Adult education, the arts and creativity

Abstract

Welcome to this special edition of Studies in the Education of Adults on arts and creativity. This volume contributes to the now decades of innovative and imaginative work by artsbased adult educators and researchers from around the world. It emerges from the need for more critical and creative ways of thinking, being, doing, and knowing. The arts and creativity play such a key role in how people make sense of and explain their worlds, scholars in adult education have in force entered the realm of imagination, experimentation, and the human aesthetic dimension as the capacity for creativity (Bishop et al. 2019). The arts and expressive practices they wield come in many shapes, including performative/poetic, visual and narrative forms. The aim is to enhance the human condition and promote agendas of social, cultural, gender and ecological justice and change. This special edition focuses on two major aspects of arts-based practice. The first is the pedagogical. The authors explore how the arts work to provoke deep, engaged, and reflective learning. For some, the power of arts-based and creative practice lies in their ability to inspire individual transformation, specifically for people who have experienced deep oppression and exclusion. This includes women who have experienced sexual violence, communities living in poverty and marginalised senior citizens. For other authors, social, ecological or gender justice and change are central goals of their aesthetic adult education work. While stated here as dichotomies, numerous papers show that in the context of artsbased practice, individual and social change agendas are seldom opposites. Rather, they are continuums that reactivate and strengthen self as they work in the interests of collectivity and respond to the needs of a deeply troubled world. The second major aspect is the arts as a research methodology, which is also a continuum rather than a contrast. In 1995, Mary Poovey argued the limits of the rationalising knowledge created through objective research approaches. She stated that ‘no matter how precise, quantification [could] not inspire action’, particularly in a world where bonds are forged through sympathy and empathy rather than mere calculations or facts (Poovey 1995, p. 84). While the arts are highly cognitive, they equally stimulate feelings, emotions, and senses. Arts-based and arts-informed practices of research, as exemplified in this volume, are the ‘systematic use of the artistic process, the actual making of artistic expressions in all of the different forms... as a primary way of understanding and examining experience by both researchers and the people that they involve in their studies’ (McNiff 2008). This section is split into three, the first considers the value of utilising arts-based research approaches as an adult educator/practitioner, the second exploring the critically important role of arts-based research methods in community-based practice with marginalised groups, and the third represents an innovative application of a ‘maker-space’ arts-based research in an adult education context.