Keywords

Arts-Based Methodologies and Youth at the Edge

The arts have always offered ways to represent the human condition. This book is a political project about educational change that offers a kaleidoscope of different creative processes and practices that bring to light local and specific voices of young people who are navigating the edges of society. Arts-based practices are grounded in relationality, and each chapter offers a unique insight into the affective domain generated through creative processes. Examination of the creative practices and approaches presented in this book disrupt the taken-for-granted ways of interpreting and understandings young people’s world. New insights have emerged from young people’s creative practices, such as music, visual art, poetry, sculpture and performance in collaboration with the researchers. This book showcases creative methodologies that inform ways that young people as co-researchers and co-creators name their complex issues of concern and at the same time share emergent solutions. Arts-based methodologies privilege relationality through the frames of feminism, new materialism, and critical theory. Arguably, these frames facilitate the emergence of alternative voices and new knowledges that informs a key aim of the book.

Arts-based methodologies rely on imagination and aesthetics (Franks et al., 2014; Greene, 1995) to generate insights through the process of artistic production and reflective practices (Kraehe & Brown, 2011). Creative methodologies also involve embodied experiences that change both research and participant understandings of contexts and points of view (Efland, 2007; Wang, 2001). When research design includes imagination as part of the process for re-examining site-specific issues, such as disengaged youth, domestic violence or misrecognition (Fraser, 1997), multiple insights and solutions are generated (Miksza, 2013; Thomson & Sefton-Green, 2010). The value of such approaches is in their power to mobilise affect, utilise multiple intelligences, and offer various modes of representation and expression.

In contemporary society, there are a lot of visual distractions that fuel a sense of uncertainty about how one can comfortably fit in the world. The arts-based methodologies explored in collaboration with youth and young people throughout this book, highlight the use of creative practices as tools to deconstruct visual ‘noise’ and the mis-representation of young people. Many of these chapters disrupt deficit and homogenous positionings of young people in policy, advertising, and schooling. This book contains exemplars of counter stories by young people that highlight agency by disrupting the deficit narratives of being defined as marginalised.

In Chap. 2 in Part I, Howard and Price present ‘Imagining an Education System Responsive to Young People’s Needs: Past, Present and Future Positioning of Youth and Young People’. The authors address the need to imagine a future world worth living in and consider how one chooses to live in that world from a youth perspective. Countering the negative experiences of youth who are navigating institutions that supress rather than liberate, this chapter highlights the potential of co-designing hopeful futures where young people lead the charge to mitigate neoliberalism and its corollary of limited framings of how one lives in the world. Employing arts-based methodologies, the authors explore the notion of freedom and how such freedom needs to be contextualised from the standpoint of young people.

Part II: ‘Enacting Arts-Based Methodologies with Young People at the Edge through Co-design’ commences with Chap. 3: ‘Against Binaries: Images, Affects and Sites of Engagement’. In the chapter, Hickey-Moody and Horn deconstruct the notion of ‘at risk’ and the potential that this positioning may reinforce the very thing youth workers and organisations are trying to overturn. Deficit positioning, they argue, is produced by historical and social framings where care is reduced to administrivia and organisations are forced to become policed sites of control for young people. This chapter employs a range of useful interlinked framings to reconnect education to the lived realities of young peoples’ emotions and themes that are contextually, religiously, and culturally located within communities. The authors further apply a culturally responsive pedagogy, drawing on collective and community knowledge that relocates learning into the space where young people have agency to represent their worlds in safe spaces, at times individually, and other times collectively. This is reflected through the collaborative future cities initiative at Otter Brook Primary School. The research highlights the layers of entanglements, the complexities of subjectivities and the border control produced within schooling through risk discourse. The creative methodologies employed thereby provide opportunities for students to ensure they were no longer mispresented as being on the ‘edge’.

Chapter 4, ‘Students Researching Inequality: Perplexities and Potentialities of Arts-Informed Research Methods for Students-as-Researchers’, shares Eve Mayes’ and Merinda Kelly’s experiences of working with ‘students-as-researchers’, who co-design and engage in research as part of a Youth Advisory Council or YAC group. In the chapter they highlight three da(r)ta moments. Working in groups, the students-as-researchers identify issues that concern them, which they unpack using arts-based processes. Rather than applying a participatory action research model, Mayes and Kelly engage young people as apprentices in researching areas that the students feel needed addressing, as well as issues that they could attend to themselves to bring about the changes they required. The school students generated da(r)ta represented through words, images and word hacks. Importantly, the authors raise young people’s awareness about the connection between historical research practices, where knowledge is produced and represented in particular ways, as well as providing a vehicle for them to represent their issues and concerns from their perspective. The arts-informed practices are generative and highlight the key themes from the young people’s perspective, including ‘inequality’ and ‘discrimination’, and how it is connected to ‘bullying’, the constructed notion of ‘teamwork’ that is assumed but not understood by adults, and ‘climate inequality’ that includes a lack of access to ‘resources’, as well as the impact of academic streaming processes within schooling.

A further example of enacting arts-based methodologies with young people through co-design is shared by Reddington and McLean in Chap. 5: ‘Inner City Youth “building their own foundation”: From Art Appreciation to Enterprise’. The authors share a ten-week art entrepreneurship programme set in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The focus draws on the notion of opportunity for young people to engage in the economy through the production of creative works. Young people reflect on their engagement as ARTpreneurs in a non-profit community art programme. This community art programme is informed by a Freirean approach where young people are agents of the changes they want to see and are supported by a community wrap-around programme. Dialogic meaning making sits at the heart of the project that is used to focus attention on the young people, including their desires, capabilities, and pursuits to achieve their goals. This chapter significantly overturns de-humanising narratives that have operated against the young people who often feel on the edge and margins of a complex and violent world. Music and creative writing are the key creative practices that are used to connect young people to each other and to the world (Biesta, 2014).

In concluding Part II, Chap. 6, ‘Media Arts in Anangu Education: A Culturally Responsive Approach for Developing Digital and Media Literacies’, is presented by MacGill and Unsworth. The focus on New Media offers insight into the complexities of arts-informed research approaches using Immersive Technologies. The chapter shares a co-designed project exploring the potential of New Media in a remote Aboriginal community in Central Australia. The use of the arts-based practice of Creative Body-based Learning (CBL)—combining affective, cognitive, and aesthetic domains—is coupled with dialogic meaning making produced in collaboration with young people ‘storying’ their lived realities in schools (Dawson & Kiger Lee, 2018; Garrett & MacGill, 2021). Virtual reality technologies are used as part of the designed learning environment where young people learn as they experiment with the technology to build stories. The project takes place on Anangu country with eleven Anangu students and one Piranpa (non-Anangu) student (ages between 11 and 15 years), their Piranpa teacher, one Aboriginal Education Worker (AEW), and one Piranpa Aboriginal Education Teacher (AET). The culturally responsive approach ensures that the work conducted will be of use to the community and builds on the skills and knowledge of the young people in relation to their community and ‘Country’.

The final theme of the book, Part III: Reflecting on Arts-Based Practices at the Edge, begins with Chap. 7, ‘Negotiating Capabilities: A New School Design for Transition to Work’, that offers insights into the complex space of alternative education programmes. Howard outlines the growing malaise of young people as they disengage with schooling, and offers portraits of student’s experiences with StartUp Co, an alternative educational setting that uses a pedagogy of care and an arts-based model that fosters students’ engagement with the life they choose. Arguing that the ‘capabilities’ of marginalised young people have been defined by the State in limiting ways, Howard expands on the notion of ‘capabilities’ to include the freedom to choose the capabilities one desires to live in relation to the world. Howard’s study examines the curricular and pedagogical challenges faced by alternative educational sites and offers insights into students’ own stories of how they conceive of a ‘better life’ that is grounded in sustainable relationships as they pursue work and further education. This ethnographic research at StartUp Co focuses on storytelling by the young people, thereby amplifying voices that are usually disenfranchised.

In complementing Howard’s reflections in Chap. 8, ‘“It’s Not My Story”: Revitalising Young People’s Learning Lives’, Channing, Kerkham, and Comber focus on the possibilities of imagination to build the lifeworld one wants rather than being directed by the expectations placed upon young people. Youthworx SA (South Australia) was a pilot study where young people were involved in a filmmaking course. The chapter cleverly negotiates the complexity of schooling in terms of its contradictions and contingent effects for young people by framing it within a broader contextual critique of education (Ball & Collet-Sabé, 2021, p. 3). Through this framing the authors contextualise the lived realities of the young people who draw out possibilities of rethinking education through a filmmaking lens. Through filmmaking the young people engaged in the creative process as collaborators and co-creators of their shared stories. The ethics of care and mode of engagement that underpins the approach of David (the teacher) was met by the young people through critical analysis of films. The dialogic meaning making was open and fluid, allowing for reciprocity, student voices, their opinions and laughter by everyone involved in the learning journey. Through the collaborative filmmaking journey, the young people became friends as they negotiated the pre-production, production, and post-production stages that lead to a sustaining community. The ten-week course addressed the academic standards and work skills that comply with industry requirements and supports a community of learners who are not all willing to enter the Creative Industries Media sector, but instead use their experiences of collaboration, co-design, and digital literacies to pursue other areas of interest. This chapter highlights the ‘vitality’ of pedagogical encounters and the wellbeing of learners and their teachers through filmmaking.

Further reflections on arts-based practices at the edge are presented by Gribble, Miltenoff, Hattam, and Maher in Chap. 9: ‘An Arts-Led Recovery in “Disadvantaged” Schools!’ This chapter shares whole-of-school action research case studies exemplifying the transformational work of two music and performing arts teachers working in so-called disadvantaged schools to turn around student learning outcomes (Kamler & Comber, 2005). The authors evidence the affordances of the arts curriculum in re-engaging students in education and propose the potential for connecting identity work with the official curriculum of school. This is advocated as exemplars of ethical and ‘local curations of learning’ (Atkinson, 2011, p. 151).

Neill, in Chap. 10, ‘Pre-enchanting Young People in Learning and Employment: Building Safe Relations for Diverse Students’, draws on material and discursive practices to outline the potential of building an extended ethics of care for young people within diverse schooling contexts. In her study, a diverse cohort of young people work on a digital storytelling project. Using a systems thinking framework, Neill cleverly develops a conceptual map of students’ perceptions of secondary schooling that expresses what students feel they need to know in order to navigate schooling. The young people speak multiple languages and have experienced various traumas or grief through migration journeys. A focus of this chapter is the relationship building and co-design projects that build a community of learners. ‘Enchanting’ is an apt title for this chapter as Neill provides insights into community-connectedness built through collective arts-based approaches to engage and support young people into secondary schooling.

Arts-Based Approaches in Research

In grappling with the question of representation, the qualitative researchers have deliberately worked at opening new ways of thinking and writing about research, the notion of being on the margins or the edge and facilitating the emergence of alternative voices and new knowledges. However, the underlying logic common to most research practices is observation of phenomenon. This approach requires levels of detachment from the researcher. In contrast, arts-based research includes research as a creative practice that is informed by the artistic sensibility of the researcher. Importantly, central to a researchers’ artistic sensibility is the dilemma of how to represent the complexity of issues of concern.

Arts-based approaches rely on co-design and co-creation with participants to ensure that there is not misrecognition and misrepresentation about participants and their lived realities. This reflexive research approach enables multiple ontologies to emerge that are site-specific (Pring, 2000) as evidenced by these emergent approaches to research design found in this book. The different projects are linked by a common thread of co-design and co-creation though creative methodologies that are enabling for the participants and researchers alike.

Arts-based methodologies draw out critical and creative processes through the various arts-informed practices. The co-designed art making process ‘forces us to think’ how something is not an object of recognition but of a fundamental encounter (Deleuze, 2004, p. 176). Critically, an encounter demands listening with bodies, feeling with emotions, and engaging with critical and reflective insights. Such encounters are created through the aesthetic and affective moments where participants ‘lean in’ and work towards a collective assembled knowledge informed by one’s own funds of knowledge. Rather than a recognition of individual worldviews, encounters allow collective ideas to emerge that take researchers and participants to new places of understanding.

Creative methodologies that work through social justice frameworks shift institutionalised patterns that govern and determine what is purported to be of cultural value and instead includes a framework to generate dialogical relations and ‘parity of participation’ (Fraser, 2003, p. 29). Creative methodologies create space for participants to use their imagination to generate multiple solutions (Miksza, 2013; Thomson & Sefton-Green, 2010) for issues of concern to their lives. Arts practices also require participants and researchers to take risks and think laterally as part of the creative process (Ewing, 2010; Simons & Bateman, 2000). As such, they can create affective states that powerfully shape participants’ subjectivities on the research journey. Aesthetic experiences are transformative as they lead to an essential openness, to different positionings, and different ways of being in the world.

The creative methodologies presented in these chapters position social justice and parity of participation as central to the research design. Fraser’s (2003) parity of participation model maintains parity of recognition whereby differences are acknowledged but with equal status and recognition in the research project. As Fraser states,

[T]o be misrecognized … is not to suffer distorted identity or impaired subjectivity as a result of being depreciated by others. It is rather to be constituted by institutionalized patterns of cultural value in ways that prevent one from participating as a peer in social life. (Fraser, 2003, p. 29)

Fraser argues it is important to recognise the ‘two-dimensionality’ of ‘subordinated groups’ both ‘economic structures’ (class) and the ‘status order of society’ (1997, p. 19). Race, class, and gender discrimination impact on participants interdependently of each other, that is ‘subordinated groups suffer both maldistribution and misrecognition in forms where neither of these injustices is an indirect effect of the other’ (Fraser, 1997, p. 19). Many of the participants in these research projects have suffered from subordination in these dimensions in complex and multiple ways.

The work explained in this book aligns with Biesta’s (1994) notion of learning in the arts where learning is not considered to be a ‘one-way process in which culture is transferred from one (already acculturated) organism to another (not yet acculturated) organism, but as a co-constructive process’ (Biesta, 1994, pp. 311–312). There are both intrinsic and instrumental benefits of the arts process and this applies to using arts within the research design that affords alternative ways of re-contextualising these complex sites of inquiry.

Researchers and participants co-create meaning through dialogic processes that are made explicit when examining or deconstructing the artwork, play, or performance. Higher-order thinking and processes of metacognition are attained through critical reflections that encourage all involved to closely observe, analyse, and reflect (Cunnington et al., 2014). In the sharing of these reflections, this book reveals how arts informed practices not only develops and fuels the imagination, but also cultivates new ways of seeing the world (Greene, 1995) and a critical consciousness that makes change possible (Freire, 1996).

Arts methodologies also centralise principles of social justice and democracy (Biesta, 2010). They provide fertile ground for the exploration of new ways to work together and collaborate in diverse educational settings. In considering the role of the arts in the relationship between education and democracy, Rancière (2004) talks of the arts as a kind of disruptive pedagogy that encourages alternative forms of knowledge production and communication. They disrupt what counts as knowledge and who is valued as a knowledge producer (Lambert, 2012). His work resonates with the philosophies of Dewey (1938), Freire (1996), Giroux (1985) and Biesta (2014), who all share faith in a pre-emptive view of equality as well as the capacities of young people to produce knowledge and intervene in their own realities. In working with these generative ideas, we can see how the arts can produce ‘aesthetic moments’ that contribute to democracy by offering up new ways of thinking, being, and doing (Biesta, 2014; McDonnell, 2017).

The resources and conceptual distinctions identified above are rooted in intellectual traditions ranging from critical theory, feminist, and affect theory. They mark the powerful intensities and unique potential of embodied and arts approaches to encourage critical awareness and self-transformation. Arts methodologies forge new ground in research practice that includes offering alternate pathways for inquiry. Arts-based research has generally been qualitative (Barone & Eisner, 2012) and, when combined with researcher and participants as co-creators and producers of knowledge and understanding, we see old problems in new light with alternative solutions. As Eisner (1994) explains, ‘If … the kinds of meaning that individuals secure are related to the kinds of concepts they form and if different forms of representation tend to stimulate the formulation of different concepts, what does unequal emphasis on forms of representation mean for what people will come to know?’ (p. 37). When there is agency in choosing the representation of the issue and problem as well as how to solve it, we can choose how we conceive the world in which we occupy (Eisner, 1994). Arts-based methodologies ensure that participants’ standpoints are central to the participatory and co-produced process.

This body of work addresses the power/knowledge nexus from a critical discourse position through arts-based methodologies. Instead of the State defining the problem, such as domestic violence, disengaged youth, poverty and racisms, the participants and researchers have co-constructed ways to represent the problem from the standpoint of the participant within a framework of equality of participation. The subtext of responsibility is investigated within a social justice framework where structural inequality is examined rather than ignored. Such examination brings to light ways in which young people have been misrecognised and marginalised.

Further, it shifts the debate from the State’s representation of ‘the problem’―such as disengaged youth―and repositions the debate within discourses of transformation and agency in the context of the participants and researchers. As Greene states,

[C]onscious participation in a work, a going out of energy, an ability to notice what is there to be noticed in the play, the poem, the quartet. ‘Knowing about’ even in the most formal academic manner, is entirely different from creating an unreal world imaginatively and entering it perceptually, affectively, and cognitively. To introduce people to such engagement is to strike a delicate balance between helping learners to pay heed—to attend to shapes, patterns, sounds, rhythms, figures of speech, contours, lines, and so on—and freeing them to perceive works as meaningful. Indeed, the inability to control what is discovered as meaningful makes many traditional educators uneasy and strikes them as being at odds with conceptions of a norm, even with notions of appropriate ‘cultural literacy’. (Greene, 1995, p. 379)

Conclusion

Socially engaged arts research is a practice of social transformation. The various projects presented in Arts-Based Practices with Young People at the Edge map a range of disciplinary approaches within the arts, such as filmmaking, visual arts, drama, and craft play. Interestingly, the theoretical underpinnings of co-creation were drawn from the field of economics but have always been a key tenet within the arts (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2000). Participatory arts in the 1990s emerged from community arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s (Jeffers & Moriarty, 2017) and continue today in the form of public pedagogy. Each time a socially engaged researcher brings participants together through co-creation, they create a ‘community of practice’ (Lave, 1991; Wenger, 1999) as part of the transformation process. They use the arts as a process to generate a ‘common ground’ (Brabant, 2016) that connects members into a community, and these socially engaged researchers employ creative methodologies as a commitment towards social justice.