. This randomized controlled trial aims to investigate the effectiveness of Text4Support in improving mental health outcomes and overall mental well-being compared with usual care. We also will examine the intervention’s impact on health services utilization and patient satisfaction. The results from this study will provide evidence on stepped and technology-based mental health care, which will contribute to generating new knowledge about mental health innovations in various clinical contexts, which is not only helpful for the local context but to other jurisdictions in Canada and abroad that are seeking to improve their health care