Supportive Transitions
Arts-health Assemblage: The Processes and Components Shaping Wellbeing in Participatory Art
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Koon Boon Tan
The concept of assemblage by Deleuze and Guattari has inspired a turn towards a relational approach to health and well-being. However, exploration of assemblage theory in the field of arts and health is currently limited. This paper offers a way of understanding the processes through which participatory arts activities contribute to the participants’ well-being through empirical research of an art program in a nursing home. I conceptualized art-health assemblage and argue that the emergent of wellbeing is dependent on multiple interrelated elements at play in participatory art, which requires combining individualized attention to the participant, well-being outcome, and ensuring the quality of the environment and activities for participatory arts.
It’s Music and we Came to Play Instruments: Teaching for Engagement in Classroom Music
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Emily Wilson
To address concerns about student dissatisfaction with school music classes, there has been significant interest in adopting more engaging teacher practices. One approach thought to make classroom music more meaningful for students by drawing their outside musical lives into their school music experiences is the Musical Futures program. Musical Futures incorporates the learning processes of popular musicians and is characterised by learning that is student-driven and peer-directed, with an emphasis on immersive music experiences. This ethnographic research investigates how teachers make use of Musical Futures and identifies the teacher practices which support student engagement in classroom music. Findings draw on participant-observation of music lessons, interviews and focus groups involving two music teachers and four classes of children aged ten to sixteen years. The research has identified that the connections between student engagement and classroom music teaching are complex, interconnected and interdependent in a way not anticipated in the music education research literature.
Material Culture in Art and Design
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Keith Cadette
This paper advances the position that local craft should be viewed, understood and acknowledged as a dynamic medium of cultural expression and for its value to society. This concept was borne out of the need to respond to the apparent lack of awareness of the true value and significance of the practice of local craft making and the creation of craft products. The study addresses concerns about the noticeable lack of awareness, understanding and appreciation of the many roles and functions that are played out in the life cycle of these craft objects, mainly through the exploration of object-subject relationships. The thesis posits that these craft objects are valuable signifiers of cultural expression, as well as significant repositories of cultural information and communication.
Are We Different, But the Same? : Creative Arts Practitioners and Researchers Exploring Ways to Make Us Think Differently
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jennifer Munday
Arts based research has many possibilities and can have an art form at various or different points in the spectrum of research. It could be the creation of an artwork itself; or the artwork might be the object of study; art might be collected as research data; or the process to exorcise aspects of the human condition. A group of geographically (and to a degree, academically) isolated creative arts practitioners and researchers have been meeting in a online space on a fortnightly basis to provide colleagial support for each other as they wrestle with ways to turn their ideas into form. The conference presentation will describe the establishment and growth in the group and demonstrate the value of sharing insights, pains and pollinations between research, writing and creativity. Members of the Creative Practice Circle work with poetry, crochet, collage, soil and water on canvas, textiles, pastels, radio and creative writing. The practices vary but the members discuss questions about how we might attempt to understand or interpret what is being said in “languages” we do not understand. In bringing each of their research projects and products cooperatively together as a way forward to publication and exhibition, the Circle members have identified a collective theme – “Listening in the Anthropocene.” The theme is a thread that will lead the group to create a tapestry of enquiry and dialogue presenting alternative views to the world around them.
