ARTS-BASED SCHOOL WELLNESS ACTION:

OBJECTIVES

• Outline how Transformative Activist Stance can push a research agenda forward
• Explain the core or "Arts-Based Action Research"
• Describe the application of these ideas to school wellness change initiatives

TRANSFORMATIVE ACTIVIST STANCE (TAS)

• Individual: The imaginative position of a forward looking activist who takes a stand for justice.
• Collective: Co-authoring actions in solidarity of shared agreement points for a visionary future.
• World: Critically interrogating and transcending constantly evolving social practices "we are not yet"

"Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry, human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other" (Freire, 2000, p.20)

Transformative Activism
&
School Wellness

"Education is this effort to present significant dimensions of an individual’s contextual reality; the analysis of which will make it possible for him to recognize the interaction of the various components" (Freire, 2000, p. 40).

Arts-Based Action Research (ABAR)

• Art as Study: Participatory arts-based practices develop the action research method.
• Art as record: Engages voice and choice through product creation.
• Art as data: Describes improvement trajectories and brings scholarship to a broad audience.

"Not everything that matters can be measured, and not everything that is measured matters" (Eisner, 2002, p. 178).

CHANGE-LAB TO ARTS-LAB

• Innovation is a creative and collective activity.
• Art and science support each other change-lab processes and output leverage points..
• Participatory arts bring multiple truths to a one valuable output.

"To call for imaginative capacity is to work for the ability to look at things as if
they could be otherwise" (Greene, 1995, p. 19).

"There is more than one legitimate agenda for arts education" (Eisner, 2002, p. 232).

In what ways can a participatory action research approach in and through an arts-lab foster school-wide comprehensive wellness improvement and support sustainable systemic change?

"A child’s speech is as important as the role of action in attaining the goal" (Vygotskii, 1978, p. 25).

Arts-Lab

• Photo/Video Voice: Thematic Description of School Wellness
• Toolkit Design: Skilled Facilitators and Artists overview into the use of art for wellness action
• Arts-Lab: Impovisation as data
• Arts-Exhibit: Animated Future Wellness Stories

"Drama is the most syncretic mode of creation, that is, it contains elements of
the most diverse forms of creativity"(Vygotsky, 2004, p. 71).

EISNER'S STRATEGIES

• Referential Adequacy - Attends to researchers intended issues
• Generalizability - significance outside the phenomena
• Generative - Generates questions
• Illuminating Effect - Audience notices new things

Are the goals of the research significant to the participants as well as myself? How do I know? What kind of future do our answers contribute to? Is this aligned with our common research agenda? Who do I(we) want to become? What do I(we) want my(our) world to become? Who/what is included and excluded in this work? Who/what is privileged? How do I know?
From whose perspective is the question significant? What phenomena are worth studying? Who decides? For what goals are the questions we ask significant? What kind of a future are answers to our questions likely to contribute to?

"We must want our students to achieve friendship as each one stirs to wide-awakeness, to imaginative action, and to renewed consciousness of possibility"(Greene, 1995, p. 43).

Questions?