Picturing resilience: Arts-based methods for professional learning and research in Education

Dr Al Strangeways – IGCE, School of Education, Charles Darwin University

Ms Emma Schuberg Barnes – School of Education, Charles Darwin University

Dr Judith Lovell – Senior Research Fellow, Northern Institute, Charles Darwin University

Dr Lisa H. Papatraianou – IGCE, School of Education, Charles Darwin University

This presentation examines the early stages of research that uses arts-based participatory approaches to represent and explore the resources and challenges of becoming a teacher and of working with young people in Central Australia.

Enhancing resilience is recognised as key to addressing teacher attrition (Johnson et al., 2016) and responding to the challenges of the profession (e.g. Papatraianou, 2012). However, scant literature explores the factors constraining and enabling resilience in remote and regional parts of Australia, a key concern, given the shortage of quality, specialist and lead teachers in remote and rural schools (Boyd et al. 2013). And while arts-based approaches have been effectively mobilised in other areas of teacher education (Dixon & Senior, 2009; Belliveau, 2006; Mitchell et al., 2013), arts-based research methods have capacity to illuminate new areas and raise previously unasked questions about the ‘lived experience’ of educator resilience.  The project draws on a resilience framework to examine the factors that support and limit Central Australian educators’ capacity to thrive in the profession and examines how arts-based participatory approaches can be used to generate new understandings of resilience for both researchers and participants.

The presentation focuses on the second stage of the project, when researchers facilitated a series of arts-based professional learning workshops for preservice/inservice teachers, Indigenous Assistant Teachers and child/youth workers in Alice Springs and Ltyentye Apurte. During these workshops, participants explored ways of representing and communicating their experiences of resilience using a range of two and three dimensional techniques and materials including collage, soft sculpture, colour/line/shape, wire, newspaper and other ‘found’ materials.  The presentation highlights the power of mark-making and image-construction to open up new ways of understanding the embodied complexities of educators’ work, develop new modes of communicating, and create new spaces in which bi-cultural community can be envisaged and enacted.