Creative Adventures in Education and Human Services: Attuning into Arts-based Methods

This book is the first of a three-part series that focuses on how arts-based methods can be used to expand horizons for imaginative and ethical research and practice in education and human services. Each of the books are an assemblage of arts-based methods for creative adventures in education and human services. The chapters of the books describe, inhabit, and demonstrate the methods and document the multiplicities of insights, affects, and effects that emerged, and which include exploring the dynamically entangled relations between people and contexts. 

This book, Part 1, attunes readers in/to the adventurousness of the three-part series. It also includes chapters on theoretically informed creative/critical/collective/auto/ethnographic experiments in thinking, lip syncing, dialoguing on images, and making artworks. The chapters report on lessons from deploying these adventurous methods for creatively knowing and doing education and human services work. The methods also function as pedagogical spaces to inhabit, navigate, play with, play within, experiment with/in, and be productive and produced in, shedding light on how to generate spaces and find places for actively engaging with the ever growing, inexhaustible, energizing, exhausting, pleasurable, confronting, seductive, repulsive, and overwhelming possibilities of thought and action in education and human services. Readers are invited to engage with the chapters as research products to learn from and as works of art to escape into and find consolation, experience as a tonic, be invigorated, get inspired, feel joy, enter a pleasurable flow, see what sparks, and venture, play, wonder, create, and generate their own creative adventures in education and human services.

The three books (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) in this series are not organised around specific focused themes. Rather, each chapter in each book introduces and explores a method that is inhabited by the authors in a creative and speculative fashion to see what is generated. The Introduction/s and the 'Thinking Thinking' chapter in Part 1 are a good place to begin with each of the three books, and in turn, the 'Conclusion' chapter in Part 3 is a good place to close in reading each of the three books. The other chapters, however, are not in sequential order and accompany each other, and can therefore be read in any order. The authors invite readers to play and be adventurous with how they read, inhabit, and engage with the books. 

Dr. Michael Crowhurst describes himself as an academic who works 'beside, inside and around' University settings and as an art practitioner. Michael has a long standing interest in education and in the experiences of LGBTQI+ people in educative systems. He is interested in thinking about the ways that education is constructed, and the impacts that education can have on different groups of people. Michael is also interested in arts-based research, reflective practice and research, and autoethnographic research. At this point in time, Michael sees himself as a teacher who writes about what he teaches about. Michael was formerly a lecturer at RMIT University,  Melbourne, Australia for 18 years (2006 - Feb 2024). He has published widely, the details of which can be seen on Google Scholar. 

Dr. Michael Emslie is a part-time lecturer in the Bachelor of Youth Work and Youth Studies degree at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Michael's extensive education, work experience and research demonstrate a commitment to explore, pursue and promote ethical and imaginative practice in human service and in particular, Youth Work. Michael thrives on engaging in creatively designed intellectual adventures and research projects that aim to inspire and make positive contributions to the world. This includes the Edge/Centre Research Program collaboration with Dr Michael Crowhurst. Michael’s writing covers areas of creative and art-based research, youth studies, LGBTQI+ young people, youth work studies, and good practice in human services.