Sharing highlights from my recent keynote, School of Education, Acadia.
Navigating
the Tides of Challenge of Change
with the Creative arts in Research and
Practice
A keynote address
delivered at the Summer Institute, School of Education
Acadia University,
Wolfville, Nova Scotia
by Cheryl L. McLean, July 4,
2014
I have been a
contributor to the field of the creative arts in interdisciplinary research for
over ten years, as an educator and
publisher of The International Journal of the Creative Arts in
Interdisciplinary Practice IJCAIP and editor of the CAIP Research series
and books, Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice, Inquiries for Hope
and Change (2010), Creative Arts for Community and Cultural Change (2011),
Creative Arts in Humane Medicine, Brush Education, distributed by
University of Toronto Press (2014). In
the journal and research books I have featured international researchers active
in creative and community based projects
around issues such as poverty and
homelessness, water issues, cultural issues,
issues such as bullying, raising awareness about marginalized groups and
many others.
Among my
goals for my work in the creative arts in interdisciplinary practice and research
has been to broaden the way we think
about the arts in research and
interdisciplinary practice as a transformational force for social
change.
Today we will be
navigating the tides of challenge and change and examining how the creative arts
in research and action play a role meeting those challenges and in seeking creative solutions. We will
examine illustrative research and stories of the arts at work in research and action for change. We will learn how such work could be used to
address the challenges of change while
also being applied in education.
There are two things
that are especially important in our work as researchers and educators. The notions of place and its people. It strikes
me that perhaps there is no better place to speak about arts research and
change than right here in this place, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, located
so close to the creative inspirations of the life giving ocean and The
Bay of Fundy, a place that is witness daily to change and some of the highest
tides on earth/these
tides you know so well, day in, day out, regular comings and goings,
like human experiences of life and living, ordinary and yet so very
extraordinary.
I came here to this place because I was
looking forward to speaking with you and because over the summer session I will
be teaching a course called Problems in
Education, Research and Creativity.
(slide)
"Leaders commit many errors by
not taking into account something so real as the people's view of the world...a
view which contains their concerns, their doubts their hopes, their ways of
seeing. " Freire
Could a greater miracle take place
than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? Thoreau
We
know it's important in our work as educators and critical for researchers or
for those active in creative arts research and
processes to try to know or understand people, who they are and how they
live and what's happening in their day to day lives before we seek to work with
them to make a difference at all in
their learning. For example, before I
prepared this talk I would deliver today
I gave some serious thought to you my
audience, particularly the graduate students seated before me.
I
imagined that many of you were hard working educators teaching in public or high
school all year, with active careers and
busy lives and in what spare time you would have you would be runners, hikers, environmentalists, community volunteers. You would have finally paid for your last
course or courses, you might have left the responsibilities of home (some of you are
married with children) to find and rent a place here in Wolfville, maybe on campus, or in an apartment sublet, you would
set up to read and study for just
over two intensive weeks. You've come to
add to your credentials or open up more
opportunities or to advance toward your career goals, some of you will be
heading toward administration. Many
will feel the stresses and anxiety of starting a new course, with a new
instructor especially and after seeing the new syllabus and the assignments and
projects ahead of you. You want to know
how to get things done quickly and
efficiently, how things will be counted
and evaluated and many of you will want
to get an A average upon graduation. For
a grad student all this can be quite exhausting, and then, you are asked by a
new instructor, the one who handed out the syllabus, to be creative and change
the world too!
Today the world
itself is facing incredible pressures
and stresses, critical needs with increasingly complex challenges, challenges that come home to
touch us deeply and intimately every day in our homes and schools, affecting
our children, and the very food they eat. There is
a critical need for creative professionals working collaboratively, empathic down to earth real people for the
people, educators and researchers who are problem solvers with heart. The tides have shifted today in terms of
creativity. These new creatives are not
content to stand on the shores and wait for change, they view creativity as necessary and fundamental and central to the educational process.
The new creatives
value the flow of the
collaborative circle the dynamism of human connection, over the rigidity, the comfort, and
absoluteness of straight cut angles and predictable squares. They have the creative confidence to join
with communities to seek to know and really hear the stories, to explore,
together even further, even when navigating through stresses and uncertainty,
they are the planners and designers who
although they draft and carefully chart the navigational course toward hope also work as intuitives who feel and move with the
currents of change.
Daniel Pink has said we
require people today whose skill sets are different
from those dominated by the left-hemisphere of the brain. According to Pink
(2006) conceptual age workers must be able to “create artistic and emotional
beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative,
and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into a novel invention, to empathize,
to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one’s self
and elicit it in others."
Along with contemporary leaders in education and
creativity practice such as Ken Robinson
and Daniel Pink, Robert Kelly at the University of Calgary, and editor of the
book, "Educating for Creativity", also believes
developing creativity should be central to the educational process. But
still, as Kelly points out, the reality is
creativity suffers when many
students still spend much of their time in public education working for
marks, gathering information and then compliantly restating it, giving the
teacher what he or she wants. In terms of real creativity in education and
active problem solving, new idea generation and collaborative
development, believes Kelly, these
are the bedrock of creative
development.
So what do we mean by
arts based research and how might these
approaches benefit you in your work as
educators?
Arts-Based
Research (ABR) uses methods and artistic processes as a means of inquiry, creating various forms of art as
a way to collect data, conduct analysis, and/or represent social science
research. Other terms that cover
similar ground include arts-influenced research, arts-based inquiry, A/R/Tography, arts informed research.
Put simply,
the arts in their many and varied creative forms: narrative; monologue; poetry;
photography; painting; theatre; film; dance; music; collage ..have the unique
ability to help us "see".
Here's just a few general examples:
Based on
research interviews with young people who have experienced first stage
psychosis, a dancer choreographs a dance which will raise awareness about
mental illness and be performed in schools, for health organizations and in the community.
After a
serious bullying incident at their school, a drama teacher interviews students
who have experience with bullying, based on theatre exercises and role plays a
script is created to share the stories with schools and the community.
Responding
to the need for sexuality education for youth, interviews are conducted with
teens and focus groups are organized. Drawing
on this research a participatory play is created to educate audiences and raise
awareness.
If one
looks back at the history of this work as it relates to education, the spawning
of Arts Based Research or ABER really began
in the 70's with the father of ABER, the late Elliot Eisner at Stanford. Even in these early days Eisner had the
wisdom to know that arts and science disciplines could work together quite compatibly
often resulting in mutual benefit and greater depth and clarity of vision for
both.
(slide)
"It is to the
artistic to which we must turn, not as a rejection of the scientific but because with both we can achieve
binocular vision. Looking out through
one eye never did provide much depth of field."
Elliot Eisner
And in time
we saw evolutions and adaptations among them the turn to performance and
performative social science articulated so well in writings by Dr. Norman K,
Denzin in the book "Performance Ethnography: a Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of
Culture." Here were performance
narratives, performance ethnography, ethnodrama,
autobiographical poetry, the new narrative forms in qualitative research for social change and economic justice.
In addition
to teaching us about ourselves, and about places and people, in terms of practice, arts processes can
benefit the educator in many ways, these approaches can contribute to reflection and self
learning; effective communication
; collaborating; presenting and performing, keen observation and listening;
witnessing; reflecting.
But the
particular goals of this talk today are for us to explore through illustrative
examples and a few stories of the work and research in action, and to point to how the arts might potentially
be used in relation to education and in
practice and in addressing issues and
social problems in the larger community.
This is where the creative challenge in this work lies drawing on educators' individual cross
disciplinary specialties and skills to
navigate through the tides of
challenge and change with creative solutions that can make a difference for
educators, schools and the communities where you work and live.
Some of the research
I will refer to in this talk will be
drawn from the books, Creative Arts in
Interdisciplinary Practice, Inquiries for Hope and Change, and Creative Arts for Community and Cultural
Change. I will also present research
authored by Acadia faculty. At the close of our talk I will refer to an
example from my own ethnodrama research.
Among the examples I present, I will be referring to topical issues and
challenges directly affecting communities here in Nova
Scotia. So, this presentation has been
created for/ as well as about you,
my audience. Let's begin our journey.
Knowing about
research as it relates to ones own place and community challenges can help us
frame the problems with existing data and research and this can be the compelling motivator to draw
researchers, educators as creative professionals and others in communities
together working toward viable
solutions. Let's listen to the research.
Dr. Lesley
Frank is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology here at Acadia
University. Dr. Frank is a sociologist
researching in the area of family poverty, food insecurity, and health
inequity. She has also worked as a community-based researcher.
She
authored the report card on Child and Family Poverty in Nova Scotia.
It is a
moving report from this
researcher/sociologist, who has spent ten years advocating to help address the
issue of child poverty in Nova Scotia. Listen
as she appeals in these heartfelt words
to the public, to policy makers, to anyone with the heart to care...
"When
you do something for ten years that was first motivated by a passionate
concern for social justice, and no justice comes, it is hard to keep going
sometimes. But then I think, I have groceries in the fridge, a job (at least
for now), my kids are not hungry at school, they will have winter coats and my
income allows for opportunities. So I write this report card another year for
my Nova Scotia neighbors who may go without food or heat in their homes this
winter in the hope that someone is listening."
The report
card she issued, unfortunately was not a
good one.
The House
of Commons goal in Ottawa was to
eliminate poverty among Canadian children by the year 2000, but, as Lesley
Frank reports, rates for child poverty between 1989 and 2011 in Nova Scotia are
virtually unchanged. Nova Scotians have
the fifth highest provincial rate of child poverty at 17.3%.
According to another report
by The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, poverty costs Nova Scotia over
l billion a year. Not to over simplify
the many serious complex factors that contribute to poverty in many of our
Canadian provinces but could we tap the creative talent and varied
experience of the educators and creative
professionals in this room here today?
Could we tell those stories and navigate toward new solutions through
with the arts?
John Portelli and Ann Vibert, Director of Education here at
Acadia, in the article A Curriculum of
Life described the 3 year pan
Canadian study about student engagement in life and learning. One Nova Scotia school was cited as an
example, a school where many of the students had experienced the effects of
poverty and yet the approach to teaching and education was hopeful, democratic
and transformative, highly creative and grounded in the immediate daily worlds
of students..an arts infused curriculum where students engaged with the
creative arts, visual arts, performance arts, music and craft, building
programming around themes of social justice and care, common courtesy and peace
and extending this creativity out to the broader community, a Town Hall where
once a month students, teachers, parents and community members celebrate work,
raise issues of concern to the school and community, stage performances and
present arts projects.
*******
Also known as participatory photography the method called photovoice
was originally developed by Caroline Wang at The University of Michigan as a
way to help rural woman in China influence the policies and programs that
affected them. We have featured many
photovoice projects in our research books some dealing with raising cultural
awareness or documenting stories of homelessness and poverty. Here's how one
school in Campbell River applied
photovoice influenced processes in a
class project for change around the theme of resilience.
In a
multi layered community based
arts research project addressing Poverty and Homelessness in Toronto
Ontario, there was a pressing need to be heard and to raise awareness about the
issue of poverty and homelessness and to help bring these stories to the
attention of the public and change social policy. It was
a collaboration of educators and creative researchers which included
peer researchers, (people with lived experiences of poverty) educators, community agency staff, funders,
artists, academics social workers 8 research based arts projects. In my role as
editor, of the book, Creative Arts in
Interdisciplinary Practice, Inquiries for Hope and Change, I talked to Nancy Viva Davis Halifax the
artist researcher on the project.
I wanted her to share her process
meeting and working with homeless persons and recording their stories and lived experiences through one of the projects, a photovoice project, which put cameras in the hands of homeless
persons to document stories of a
"day in the life" of people living on the streets of Toronto.
Nancy writes,
"My responsibility
is to work towards social justice and equity and to teach about the
circumstances through writing and arts informed research. The deaths of the most vulnerable on our
streets haunt me. Every season provides
new challenges. And always there is
isolation, fear, shame, loneliness."
In addition
to issues around poverty in Nova Scotia, there have been hard fought
battles to keep schools open in villages like Petite Riviere, Maitland, River John, Wentworth, and Mill
Village, people and families thrown into crisis, hundreds of rural and small
town Nova Scotians have come together to
support their small rural schools trying desperately to avoid more school closures.
Here at Acadia, Michael Corbett and Dennis Mulcahy, at Memorial, in their report, Education on a
Human Scale, Small Rural Schools in a Modern Context" have demonstrated in their research that
smaller schools in Nova Scotia can and do work and that big isn't always
better.
How might we contribute creatively with arts based solutions driving
innovative project ideas that could have the potential to navigate challenging issues such as these/
issues that affect the very heart of a
place, your students, communities, your schools?
Environmental issues affect every province across the country and Nova
Scotia is no exception. Climate change,
water and the impact of sea-level rise
in Atlantic Canada, /harnessing the tides for energy/ studies are underway looking at the
impacts, there is a Tidal Energy Institute here at Acadia.
Carefully charting and then navigating the currents, around tricky
territory such as community water issues,
or the lack of water , can be, for any community, a serious question of life and survival.
Navigating
their way through a critical water crisis in Texas in
an arts based interdisciplinary
educational project for change,
Dr. Stephen Carpenter, a Professor of Arts Education at Penn State and
Oscar Munoz, Deputy Director of The Colonias Program for the Centre for Housing
and Urban Development faced a challenging question, How can we provide clean
potable water for the people of the colonias?
In research across disciplines informed by the visual arts, education,
civil engineering, sociology and anthropology the project explored waters role
in community health . Their solution was
to create clay pots, point of use
ceramic water filters. Educators worked
with the community as well as school students, kilns were built and clay pot
receptacles were fashioned at several public pedagogy events held with the
community. Researchers and
interdisciplinary team members created a travelling national exhibit of ceramic
water receptacles and the exhibit toured for public galleries across the United
States.
**********
John J. Guiney Yallop
is a Professor here in the School of Education.
John's work as a creative teaching professional a researcher, writer and poet involves
poetic inquiry, narrative inquiry, autoethnography and performative
social science . His writing has drawn on
place and memory and his loving accounts touch
the emotions as he shares his personal experiences of life growing up in
Newfoundland. In other writings the work
addressed these important questions: How
do we convey the experiences of four ex-prisoners attempting to find new lives
outside prison? How do we raise
awareness about their health and care
while educating others about the issues? With colleague and researcher Liz Day,
and based on interviews with four ex prisoners, John expressed through poetry
and evocative writings what happens to older persons leaving prison, both socially and from a health point of view.
These writings, this research, gives voice to those stories, ...stories that are not often heard.
Following this presentation
Michael Corbett and Martin Morrison will be presenting a workshop about the
importance of inclusive educational practices as well as addressing the need
for cross cultural understandings in
Nova Scotia. In an article in the book Creative Arts for
Community and Cultural Change, discussing The Art of Migrant Lives, Bicultural Identities and
the Arts, Wakholi and
Wright discuss a project called The African Cultural Memory Youth Arts
Festival which took
place in Western Australia. They too asked an important question that inspired
the idea for their project. How can we use performance to educate in
Australia about Bicultural Identities? Arts based educational research along with African centered pedagogical
approaches provided the framework for new understandings. The arts were used to
explore identity while sharing experiences and stories with others through
singing, dancing, drumming, storytelling, script writing, painting and cooking.
They reported African Australian young people, between two worlds, performed
embodied knowledge about bicultural identities and educated others about their
lives and cultural experiences.
So, navigating my own educational journey, like many of you I too had to shift with the tides to attend
graduate school, say good-bye to my two teenage children and my husband in
London, Ontario, and set up a second
residence in another city, Montreal,
Quebec, travelling the distance between home
and school, over two years to complete
my studies.
I began my graduate
work at Concordia University. My
interests were in arts research and drama at the time with a focus on
gerontology and mental health. I worked
for two years as a therapist with older persons in mental health in low income
residential homes, and, at the same time studied Stanislavski acting methods
with Dr. Muriel Gold, formerly the Artistic Director of the Saidye Bronfman
Theatre. All of my clients were Jewish
and among them were Holocaust survivors.
My research too began with a
question, How could a performance about aging, autonomy and mental health
educate health care providers about depression in older persons and help bring
about change? Drawing on my writing,
acting and therapeutic experience with older persons I believed the best way to foster empathy, bring about change and
educate about aging and mental health was to research, write and act in an
ethnodrama (defined by Johnny Saldana, an ethnodrama is a written play script
consisting of dramatized significant selections of narrative collected from
interview transcripts, participant observations, field notes, journal entries,
personal memories, experiences and or print and media artifacts...this is
dramatizing the data.")
In my research I sought to learn as much about my clients as
possible, compiling detailed field notes, conducting one on one interviews,
recording oral histories, listening to my clients' stories of struggle and
survival.
My audience was
comprised of health educators, geriatricians, nurses, social workers,
counselors, people highly experienced in the field. The ethnodrama was based on the true stories
of their clients. The stories they
would witness in this drama would be the same stories they experienced day in
and day out with older persons in their care.
I will now introduce you to Mary, who shares her memories about life in the
children's home and her love of her teacher and her excitement about learning
how to read.
(reading from
ethnodrama script monologue Birds/Mary)
"There is a paternalism with regard to
the elderly. this often results in their
autonomy being assumed to be less than it is or taken away against their
will. I learned I am inappropriately
detached from people. I came. I attended because I was curious and I am
glad I came. I learned about others but
it (the ethnodrama) taught me about myself." Elder abuse researcher
We set out on this journey today to navigate
our way together through the tides of
challenge and change with the creative arts in research and practice, and so now we turn toward home. Creativity and change begins with
recognizing the force that has been since the beginning, the universal human need for love and
community, to connect together around a cause bigger than ourselves, to launch toward hope and to make a
difference. And it is in this creative force, and in
the always returning to it, that the tides may hold their greatest promise.
The late Alex Colville,
former Chancellor of Acadia University,
and one of Canada's most respected and influential contemporary artists,
who died nearly a year ago on July 16 of last year, a long time resident of Wolfville, described
the creative journey and how the arts bring us
back to those things we may have always known, the soul's longing for purpose,
he writes, "The creative process consists of the unconscious activation of
an archetypal image and in elaborating and shaping this image in the finished
work. By giving it shape, the artist
translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible to find our way back to the deepest springs of
life."
It has been an honour
and a pleasure speaking to you today, thank
you,
Cheryl L. McLean.
This is a book for the times that stresses the vital importance of creativity and the human story, a body of work that seeks to help give voice to the silenced, the oppressed and the marginalized, which includes narrative accounts of personal transformation that honour creative expression as fundamental and at the very source of human meaning and purpose.
