Expressive Arts and Leadership

[Punitive] perspectives on artistic education and aesthetic knowing in classrooms void of creative expression. And how to get it back.
(A critique and response to the question:
What impact would art education have on creative cognition in both students’ ability to problem solve and on teachers’ ability to teach with passion as co-learners?)

This Chapter is included in the book  Using The Creative Arts Therapies  for Coping with Loss and Grief, edited by Dr. Dorothy Miraglia and Stephanie Brooke,  published  by Charles Thomas Press, USA 2015. It looks at how the use of stories and the theatre form of Playback Theatre is useful in looking at issues of grief and loss. Cross cultural case examples are included.

Abstract

THE EFFECTS OF EXPRESSIVE ARTS ON DECISION-MAKING:
SENSEMAKING IN SITUATIONS OF COMPLEXITY AND AMBIGUITY

The increase in personal and global interdependence, interconnectedness, and diversity is compelling individuals and organizations to make decisions in situations of escalating complexity and ambiguity. There is a need to find methods that allow individuals to make sense of complex situations where no clear way of proceeding is evident. In this dissertation, this researcher focuses on expressive arts methods to facilitate sensemaking and decision-making in situations of high complexity and ambiguity. This qualitative research is an exploration of the questions: What can we learn from high functioning people about the value of their artistic practices in helping them to make good decisions? and How can this knowledge be integrated with expressive arts coaching to help individuals and groups strengthen their own decision-making processes? The first part of this study included interviews with a diverse group of high functioning, well-adapted, successful individuals, who consistently practiced the arts. They were interviewed about how making art functioned in their lives from childhood up to the moment of the interview. The second part of this study included one group expressive arts workshop and individual expressive arts sessions designed to facilitate decision-making about specific questions brought in by the participants. All of the questions were about situations of high ambiguity where no clear path was readily identifiable, such as: (a) What is my role in the community?, (b) How can I fit more on my plate without taking anything off?, (c) What should I do next professionally?, (d) What should I look for in a future mate? and (e) How can I move forward in my art career? The research resulted in a number of important findings. From the interviews, it was found that practicing the arts played a role in five domains of the interviewees' lives. These domains were: The Self, Emotional Management, Connection to People, Connection to the World, and Creative Visualization. These five domains were visualized as a network to understand their relationships in accordance with ideas from the complex adaptive system metaphor. The issue of resistance to expressive arts methods from people unfamiliar with them was linked to the relation between the exploration of new possibilities and the exploitation of old certainties, which is a concern for all complex adaptive systems including individuals and organizations. In this study, the researcher helped to identify ways in which expressive arts can contribute to decision making: (a) it was observed that expressive arts allowed individuals to turn ambiguous situations into comprehended ones, explicitly in words, which permitted them to take action: either deciding something mentally and/or implementing a decision, (b) Expressive arts allowed people to manage emotions while making decisions, and (c) to manage emotions while implementing decisions. The use of expressive arts highlighted personal and environmental unfolding, emergence, agency, flow, and transience that could have been obscured by using exclusively analytical methods for sensemaking and decision-making. The encouraging findings obtained in this research call for further, extensive, and in-depth explorations of the use of expressive arts as a tool for sensemaking and decision-making—for individuals and groups—in situations of high complexity, ambiguity and emotionality.

Obwohl für Wissenschaft und Forschung, für Verständigung und Vermittlung unverzichtbar, ist die Sprache im Kontext der künstlerischen Therapien bisher kaum thematisiert worden. Die Frage nach einer angemessenen Sprache erhält in Dokumentationen künstlerisch therapeutischer Praxis insofern eine besondere Bedeutung, als hier der schöpferische Mensch im Mittelpunkt steht. In ihren Beiträgen nähern sich die Autorinnen und Autoren dieses Bandes dem Thema Sprache interdisziplinär und unter wechselnden Blickwinkeln. Sie untersuchen Differenzen und Kongruenzen von sprachlichen und bildnerischen Medien und erkunden Eigenschaften und Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten sprachlicher Darstellung im Bezugsfeld kunsttherapeutischer Praxis und Forschung.

Eine Kunst, die sich das Soziale zum Thema macht, führt an die Schnittstelle zwischen Kunst und Therapie. Sobald der therapeutische Raum als sozialer Raum ins Spiel kommt, gewinnt therapeutisches Handeln eine sozialkünstlerische Komponente. Der Blick wird über das gestaltete Objekt hinausgeführt auf die Bedingungen der therapeutischen Interaktion als Gegenstand der Gestaltung. Sie wird zum Teil einer Geschichte, an der Patient und Therapeut Anteil haben. Die Geschichten aus der kunsttherapeutischen Praxis, die der Autor erzählt, beschreiben den Raum, in dem zwischen Therapeut und Patient ein Bild entstehen kann: den intermediären Bereich. An die Stelle eines traumatisierenden Bildes vermag ein anderes zu treten: das erlebte Bild, zu dem die Therapie einen neuen, sinnstiftenden Zugang eröffnet.

The words " universe " and " university " share a common root: " universus, " the Latin word for " whole, entire. " Like universe, the word university implies a capacity for limitless expansion, bringing scholars from diverse academic fields together to serve the common purpose of increasing knowledge. This is equally true even when an institution of higher education goes by another name like " college " or " school. " Somehow, though, we academics turn away from this dazzling prospect of boundless knowledge. We draw together in smaller groups of people like ourselves, preferring to associate with those who share the same disciplinary engagement, professional practices, and habits of mind. These focused relationships are undeniably beneficial, serving to concentrate disciplinary activity and promoting fruitful collaborations, working together to prepare the next generation of disciplinary scholars. Nevertheless, these self-imposed boundaries are confining. The greater our disciplinary expertise, the less likely we are to reach out for those limitless possibilities within the universe of higher education. My research and professional engagements have afforded me the incomparable opportunity of studying more than 60 institutions of higher learning and placed me in contact with no less than 1000 people across disciplines literally ranging from anthropology to zoology. Among the many things I learned, I've observed that we tend to have pre-defined ideas about leaders, believing that those from certain academic disciplines are more qualified than others for positions of leadership. Most of us prefer leaders who are somehow familiar – people who think like we do, work like we do, and share our same philosophies. Likewise, it's only natural that we encounter barriers when dealing with people different from ourselves. For instance, we've probably all had the experience in our personal lives of choosing not to associate with someone because of their political views. In higher education, though, the greatest obstacle to acceptance can arise with regard to our disciplinary orientations. The more deeply entrenched we become in our academic fields, the less likely we are to view a person from a different disciplinary orientation as someone from whom we could learn, or more so, as someone whom we could follow as a leader.

Amidst the great change and rising complexity of the early 21st century, this inquiry’s four women co-participants explored the timely question “How might we develop a social space and a process that facilitate an emergent practice of shared leadership?” An Artful Action Inquiry, co-constructed by participants, provided the structure through which to engage in a playful and reflective practice of group learning, self- discovery, and collaborative action over a six-month period.
Our current turbulent and transformative era calls for us to develop such post-heroic leadership styles and structures fostering active engagement founded on a mindful, integrated connection between We and I. Conscious systems participation, whole intelligence, and harmonious collaboration are three critical and interdependent elements in developing organizations engaged in sustainable human systems. There is an identified gap between the growing need for those of us shaped by Western societal norms to act interdependently and creatively, and our ability to do so. The women in this circle of inquiry make a contribution to addressing this developmental gap by reporting on their own collaborative
iv
emergence as a team taking action to establish a non-profit organization in the United States.
Participants found that investing time and full creative presence in co-creating social space provided a supportive framework for the vulnerability necessary in emergent, paradigm-shifting work. We practically and beneficially applied art making, movement and storytelling to the work of envisioning, assessing, and strategizing paths of action. We experienced how engaging with collective intention both confronts us and opens doors to deeper relational work practice and growth-in- connection.
Our circle emerged as open yet unbroken, where “open” expresses our individual freedom as brilliantly unique and specialized human participants and “unbroken” holds the reality and the opportunity of fully connected integration in the social and planetary system. Therein lies the challenge of practice in such a both/and paradigm. As we intentionally enacted the metaphor of shared leadership in this research, we found that it is insufficient to hold the ideology of the circle while practicing a separative self-concept. A desire or choice to share power is only the beginning of the work required to enact power-with.

Introduction
Understanding Art and Aesthetics
Critical, utopian, and pragmatic dimensions of art
Pragmatic aesthetic experiences and processes in and for leadership
Creativity and Creative Leadership
Envisioning and imagination
Art of leadership performance
Symbolic Leadership
Improvisation
Practical implications
Art and Leadership education and development
Conclusion and Perspectives

The notion of the German word Bild occupies a central, mediating position between art and therapy. In the sense of “image,” it touches upon psychological theories of the unconscious, as well as reception-aesthetic approaches in art theory. With the “Iconic Turn”—the turn from the word to the image—the term “image” is given a new meaning, which goes far beyond previous accounts of the effect and perception of images. It leads to the anthropology of pictorial creation.

In what follows, we position our differing conceptualizations of leadership in art education adjacent to one another for readers to explore their contingent performativity. Accordingly, we are emulating the convergence of papers, ours and those of other scholars, artists, and teachers who, at the 2016 National Art Education Association Convention, addressed the theme of leadership cross-pollination.
Considering that the presenters’ address of this theme constituted a
contingent multiplicity of artistic and scholarly perspectives suggests that the event of the conference likewise constituted an ideational assemblage and art education a field of immanent research and practice. As immanent forces, both the conference and the field of art education offered attendees opportunities to experience leadership cross-pollination from in-between and across the differing papers and presentations. It is that immanent performativity that we are inviting
readers to summon as they perform an experimental reading in-between and across our two writings on the leadership-of-nonleadership in art education.

Artful Inquiry (Barry, 1996; Seeley, 2011) is an inquiry process that pushes epistemological boundaries to include movement, storytelling, art-making, sound, circlework and silence. Informed by experiences with studio practice in visual and improvisational arts, the authors construct an accessible framework within which to conduct transformative learning. Incorporating multiple ways of knowing and cycles of action and reflection in a spiral learning process assures that practice is congruent with beliefs and that transformative learning is possible. The Studio of Life supports everyday personal and professional creative inquiry practices as we construct a new future for self, community, culture and earth.

Wellbeing is commonly used to describe a person’s mental, physical, emotional and affective states of wellbeing but still often neglects the cultural and spiritual context of anindividual’s sense of wellbeing. This study uses data from sixty women’s stories and artworks exhibited at The 2009 Women’s Room Ancestral Connections Exhibitionexamining how approaches to art making influenced cultural and spiritual wellbeing infive groups affiliated with The Women’s Room. Arts based narrative analysis, in-depthinterviews and ethnographic observation were used to determine women’s approaches toart making and a new arts analysis tool called The SPICES framework was developed inthe course of research as there were no suitable frameworks to analyse the cultural and spiritual intent of stories and artworks. The study found that women primarily used threeapproaches to making their art being 1) Spiritual approach, 2) Intuitive Channeled approach and 3) Expressive Symbolic approach (SPICES framework). These findingssuggest that making art using a SPICES approach enabled a creative agency for theexpression of cultural and spiritual beliefs, a communicative action strategy which bothchallenged dominant cultural conceptions of societal roles, and assisted women to copewith the challenges of everyday life. The SPICES approach will facilitate deepened understandings of transpersonal art produced in community art contexts, art therapy or cultural arts practice. Implications for policy makers, practitioners and researcherssuggests the need to develop more sophisticated understandings of the cultural and spiritual meanings behind the art being made in diverse community settings as this willshed light on how cultural beliefs and practices influence health and wellbeing, leading to better understandings of client community needs and perspectives.

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