Transformative visions: Arts research relevance for holistic education

• In Event: Holistic Education: Pedagogies and Learning Outcomes

Proposal

The presentation will explore the value of holistic education, as articulated by The Contemplative Inquiry and Holistic Education (CIHE) Special Interest Group of CIES. Through the narration of our experience teaching an arts research graduate course with students who are also in-service art teachers, we will identify key aspects of conducting research related to holistic education through arts and examine how the pedagogies we implemented and the approaches to inquiry that inspired our mentoring work, have shown to foster inner growth and development for our students.
Our research is guided by concepts of intuitive inquiry (Anderson & Braud, 2011), a qualitative research strategy that emerged from transpersonal psychology and seeks to "balance structure and flexibility, exterior and interior, reason and emotion, thinking and feeling, discernment and holism" (p. 16), and resilience framework (Macpherson et al., 2016), which includes "the capacity of a young person to feel safe, commit to a group and belong, develop their learning, cope with difficult feelings, help others, develop self-understanding, and foster a sense of identity" (p. 7). Alongside compassion and empathy in educational contexts, as articulated by Barton and Garvis (2019), our presentation will introduce concepts with examples from our students' research, writing, and artworks, as we share how we borrow from the frameworks mentioned above to inform the development of our holistic research.
Recently we began to look more closely at how our students-art teachers' experience in the course may have reverberated to benefit their k-12 students. For this paper presentation, as our research continues to evolve, we will gather insights from revisiting our alumni research and reconsider our emerging longitudinal data. New conversations with alums, some with whom we have formed enduring relationships, will further establish correspondences between our observations and what may transfer to our students' classrooms. In our contemplative educational work and collaborative writing, we become increasingly aware of how empathy, care, and resilience can transfer from our in-service teachers/graduate students to their K-12 students. The findings of our students' inquiries tend to "illuminate realms of human struggles for us all" (Anderson & Braud, 2011, p. 26). In this way, we hope to contribute to a broader study and establish how "the use of creative and multidisciplinary forms of holistic education encourages learners to become engaged in society" (CIHE).
Initially, the course, which has become the site and context of our research, was conceived to provide art teachers completing their master's research project with the open-ended potential of artistic approaches to inquiry that would facilitate the investigation of issues that mattered deeply to their life as contemporary educators and teaching artists.
We observed how teachers' daily lives are preoccupied with standards, assessments, and accountability norms. We noted the need to expand their approaches to research and ways of knowing that allows for the surfacing of the invisible and the intangible, what Anderson and Braud (2011) describe as "an expansion of the empirical," explorations reach down into consequential "private and unobservable" dimensions (p. 3). As their instructors and research mentors, we facilitate forms of artistic inquiry that explore embodied, perceptual, intellectual, emotional, intuitive, and spiritual realities. We work with the understanding that arts practices facilitate reflections that reveal new perspectives (McKay & Sappa, 2020), producing "new forms of thinking and previously unformed ideas [that] can lead to transformational ways of being" (p. 31). Students develop ideas in visual or multimodal forms that both result from and initiate new thinking in a personal and cyclical process of discovery and self-discovery (Anderson & Braud, 2011).
As our students use diverse methodologies such as autobiographical narratives, poetry, artistic expression, and intuitive processes in their own arts research, they also cultivate the self-awareness and confidence designed to carry over the benefits of their explorations to the complex world inhabited by their own students whose needs for social justice, for an awareness of their "inter-being, togetherness, compassion, understanding, and a cooperative future" (CIHE), have never been greater.

References
Anderson, R. (2011) Intuitive Inquiry. In R. Anderson, & W. Braud. Transforming self and others through research: Transpersonal research methods and skills for the human sciences and humanities, (pp. 15–70). State University of New York Press.

Barton, G. & Garvis, S. (Eds.). (2019). Compassion and empathy in educational contexts. Palgrave Macmillan.

McKay, L. & Sappa, V. (2020). Harnessing creativity through art-based research to support teachers' identity development. Journal of Adult and Continuing Education 26(1), 25-42.

Macpherson, H., Hart, A., and Heaver, B. (2016). Building resilience through group visual arts activities: findings from a scoping study with young people who experience mental health complexities and/or learning difficulties. Journal of Social Work, 16(5), 541–560. DOI: 10.1177/1468017315581772

Authors

• Rebecca Bourgault, Boston University

• Catherine Rosamond, School of Visual Arts