Can the Arts Change the World? The Transformative Power of the Arts in Fostering and Sustaining Social Change

A group of nonprofit leaders working in the arts, advocacy, political organizing, social services, and education explored the connection between community organizing and creative expression by engaging in collective activities, including visiting various examples of community arts, and experimentation with their own practice. Through this process, the group concluded that arts could be socially transformative; that community arts can create a safe space that allows people to trust and be open to changing; that art can help people reflect together and not talk past one another; and that the process of creating together can be healing and sustaining

Sterling Houston Papers

E-mail from Arnold Aprill to Sterling Houston, prominent San Antonio playwright. He has received a script for one of Houston's plays, Cameoland, and is writing to comment on several parts of the story. This includes notations on character development, music, and imagery

Wellbeing in classroom arts collaborations

While the research undertaken for this paper was not exclusively addressing wellbeing in arts collaborations in school classrooms, its undeniable presence was acknowledged consistently by all participants, teachers in particular. Faced with the possibility of the complex deployment of a National Curriculum in Australia for the first time, teachers are generally reticent about the impact of a curriculum designed to measure student progress and reduce capacity for wellbeing. This chapter aims to draw some findings about the often ignored presence of wellbeing at the site of collaborative arts practice that is used to engage students across curriculum areas in Primary school. Wellbeing in education contexts is often assumed, yet the advent and adoption of the National Arts and Health Framework suggests that communities (in whatever context) should address the health (and financial) benefits of longer-term programs that promote wellbeing

Wellbeing and arts education: opportunities for increasing advocacy

The importance of wellbeing for social and community health is often predicated on a ‘medical model’. This paper explores existing research which proposes a return to Aristotle’s eudaimonic understanding of wellbeing. An Eudaimonic approach values pleasure, enjoyment and beauty. However, the absence of wellbeing from policy documents related to arts education is of concern, particularly as the arts have been shown to increase empathy, tolerance and imagination. This paper therefore advocates for the transformational quality of experimentation, evident in the arts, which increases the wellbeing of students in a range of ways including the ability to recognise and explore nuance