Participation in community arts: lessons from the inner-city

Abstract

In this paper, we critically reflect, through the lens of liberation psychology, on our experiences of using participative community arts in work with young people and intergenerational groups in inner-city Manchester, UK. We used mixed methods to examine the impact of and engagement with community arts in two projects. One study was quasi experimental in design and used questionnaires developed by the researchers to compare Higher Education aspirations with levels of self-esteem and self-efficacy, as a result of participating in creative music sessions. The other study was a multi-media action research project, using qualitative methods to explore participant experience and the impact of the activities. Our methods included observations, interviews, the creative products and the creative processes. Through our critical reflections, we examine the role of power and powerlessness in participative arts, as well as ways in which participation had the potential to enable ‘conscientisation', which in turn had the potential to lead to self-empowerment and motivation for action. Both projects demonstrated the importance of forming ‘communities of practice’ with a diverse range of stakeholders in order to gain maximum impact from the projects and move towards a position of collaborative governance. We found that this approach was a useful starting point for facilitating ‘collaborative governance’ for wider social and political change.

Keywords:

• liberation psychology
• community arts
• communities of practice
• collaborative governance
• conscientisation

Notes on contributors

Dr Ornette D. Clennon is a Visiting Enterprise Fellow and composer at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He writes for Media Diversified and Open Democracy and is also a Public Engagement Ambassador for the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE). His enterprise work has been recognised with an NCCPE Beacons New Partnerships Award.

Carolyn Kagan is Professor Emeritus of Community Social Psychology at the Research Institute for Health & Social Change, Manchester Metropolitan University. She has vast experience working on participative community projects in partnership with local people. Professor Kagan is particularly interested in finding creative ways to evaluate community projects and to facilitate change in human services. She collaborates closely with colleagues working in Latin America and Australia and sits on the steering groups of a number of community projects. Her more recent work has involved researching arts for health initiatives, higher education-community engagement, urban regeneration, and the development of intergenerational practice.

Rebecca Lawthom is a Professor of Community Psychology and leads a Centre on Social Change and Community Well Being. Her work engages with participative and collaborative research with those marginalised by the social system. She researches into disability, feminism, and migrant literature working qualitatively and in solidarity.

Dr Rachel Swindells is a senior research assistant at the Research Institute for Health and Social Change, Manchester Metropolitan University. With a background in ethnomusicology and psychology, she is a gamelan specialist with particular interests in community engagement and participatory arts and well-being. Current projects include a collaborative, practice-led gamelan project for young people with profound and complex learning disabilities.

Notes

1. http://www.artshealthandwellbeing.org.uk/.

2. All neighbourhoods were classified on different social dimensions to create an index of multiple deprivation. For the 2010 Indices used here, see http://data.gov.uk/dataset/index-of-multiple-deprivation/resource/7537209d-aea6-47d6-88db-ba0dcf1d58d4.

3. All neighbourhoods were classified on different social dimensions to create an index of multiple deprivation. For the 2010 Indices used here, see http://data.gov.uk/dataset/index-of-multiple-deprivation/resource/7537209d-aea6-47d6-88db-ba0dcf1d58d4.

4. Statutory requirement of universities to demonstrate that they are providing ‘fair access’ to potential students from economically deprived backgrounds.

5. The intervention largely used the models ‘Arts for participation and citizenship’ (Hughes 2005) and ‘Arts a Cultural Right’ (Chaney 2002; Meredyth and Minsion 2000; Stevenson 2003), where our participants explored positive community roles by using social collaborative learning processes. The workshops encouraged the development of the social skills of both the children and the elderly visitors, as they were characterised by Process directed education (Bolhuis and Kluvers 2000) where the year 6 participants (aged 10 years) negotiated their own ground rules for the group, which also included their own initial self-assessment of ability. The workshops were also guided by the use of Situated Learning (Lave and Wenger 1991), where the learning was distributed by assigning individual roles for certain workshop processes.

6. The researchers registered spontaneous teacher interventions as being the most challenging aspects of the partnership because they felt that they sometimes confused the boundaries of the partnership and as a result, the children's motivation.

7. Further examples include: one long-term unemployed older man got a job during the course of the project and another soon after it ended. A younger participant, who had dropped out of school, applied for and got a training place for a childcare course. All of them said that it was the confidence and skills they had gained through working on the project that had enabled them to take the next steps towards employment or education. The research team had not expected the project to be life changing, but for some, it clearly was, strengthening their motivation for action.