Arts Education in the Third Space: Creative Journeys towards Critical Consciousness and Social Transformation

Abstract

This research considers causal factors that impede the development of socio‐cultural creativity for adolescents, who experience micro and macro levels of structural violence and dehumanisation, while examining the conditions needed for participants to reconnect with their creative potential. Overall, the data present qualitative evidence that a blended programme of arts education, therapeutic intervention, and advocacy supports the emergence of ‘creative characteristics’. By fostering ‘resistant’ conditions related to the learning environment, concepts and structures of time, the co‐construction of learning content, and creative – critical pedagogies, it can be said that the systemic barriers restricting the development of creativity are suspended. It is within these conditions, characterised by non‐linguistic forms of communication, non‐hierarchical ontoepistemologies, relationality, and ethics of care that we can trace young people's journeys from isolation, disconnection, and internalised trauma towards critical consciousness and interconnectedness. We conceptualise that participants' embodied experiences of alternative realities transcend the boundaries of our space, time, and material structures into a developed criticality and sense of agency. We therefore propose a framework for urgent consideration that positions arts education as a vital humanising, peacebuilding, and social transformation process.