Arts-Based Research, Resilience and Well-being Across the Lifespan

This book investigates how arts-based research methods can positively influence people's resilience and well-being, particularly in constraining environments. Using examples from arts-based research methods in different contexts and from across the globe, the book brings together a diverse range of perspectives to understand how both resilience and well-being can be supported in a world that is rarely stress free. Collectively they demonstrate how arts-based research methods can: provide agency through the foregrounding of participants' voices; afford transformational learning opportunities; create opportunities for relationship building; support creativity and new ways of thinking; generate aspirations and hope; encourage forms of communication that expose ideas, emotions and feelings that previously might not have been known or known how to be expressed; and enhance reflection and reflexivity. The authors explore how art-based practices, such as clowning, collage, dramatisation, drawing, painting, role-play and sculpting, can be used to support the resilience and well-being of individuals and groups across the lifespan, and theorize how arts-based research methods can positively contribute to participants' positive self-esteem, self-image and ability to cope with challenges and new circumstances. Academics, professional learning facilitators, higher education students, and anyone interested in resilience and well-being in the health and education sectors will find this an interesting and engaging text.Loraine McKay is a senior lecturer in the School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University, Australia. Georgina Barton is an associate professor in the School of Teacher Education and Early Childhood at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia.Susanne Garvis is a professor at the University of Gothenburg, and a guest professor at Stockholm University, Sweden.Viviana Sappa is a senior researcher and teachers' educator at Swiss Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (SFIVET) in Lugano, Switzerland.