“Everybody is an Artist”: Arts‐based Education and Formerly Incarcerated Young Black Men's Academic and Social–Emotional Development in an Alternative School

Although arts‐based programming is shown to positively influence the development of youth exposed to adversity, little is known about the influence these programs have on formerly incarcerated emerging adult Black men enrolled in an alternative school. With educational resilience as a guiding framework, this qualitative case study explored the ways in which an arts‐based program in the context of an alternative school designed for formerly incarcerated young people facilitates emerging adult Black men's academic and social–emotional development. Data collection consisted of observations and interviews with school personnel and formerly incarcerated Black male students. Analysis and interpretation included a range of inductive techniques (coding, constant comparisons, and memoing). Results indicate that offering arts‐based activities fostered an environment where students could build caring and supportive relationships with peers and school personnel. Instructional practices that integrated music and poetry provided meaningful opportunities for the young men to participate, which appeared to enhance their motivation and attitudes (self, others, learning, and school) and academic self‐efficacy, and lessen their psychological and emotional distress. Study findings provide insights into how an arts‐based program in an alternative school can improve healthy development and academic achievement among formerly incarcerated young Black men transitioning into adulthood.     

Picturing the Wheatbelt: Exploring and Expressing Place Identity Through Photography

Community arts and cultural development is a process that builds on and responds to the aspirations and needs of communities through creative means. It is participatory and inclusive, and uses multiple modes of representation to produce local knowledge. ‘Voices’ used photography and photo elicitation as the medium for exploring and expressing sense of place among Aboriginal and non‐Indigenous children, young people and adults in four rural towns. An analysis of data generated by the project shows the diverse images that people chose to capture and the different meanings they afforded to their pictures. These meanings reflected individual and collective constructions of place, based on positive experiences and emotions tied to the natural environment and features of the built environment. We discuss community arts and cultural development practice with reference to creative visual methodologies and suggest that it is an approach that can contribute to community psychology’s empowerment agenda.