Peter Wright PhD

Introduction: This study describes and evaluates Good Arts, Good Mental Health® (GAGMH), a groundbreaking, population-level, arts-mental health promotion media campaign. The objectives of the campaign (Wave 1) were to increase brand awareness, comprehension, and agreement with the tagline Good Arts, Good Mental Health® and empower the general population to form an intention to engage in the Arts for their mental wellbeing.

Methods: The campaign ran from August to September 2024 (4 weeks), cost AUD$198,965 (23% creative and 77% media/advertising distribution), and targeted the Western Australian (WA) general population aged 18–65 years, all genders, in both metropolitan and regional areas. The campaign was distributed through a variety of platforms, channels, visual, audio, and static assets. To gauge the success of the campaign, a process evaluation and (short-term) outcome evaluation were conducted by sourcing online analytics and conducting an online survey of the campaign target group (n = 661).

Results: Overall, campaign reach and frequency were optimal and met set targets. Campaign website engagement substantially increased from baseline (7,505 to 53,810 events 1 month after the campaign). Advertising cost-per-reach was effective and ranged from $0 for free/organic media to $0.10 for radio. For paid media channels, the highest reach (948,106 people) and best cost-per-reach ($0.02) were delivered by Meta (Facebook and Instagram).

Measured as both (1) a proportion of total respondents and (2) a sub-set analysis of each preceding level in the cognitive impact hierarchy, post-campaign, one-in-four respondents were aware of Good Arts, Good Mental Health®. This is comparatively high for a new tagline and health campaign without TV advertising. Overall, comprehension was satisfactory. Agreement and intention to act on the message were high and double that of comparison Western Australian health promotion campaigns.

Discussion: Study findings indicate the GAGMH campaign was successful. If funded, future waves of the campaign could build on Wave 1 to reinforce message awareness, increase understanding of GAGMH concepts, focus more on the arts-mental health dose, and extend the outcome evaluation by measuring behavioral action. The information contained in this study is useful to Public Health, Mental Health, and Arts-Health professionals in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of future arts-mental health promotion strategies and campaigns.

This paper presents the challenges faced by Taylor (pseudonym), a young child, with a disability navigating everyday life. These challenges reflect issues that many people with disabilities face where Diversity, Inclusion and Equity are key to disability justice. Highlighting places and spaces of inclusion and exclusion in both formal and non-formal settings, we describe sites where Taylor is both constrained and enabled and consider what that might mean. Informed by the first author’s carer position, eight vignettes provide both context and consideration, making these challenges visible and hence provocations for change. These accounts are considered in relation to key concepts of the social model of disability within a critical disability framework. This exploration highlights how society’s perceptions are largely bound by a bio-medical view of disability that promotes deficit views. By way of contrast, and beyond an impoverished framing, a social model of disability sees Taylor as a vibrant, intelligent young person seeking to live a life rich with meaning and value. What the research reveals is that learning and change are possible in both formal and non-formal settings where an enhanced understanding of places and spaces for engagement and participation means that society becomes more equitable and just.

Disability awareness is an issue that can inform societal understanding of marginalised groups. Contemporary literature continues to show the importance of inclusion in society and the impact inclusion has on people with disabilities and society more broadly. The importance of disability awareness is important in the context of the daily challenges faced such as discriminatory practices, stigma, stereotyping and exclusion and manifested in areas such as access to buildings, educational opportunities, and visibility in the media. Given the importance of disability awareness and the significant influence of media, especially on children today, this research investigated the inclusion of disability as one element of ‘awareness’ in one ‘made-for-children’ (2–5 years old) television programme. Drawing on a social model of disability, three key concepts of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity were used to explore the way that disability is portrayed for early learners. Analysis of 265 episodes (2015–2021) revealed that inclusion of disability appeared in fewer than 15% of episodes and was not representative of the community broadly speaking. This lack of representation exposed the limited potential that the media currently has as an educative function for preschool children in disability awareness and understanding of disability as part of contemporary society. Including more people with disabilities in made-for-preschool children's programmes is one way to both build awareness and progressively ameliorate this position.

Creative practice inspires exploration, personal expression, and learning, and can be understood from a variety of perspectives. Traditionally, these perspectives have been through the process of learning where doing is important, and through the product of learning where practice has outcomes serving a diversity of purposes. In recognising these critical links between practice and learning, we consider this entanglement of process and product through complexity theory as more than binary opposites where the key ideas of ‘knower and knowledge’ helps to untangle a multiplicity of understandings. Identifying complexity practice as developmental, transactional, and organisational, we outline how in Australia, this complexity produces tension in schools as teachers grapple with developing arts process skills as a significant achievement themselves, the production of arts works as important outcomes of arts learning, and broader social outcomes as elements of change. In helping to make these interactions clear it is possible to see complexity as both enabling and constraining change, providing direction and focus for future creative practice in both teaching and learning.

This article considers Participatory Arts and sociocultural understandings of justice and praxis through the example of Big hART, an Australian multi-award winning provider where both artists and participants – often disenfranchised and marginalised young people – co-create the work (Matarasso, 2018). Enacting social justice principles, Big hART works alongside young people to improve their life outcomes through arts practice strengthening young people’s critical capabilities by inducting them as both makers and responders to their own lives and the world around them. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research across three sites in rural and regional Australia we highlight how multidimensional and multi-modal arts-based projects contribute to young people’s lives through theorising the attributes and dimensions of twenty productive conditions and practices identified as essential for social change. These possibilities are important as when these conditions are purposefully enacted, the power of the arts for sense-making and identity development is revealed in non-formal learning spaces. Theoretically unpacking these conditions and practices and linking them with research outcomes helps build understanding of the generative power of Participatory Arts through the ways Big hART builds bridges between young people and their communities and the developmental trajectories they may take through being ‘at-promise’ rather than ‘at-risk’.

This book provides a unique insiders account of the work of Big hART, one of Australia’s leading participatory arts organisations. Founded on the values of social justice, creativity and transformation Big hART seeks to mobilise a range of community resources including young people, elders, artists, and community activists to produce high quality public performances of merit and social worth. Located in diverse geographic, social and cultural settings across Australia’s vast landscape, these creative works generate intergenerational understandings of the cultural processes of individual and collective transformation strengthening capabilities, identity, and connected belonging. This book documents a series of powerful stories that illuminate the ideological, artistic and cultural pathways and learnings gifted by the generosity of participants themselves.

Arts specialist teachers have a unique place in primary schools. They are often the sole teacher responsible for an entire learning area and hence commonly provide leadership and drive the curriculum implementation of the arts in and for their school. This responsibility finds us asking questions about the ability of arts specialist teachers to create professional agency in an increasingly challenging school environment. Using a narrative portraiture approach, and seven propositions for professional agency, we focus on a single teacher in order to consider how both individual and structural elements are understood from the perspective of an arts specialist. Conditions explored include relationships, time, purpose and constraints, work-related identity, experiences, and work communities. Challenges such as isolation, ongoing support and the development of community are highlighted as potential difficulties in the process of developing agency. The study contributes to an understanding of the personal cost and potential growth the development of professional agency provides.

The landscape of arts education is changing, with an increased focus on collaborative partnerships between schools and arts sectors for the purpose of creating richer arts education − both process and products. Using a combination of phenomenology and autoethnography, this research explores how one particular form of arts education partnerships function in order to consider the enablers and constraints to working effectively together. The study draws on data from interviews of eight key education (School Professionals) and industry staff (Industry Professionals based at a professional venue) and the first author’s reflective journal conducted over a ten-day period during the staging of a high school musical. The findings reveal how traditional roles and practices are being re-visioned and reshaped to encompass both industry and education values connecting aesthetic quality with educational outcomes. The result of these partnerships at their best, produce not only richer experiences for students, and deep learning, but also closer industry and education relationships that are inclusive, productive and mutually beneficial. © 2019, Pennsylvania State University Libraries. All rights reserved.

This article explores the effects of neoliberalism and performative educational cultures on secondary school drama classrooms. We consider the ways Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis and Butler’s concept of gender performance enable us to chart the embodied, relational, spatial and affective energies that inhabit the often neoliberal and heterosexually striated space of the drama classroom. These post-humanist analyses are useful methodological tools for mapping the complexities of student becomings in the space context of the secondary school. We also show how Foucault’s governmentality and Ball’s theory of competitive performativity are particularly salient in the context of immanent capitalism that shapes the desires of its subjects. These frameworks, when combined, can be useful in critiquing neoliberal educational assemblages and in indicating emerging deterritorializations and lines of flight in teachers and students.

Support, professional guidance and modelling of teaching practice offered by quality mentor teachers are important components in preparing teachers for the profession. Yet research confirms the impact of poor mentoring on pre-service teachers’ developing pedagogy. This paper reports findings from a qualitative study with pre-service drama teachers and their mentors as a way of better understanding how mentoring impacts their developing pedagogy, in a learning area that is highly interactive and relational. Data comprised of observations of planning and teaching, participant interviews, journals and field notes representing five pre-service drama teachers’ experience of mentors during an extended teaching practicum. These data revealed the considerable variance and disparities in mentoring styles and quality and the repercussions for the pre-service drama teachers. The discussion addresses the implications of these findings in light of those mentor attributes identified as most conducive to creating competent and confident beginning drama teachers.