The focus of this qualitative, arts-based inquiry was to understand how disabling illness might be transformed through art. A/r/tography -- art/research/teaching and writing, was the method used to explore and understand the meaning(s) held within the art: Border Crossings -- a conceptual, figurative, sculptural installation. The installation embodied the experience of disabling illness, symbolically depicting power relationships, identities, subjectivities and the multi-dimensional nature of being, of one coming up against the institution, the illness and the self. Guided by the work of Heidegger (Hermeneutic Circle), Deleuze and Guatarri (Rhizome and The body without Organs) and Foucault (Power Relationships), the A/r/tographer examined the installation through the lens of the poststructural feminist writers Grosz, Davis, Gatens, Weedon, Moss and Dyck with a focus on the body/subjective to explore notions central to understanding being in a body. A further analysis through art theorists Eisner, Allen and A/r/tographers Irwin and Springgay’s aesthetic perspectives, explicated the nuance of how art transformed the ill researcher and larger community. The results of the inquiry revealed a multi-dimensional, generative process of opening multiple thresholds of complexity, understanding and transformation of the experience of disabling illness for inquirer, and the art participant/observers/larger community. The research illuminates the value of A/r/tography as a potent means of inquiry into lived experience and how art enhances the understandings and possibilities for the transformation of the experience of disabling illness/lived experience. / Graduate

This thesis describes a study that was done with tutors and students in Frontier College’s Beat the Street: Literacy and Basic Skills program. Using a qualitative methodology, it focuses on stories of literacy, life and learning from tutors and students. The author’s own experiences, stories and reflections as a tutor are an important piece of the work. The thesis operates on and argues for the notion that people are made up of their stories, and that they interact with other people and the world through those stories. This research process revealed many ways in which tutor and student perceptions of literacy, learning, and each other were affected by their stories. It also revealed that in the overlaps between stories lies the potential for a moment of profound connection and learning the author describes as resonance. The thesis explores some of the ways resonance was perceived to enhance the literacy environment.

This thesis describes a study that was done with tutors and students in Frontier College’s Beat the Street: Literacy and Basic Skills program. Using a qualitative methodology, it focuses on stories of literacy, life and learning from tutors and students. The author’s own experiences, stories and reflections as a tutor are an important piece of the work. The thesis operates on and argues for the notion that people are made up of their stories, and that they interact with other people and the world through those stories. This research process revealed many ways in which tutor and student perceptions of literacy, learning, and each other were affected by their stories. It also revealed that in the overlaps between stories lies the potential for a moment of profound connection and learning the author describes as resonance. The thesis explores some of the ways resonance was perceived to enhance the literacy environment.

Children’s experiences are the cornerstone of all that matters in elementary schools. It is therefore the purpose of this study to shed further light into what those experiences might be, particularly as they are present in arts-infused education. Over a period of almost two school years I followed a group of primary grade students in and out of their classrooms at Central Arts Elementary School in an urban mid-Western Canadian school district. Through conversation, recordings, artwork, scripts, and visual images, as teacher-researcher-artist, I collected a series of moments that I believe best describes the nature of these students’ experiences in arts-infused education. Concepts of identity, place, imagination, and self were explored. I considered the lived curriculum of the classroom, and also the ways in which the children’s experiences with the arts resonated alongside my own artistic endeavours. The study is a multi-method inquiry informed by arts-based, narrative, and ethnographical research practices. There are elements of ethnodrama, in the ways in which some events are portrayed through scripted descriptions in a concluding chapter of the work. Children’s art, and the art of classroom life are revealed through both image and text. Puppets, masks, and a variety of other artistic media are brought forward for the purposes of consideration and discussion. In all, the work is unique in its attention to the words of children, and extended researcher engagement. Implications of the study include the importance of listening to children when they speak, continuing to offer the arts as pathways to greater awareness in schools, and considering children’s relationships as powerful mentoring experiences for one another.

This research project is located in the context of Aboriginal health and education, and in particular, emotional and social wellbeing, recognising the critical need for effective mental health services and resilient, well-trained workers in the field of mental health.Mental health is understood to include a broad spectrum of conditions with extreme and chronic mental illness at one end and resilience or wellbeing at the other – the socalled ‘soft end’ of the social health spectrum. While recognising that the lines of demarcation between one category and another are grey, my thesis addresses the problems at the latter end of the spectrum: problems of excessive pain; the grief and despair caused by dispossession, loss of place, family and identity; and the deep frustration, humiliation and anger that results in family violence and child sexual abuse, intergenerational substance abuse, neglect and poor physical health. It is my position that very many Aboriginal people who need to make changes in their lives in order to feel well and functional in the world are not suffering from a Western disease but from the transgenerational consequences of colonisation. In recognition of the notion that Aboriginal wellbeing is everybody’s business, this PhD research project represents my response to these consequences.While popular assumptions are made about the relevance of art to Aboriginal health and many Aboriginal people testify to the fact that their engagement with art (writing, drama, dance, music and visual art etc.) has brought about significant change in their lives, there is no available research in Australia that supports the development of an arts-based approach to learning/therapy/wellbeing that has, for reasons that are well understood, the potential to suit the needs of Aboriginal people.Addressing this gap in the research, I inquire into an experiential, arts-based, emotionfocused, narrative-orientated, constructivist approach to healing in the tradition of humanistic psychology, which emphasises the importance of an emancipatory, clientcentred processes that facilitates the development of awareness, creativity, clarity of expression and critical reflection. The position I take breaks with the traditions of the biomedical model and conforms to the now widely held view that psychology and counselling treatment programs for Aboriginal people must address the whole person, emotionally/spiritually, mentally and physically, responding to the individual in his/her sociopolitical and historical context. Expressive arts therapy, the multi-modal approach to healing explored in this thesis, lays claim to these intentions.In this project, I locate myself as the researcher/practitioner whose life-stance is expressive of the phenomenological principles of experiential learning and reflexivity. Accordingly, I have drawn on a number of closely related research methodologies all of which, I argue, are consistent with phenomenology and Indigenous, participatory research practices: critical action research, art-based research and phenomenological research methodology. These modes of inquiry are linked through principles that value subjective experience and allow for a diversity of ways of knowing. Embracing an expanded field of ways of knowing respectful of Indigenous epistemologies is at the core of the arts-based therapy program under investigation.Expressive arts therapy, in this research project, was delivered in two modes: one was a series of nine full-day group workshops conducted over an academic semester; the other was a series of ten intensive individual therapy sessions with three participants conducted over the period of a year. The participants or ‘co-researchers’ were drawn from the College of Indigenous Australian Peoples and the Education and Art departments at Southern Cross University. Three mature-age Aboriginal students who had engaged in the Masters of Indigenous Studies program emerged as the core participants who, having contributed to the development stage of the project, followed the program through the group workshops to the final interviews at the end of the series of individual sessions.This thesis is, in part, an illustrated narrative of the in-depth work the core participants did with me in both the context of the group and individually. It invites the active participation of the reader. Insights into the nature and impact of expressive arts therapy are offered through a focus on the lived experience of the three core participants, their reflections on the program and their observations of the changes they made in their lives. An important parameter that I set, determined that the ultimate voices of authority were to be those of the participants. I was not at liberty to look for meanings that went beyond their experience and understanding.I argue that the experiences of expressive arts therapy re-presented in this thesis demonstrate that expressive arts therapy is in principle consistent with current approaches to Aboriginal psychology and counselling currently recommended by Aboriginal professionals and spokespeople in the field of Aboriginal health. Furthermore this body of work demonstrates that expressive arts therapy is a culturally appropriate intervention grounded in a creative process that has the potential to facilitate healing and change in the lives of people suffering from the long-term consequences of damaging childhoods.It is my hope that this approach to healing will be further researched and developed and, with culturally appropriate terms of reference, adapted to a wide variety of existing community services – rightfully, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander practitioners working for the wellbeing of their own people.

This research project is located in the context of Aboriginal health and education, and in particular, emotional and social wellbeing, recognising the critical need for effective mental health services and resilient, well-trained workers in the field of mental health.Mental health is understood to include a broad spectrum of conditions with extreme and chronic mental illness at one end and resilience or wellbeing at the other – the socalled ‘soft end’ of the social health spectrum. While recognising that the lines of demarcation between one category and another are grey, my thesis addresses the problems at the latter end of the spectrum: problems of excessive pain; the grief and despair caused by dispossession, loss of place, family and identity; and the deep frustration, humiliation and anger that results in family violence and child sexual abuse, intergenerational substance abuse, neglect and poor physical health. It is my position that very many Aboriginal people who need to make changes in their lives in order to feel well and functional in the world are not suffering from a Western disease but from the transgenerational consequences of colonisation. In recognition of the notion that Aboriginal wellbeing is everybody’s business, this PhD research project represents my response to these consequences.While popular assumptions are made about the relevance of art to Aboriginal health and many Aboriginal people testify to the fact that their engagement with art (writing, drama, dance, music and visual art etc.) has brought about significant change in their lives, there is no available research in Australia that supports the development of an arts-based approach to learning/therapy/wellbeing that has, for reasons that are well understood, the potential to suit the needs of Aboriginal people.Addressing this gap in the research, I inquire into an experiential, arts-based, emotionfocused, narrative-orientated, constructivist approach to healing in the tradition of humanistic psychology, which emphasises the importance of an emancipatory, clientcentred processes that facilitates the development of awareness, creativity, clarity of expression and critical reflection. The position I take breaks with the traditions of the biomedical model and conforms to the now widely held view that psychology and counselling treatment programs for Aboriginal people must address the whole person, emotionally/spiritually, mentally and physically, responding to the individual in his/her sociopolitical and historical context. Expressive arts therapy, the multi-modal approach to healing explored in this thesis, lays claim to these intentions.In this project, I locate myself as the researcher/practitioner whose life-stance is expressive of the phenomenological principles of experiential learning and reflexivity. Accordingly, I have drawn on a number of closely related research methodologies all of which, I argue, are consistent with phenomenology and Indigenous, participatory research practices: critical action research, art-based research and phenomenological research methodology. These modes of inquiry are linked through principles that value subjective experience and allow for a diversity of ways of knowing. Embracing an expanded field of ways of knowing respectful of Indigenous epistemologies is at the core of the arts-based therapy program under investigation.Expressive arts therapy, in this research project, was delivered in two modes: one was a series of nine full-day group workshops conducted over an academic semester; the other was a series of ten intensive individual therapy sessions with three participants conducted over the period of a year. The participants or ‘co-researchers’ were drawn from the College of Indigenous Australian Peoples and the Education and Art departments at Southern Cross University. Three mature-age Aboriginal students who had engaged in the Masters of Indigenous Studies program emerged as the core participants who, having contributed to the development stage of the project, followed the program through the group workshops to the final interviews at the end of the series of individual sessions.This thesis is, in part, an illustrated narrative of the in-depth work the core participants did with me in both the context of the group and individually. It invites the active participation of the reader. Insights into the nature and impact of expressive arts therapy are offered through a focus on the lived experience of the three core participants, their reflections on the program and their observations of the changes they made in their lives. An important parameter that I set, determined that the ultimate voices of authority were to be those of the participants. I was not at liberty to look for meanings that went beyond their experience and understanding.I argue that the experiences of expressive arts therapy re-presented in this thesis demonstrate that expressive arts therapy is in principle consistent with current approaches to Aboriginal psychology and counselling currently recommended by Aboriginal professionals and spokespeople in the field of Aboriginal health. Furthermore this body of work demonstrates that expressive arts therapy is a culturally appropriate intervention grounded in a creative process that has the potential to facilitate healing and change in the lives of people suffering from the long-term consequences of damaging childhoods.It is my hope that this approach to healing will be further researched and developed and, with culturally appropriate terms of reference, adapted to a wide variety of existing community services – rightfully, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander practitioners working for the wellbeing of their own people.

This study was an exploration of the professional identities of secondary school mid-career art educators through arts-based educational research [ABER]. The aim of this research was to gain understandings of mid-career art educators’ perceptions of their professional identities. Inspired by my personal experiences as an art educator, this study engaged other art educators to visualise their professional identities, as secondary mid-career art educators in England, and contribute new perspectives to the research community. Theoretically, this study is aligned with the writings of Dewey (1934, 1944), Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 1994). Deleuze and Guattari’s post-structural concept of the rhizome formed the basis for the development of the ideas associated with identity. As an assemblage, the rhizome is a complex system based on non-linear, reactionary growth patterns. The non-linear growth of the rhizome is facilitated by the activation of the in-between. As such, the rhizome connects to a view of identity as an unstable, flexible and fragmented entity that is in a constant state of becoming (Bauman, 2000). Dewey’s pragmatism was connected with Deleuzian post-structural theory through the writings of Semetsky (2006). Dewey (1944) and Greene’s (1973, 2003) writings associated with democratic education and artistic development connected these theoretical considerations with constructivism, the arts and education. Sachs’ (2003) writing on progressive and bureaucratic education provided a framework for the discussion of professionalism and professional identities. As a contribution to ABER this study was based on a/r/tography (Springgay et al., 2008) as a methodology and actively integrated image and text to the data collection and data analysis. Collage was used as the main arts-based method to develop responses from the participants and to visualise the participant data. This research asked mid-career art educators with busy lives and demanding occupations to consider who they are and express their views through art. These images of identities reflected the complex in-between-ness of professionalism in education.

This study explores how self-imposed limitations affect anxieties about art-making and the art-making process. As a teacher, I was interested in how limitations affected student art-making. I used arts-based research methodology to explore spiritual and personal quandaries in my own life through the process of art-making. A consistent thread throughout this investigation was using the process of making art as a way to gain understanding about my own life and teaching. I was also able to create a culture of vulnerability and honesty in my classroom and help my students embrace themselves and their physical, emotional, and situational limitations through the art-making process.

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