How do young people develop through youth arts programs and how can these programs reflect and extend young people’s personal interests? How can youth arts support participatory democracy and social change?
Frances Howard puts forward a powerful case for the value of youth arts programs, whilst acknowledging and interrogating the complexities involved, including unequal access to provision and the class-based harm that can be inadvertently practiced within them.
Drawing on the author’s own practice experience, alongside a range of international case studies showing best practice, this grounded and accessible text will be welcome reading to academics, students and practitioners across Education, Youth and Community courses.
Part II of this book focuses on my research on a British-based arts program – Arts Award – within the context of youth work settings. The desire to undertake this research was prompted by my own background as a youth arts worker, working for local authority youth services within Nottingham. In this chapter, I introduce the Arts Award program and my ethnographic methodology and describe the three diverse settings in which I had the privilege of being a participant-observer for a year. Drawing on qualitative data from my study, I seek to capture the young people
How and why are arts and cultural practices meaningful to communities?
Highlighting examples from Lebanon, Latin America, China, Ireland, India, Sri Lanka and beyond, this exciting book explores the relationship between the arts, culture and community development.
Academics and practitioners from six continents discuss how diverse communities understand, re-imagine or seek to change personal, cultural, social, economic or political conditions while using the arts as their means and spaces of engagement.
Investigating the theory and practice of ‘cultural democracy’, this book explores a range of aesthetic forms including song, music, muralism, theatre, dance, and circus arts.
This book explores the rationale, methodologies, and results of arts-based approaches in social work research today.
It is the first dedicated analysis of its kind, providing practical examples of when to choose arts-based research, how the arts are used by social work researchers and integrated with additional methods, and ways to evaluate its efficacy. The multiple examples of arts-based research in social work in this book reveal how arts methods are inherently connected to the resilience and creativity of research participants, social workers, and social work researchers.
With international contributions from experts in their fields, this is a welcome overview of the arts in social work for anyone connected to the field.
This chapter explores the different arts practices on offer through the youth arts program in my study on Arts Award. Drawing on Paul Willis’ (1990) framework of ‘common culture’, examples of the artistic practice undertaken by the young people are given as incorporating everyday practice, symbolic resources and bedroom culture. Arts practice was an opportunity for learning new things, developing new arts skills, working with artists and utilising industry-standard equipment. However, access to quality arts practice was restricted for some, with more
This chapter investigates the differing pedagogies drawn upon by the youth workers in my study on Arts Award. Findings from my research demonstrated that young people in youth settings experienced diverse pedagogies, some of which were beneficial and some of which had implications for disadvantage. Drawing on the notion of cultural citizenship , I question what arts programs ‘prepare’ young people for. I argue that youth arts programs have the potential to develop young people as justice-oriented cultural citizens ( Kuttner, 2015 ) who feel a civic
The liberal arts approach to higher education is a growing trend globally. We are told that the mental dexterity and independent, questioning spirit cultivated by such interdisciplinary degrees are the best preparation for the as-yet unknown executive jobs of tomorrow.
This book explores the significant recent growth of these degrees in England, in order to address an enduring problem for higher education: the relationship between meritocracy and elitism.
Against the view that the former is a myth providing rhetorical cover for the latter, it argues that these are two entangled, but discrete, value systems. Sociology must now pay attention to how students and academics attempt to disentangle them.
155 EIGHT Understanding grassroots arts groups and practices in communities Hilary Ramsden, Jane Milling and Robin Simpson Chapter aims This chapter aims to: • consider the distinctive elements of the amateur and grassroots arts sector; • assess current understandings of the impacts and experiences of grassroots arts groups in communities; • question the current critical framing of amateur and grassroots arts activities and groups; • reflect on the direction of future research in amateur and grassroots arts in communities. The amateur and grassroots arts
This book started by grappling with a series of conceptual tensions within youth arts programs. These included cultural hierarchies, assumptions of social impact and the classed take-up of youth work. Looking globally, I explored three diverse approaches – creative arts youth work, the arts as intervention, and positive youth development – in order to critique the range of programs on offer to young people today. This was followed up with the introduction of three alternative perspectives – common culture, cultural citizenship and cultural democracy – which
Introduction In line with the aims of the Rethinking Community Development series, and in common with the other volumes published to date, this book reflects a commitment to theorising ‘issues and practices in a way that will encourage diverse audiences to rethink the potential of community development’. For us, the editors, this volume extends our longstanding interest in the potentially rich dialectical relationship between the arts, culture and community development (Meade and Shaw, 2007 ; 2011 ; Shaw and Meade, 2013 ; Meade, 2018 a). Taking it as
