Youth learning and the arts -new research from Australia
Valuing arts and creative practices as pathways to learning – especially for young people – has more advocates in the USA than in Australia. My last post about the Neighborhood Story Project is an example of a project that has a partnership with a high school to engage young people in creative activity (in their case creative writing) for learning. NSP has worked hard to maintain a model that is structured, yet informal and independant from the culture and physical space of high school in order to engage young people in ways that high school typically does not, and perhaps can not.
In Australia there are lots of projects that use the arts to engage young people in learning, especially in remote Indigenous communities – but the truth is that on the whole policy makers and the education sector have treated these kinds of practices with suspicion if not outright disdain. Arts are considered to be fine for diversion for really troubled kids, but not real pathways to learning, enterprise development or employment. May this attitude soon change….
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New research being undertaken by Inge Kral and Jerry Schwab at CAEPR at the ANU – as part of their Lifespan Learning and Literacy for Young Adults in Remote Indigenous Communities 2007-2010 research project is providing some research evidence that may be able to influence this thinking. Preliminary findings – published online following a symposium on Youth Learning held in Darwin in September 2009, are documenting the value and functions that informal and formal participation in arts activities, in particular those using digital media, can have in terms of literacy, learning, and skill development for Aboriginal young people across Australia.
Their insights are not exactly new – they are drawing on established research on arts and education from the US and UK – but they are freshly applying this to practices and circumstances in Australia and are providing scholarly lenses and much needed critical research evidence that may influence policy makers and educators in Australia into more active support of informal, creative and innovative practices to address the learning needs of young people.
They say it all more succinctly than I do – go to this page to read a short paper on Arts: multimedia, music and theatre as processes of learning and literacy and click on the links on that page to a variety of other short papers on related themes.
hi Maya,
Glad to receive your ‘postings’ (?), providing me with some more knowledge of what is going on – or could and should.
Looking at the ‘in the gallery’, I saw no text about who, when, where, what the fotos refer to, other than titles/captions at the top of each image. They appear to be taken in Australia, but other than that, I think it would be good to have more information. I suspect that the AFI staff would not know that they are taken in Australia, and would want more information.
saludos,
Carlota
May the negative attitude in Oz soon change indeed.