The Social Impact of Creative Arts in Australian Communities 981167356X, 9789811673566

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Sandra Gattenhof · Donna Hancox · Helen Klaebe · Sasha Mackay

The Social Impact of Creative Arts in Australian Communities

The Social Impact of Creative Arts in Australian Communities

Sandra Gattenhof · Donna Hancox · Helen Klaebe · Sasha Mackay

The Social Impact of Creative Arts in Australian Communities

Sandra Gattenhof Queensland University of Technology Kelvin Grove, QLD, Australia

Donna Hancox Queensland University of Technology Kelvin Grove, QLD, Australia

Helen Klaebe The University of Queensland Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Sasha Mackay Queensland University of Technology Kelvin Grove, QLD, Australia

ISBN 978-981-16-7356-6 ISBN 978-981-16-7357-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7357-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgements

A book such as this is not a solo endeavour. The authors would like to sincerely thank all the organisations, research partners, communities and individuals who have generously shared in our research journeys and supported the work we have undertaken in the past ten years to understand in social impact of arts, cultural and creative engagement. The authors would like to particularly thank Dr. Alex Philp who has worked closely with us in ensuring that our wordsmithing and referencing are clear and accurate for our readers. This tedious work can be underestimated. Without Dr Philp’s eagle-like gaze on our writing, you would not be reading about our research projects today. Finally, the authors thank our academic colleagues at Queensland University of Technology—Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice Faculty, for their encouragement and compassion.

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Contents

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Introduction: Evaluating Intangibles—Social Value, Impact and Notions of Place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 1 4

Understanding Social Value and Impact in the Australian Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Defining the Notion of Value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Rethinking Value Beyond Economic Outcomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Understanding Impact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Language and Approaches to Understanding Impact . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 The Conundrum of Correlation or Causality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7 7 8 10 13 14 19 20 21

Building an Embedded Framework: Early Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Case Study I: Smithsonian Folklife Festival . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.1 Understanding Stakeholders: An Evaluation Project Management Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.2 Project Results, Findings and Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.3 Impact: Expect the Least Expected . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.4 Embedded Evaluation Framework: Continual Cycle of Improvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Case Study II: Animating Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.1 Project Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.2 Evaluation Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.3 Data Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.4 Non-text-Based Digital Visual Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.5 Analysis, Reflections of the Process and Findings . . . . . . . 3.3.6 Authenticity of Reporting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

25 25 27 27 28 28 31 32 32 35 37 38 39 40 vii

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3.3.7 Illuminating Impact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.8 Embedded Evaluation Throughout the Project . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

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Nothing About Us Without Us: Co-creation with Communities for Impact Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Community Engagement Versus Consultation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Meaningful Community Engagement is All About Relationships and is Place-Based . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Co-design: By the People and Process Over Outcome . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 Co-creation: Situated Languages to Communicate from Within Remote Communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6 Creative Community Engagement: Tim Fairfax Family Foundation Toolkit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6.1 Project Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6.2 Charters Towers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6.3 Roma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arts-Based Methodologies for Fostering Inclusion and Understanding with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Milpera State High School Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Building Inclusive Classrooms Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.1 Research Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Room 17 Goes Large Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Co-creating Stories with Communities: Collaborative Art and Meaningful Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Collaborating with Communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Co-creating Stories at Creative Regions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.1 Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.2 Elephant in the Room . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 Considerations and Emergent Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.1 Identify Differing Values and Objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.2 Prioritise Long-Term Partnerships Rather Than Short-Term Deliverables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.3 Involve Participants as Collaborators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

41 41 42 43 45 45 47 49 52 53 54 55 56 58 59 60

61 61 62 63 64 66 70 71 73 73 74 77 78 82 85 86 87 88 89

Contents

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Creative Partnerships for Social Impact: Addressing Domestic Violence in Regional Queensland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 7.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 7.2 Connecting the Arts with Public Health and Community Services: Creative Regions and UCC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 7.2.1 Ethical Complexities and the Effect of Authenticity . . . . . 98 7.3 The Production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 7.4 Evaluation: Creative Regions and CQUniversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 7.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

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Kindy Moves: Using Impact Narratives to Position Children as Stakeholders in Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 About the Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3 Key Concepts Used to Frame the Impact Assessment . . . . . . . . . . 8.3.1 Intrinsic and Instrumental Benefits of Arts Engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3.2 Teaching Artistry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3.3 Dance in Australian Early Childhood Learning Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3.4 Shaping the Impact Narrative for Participants and Queensland Ballet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.5 Impact Narratives for the Kindergarten Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.6 Impact Narratives for Kindergarten Educators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.6.1 Child One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.6.2 Child Two . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.6.3 Child Three . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.7 Impact Narratives for Queensland Ballet Teaching Artists . . . . . . 8.8 Impact Narrative for Queensland Ballet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.9 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Community Consultation Using Digital Engagement in the Time of COVID-19 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2 Overview of the Role of the Creative Arts in Regional Australia: A Social Impact Model Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3 Designing Online Community Consultation Using Arts-Based Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4 Digital Liveness as a Model for Engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.5 Outcomes and Understanding Emerging from Online Community Consultation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

107 107 108 109 109 110 111 112 112 113 116 117 117 118 119 119 120 120 123 123 124 126 128 131

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9.5.1 Principle One—Generative Engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.5.2 Principle Two—Openness of Provocation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.5.3 Principle Three—Centring Storytelling Through Place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

131 132 136 137 138

10 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 10.1 Sharing Perceptions and Understandings Through Listening and Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142

About the Authors

Assoc. Prof. Sandra Gattenhof’s projects and research focuses on evaluation practices for gauging the impact of arts engagement with a particular emphasis on children and young people. Assoc. Prof. Donna Hancox investigates in her research and publications the role personal narratives play in creating social change, and the potential of interactive and immersive storytelling tools to amplify the voices of under-represented communities. Prof. Helen Klaebe’s work develops new approaches to participatory public history using multi art form storytelling strategies to engage communities, and to evaluate the economic, cultural and audience impact of public art programs. Dr. Sasha Mackay’s work explores participation and co-creative storytelling practices for more nuanced and inclusive representations of individuals and communities. Sasha works in regional communities as a producer and researcher of socially engaged arts and participatory storytelling projects.

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Chapter 1

Introduction: Evaluating Intangibles—Social Value, Impact and Notions of Place

Abstract A new public discourse about what the arts contribute and what they bring to the table in the form of meaningful communicative methods, development of inclusive places and compelling avenues for sharing knowledge for all members of society is urgently needed. What has become clear to virtually every arts and cultural organisation and researcher who has engaged with communities to deliver or assess creative projects is that what individuals and communities value—or what can be framed as social impact—about these events and programmes and what we measure are not aligned. To understand the impact and value for individuals and communities, a new language and attribution framework is needed to move the debate and analysis beyond the entrenched rhetoric of the false binary of intrinsic or instrumental benefits of arts engagement. This book sets out to probe how attention to place and non-textbased tools can richly improve evaluation methods. It discusses new frameworks and avenues for assessing and communicating the impacts that arts and cultural engagement and participation have on the lives of individuals and communities, in ways that are authentic and meaningful for stakeholders, as well as for communities.

1.1 Introduction Throughout communities, arts organisations, cultural institutions and all levels of government, there are tacit agreement and understanding that the arts make a significant contribution to social impacts in education, belonging, identity and the wellbeing of those who participate in them. However, how this contribution is understood, assessed and articulated remains piecemeal and almost entirely absent in broader discussions around arts policy and funding. The debate in Australia, and internationally, about the most effective ways to report on the impact of arts and cultural engagement by individuals and communities is not new. Belfiore notes that there are “two defining issues of contemporary cultural policy debates: cultural value and the challenge of its measurement” (2015, ix). Belfiore extends this by saying that the measurement of value attributed to arts and culture is particularly heightened when the arts are supported through public funding. The challenge is not a data collection issue but a conceptual issue. Walmsley (2013, 74) points to a similar conundrum © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Gattenhof et al., The Social Impact of Creative Arts in Australian Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7357-3_1

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and notes, “impact in the arts tends to equate impact with either benefits or value”, although the terms are not entirely synonymous. To confuse the debate even further, the terms impact and value are used interchangeably and as proxies for each other (Gattenhof, 2017). This lack of clarity around the attribution of impact and how it might be applied within an evaluative framework makes work difficult for both arts organisations and researchers to clearly point to the outcomes of arts-based projects. A new public discourse about what the arts contribute and what they bring to the table in the form of meaningful communicative methods, development of inclusive places and compelling avenues for sharing knowledge for all members of society is needed. What has become clear to virtually every arts and cultural organisation and researcher who has engaged with communities about creative projects is that what individuals and communities value, or what can be framed as social impact, about these events and programmes (connection, wonder, empowerment, imagination, aesthetic enjoyment, challenge, new knowledge and perspectives) and what we measure (attendance and associated economic benefits) are not aligned. To understand the impact and value for individuals and communities, a new language and attribution framework is needed to move the debate and analysis beyond the entrenched rhetoric of the false binary of intrinsic or instrumental benefits of arts engagement. A related issue is the deployment of evaluative schemas to capture the impact of arts engagement. Assessment methods and frameworks currently used for measuring arts and cultural engagement, predominantly through quantitative frames and tools, can flatten the history, purpose and meaning of arts engagement. Our discussion will take as its starting point the following definition of social impact as, “those effects that go beyond the artefacts and the enactment of the event or performance itself and have a continuing influence upon, and directly touch, people’s lives” (Jermyn, 2001). The Centre for Social Impact (n.d., 1) defines social impact as “the net effect of an activity on a community and the wellbeing of individuals and families”. While social impact is an increasing field of research and investigation, its application to the creative arts has not been significantly understood or examined from an end-user and policy perspective. This book takes the position that an understanding of how and why measurement is undertaken to determine social impact is needed rather than debating the merits attributed to cultural evaluation that is already publicly available (see Belfiore, 2014; Belfiore & Bennett, 2007a, 2007b; MacDowall et al., 2015; Radbourne et al., 2013). This book discusses conceptual understanding and assessment frameworks that can be used to dynamically assess social impact of arts engagement across the “three types of cultural value: intrinsic value, instrumental value and institutional value” (Holden, 2006, 11), with particular emphasis on how arts engagement creates, supports and extends factors such as wellbeing, social inclusion (also named social cohesion or belonging), identity and connection to place. Using arts and cultural policies and strategy documents from Australia as touchstones, and calling on like policy from New Zealand, USA, Canada and the UK for debate, this book argues that the social impact of arts engagement for individuals, whole communities and cohorts can help promote arts experiences in everyday life, enables activity that connects communities

1.1 Introduction

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and supports increased diversity in our creative workforce. To understand and articulate the social impact of the arts on a wide range of individuals and communities, we must understand the people and places who engage with arts and culture. There is a tension in producing arts programmes that engage and stimulate public audiences, while making the best use of resources in order to augment experience and outcomes for the (often multiple) funding stakeholders. Rarely do all parties have identical aims and goals, or at least the priorities of these goals may differ, and yet articulating what success would actually “look like” is seldom discussed and recorded together as a stakeholder group. Integrating new evaluation elements into processes of production and curation and adequately capturing “the value” of creative events in ways that make meaning once cultural programmes and events have concluded is important. Our book explores how going beyond quantitative data such as attendance numbers and using anecdotal qualitative data can richly improve evaluation methods and more accurately measure the impact of public programmes, both as public worth and as value to stakeholders, if expectations are clearly understood from the outset. Increased attention to the specificities of place—that is, geography, environment, climate, culture, demographics—and the assets of communities—including creativity, knowledge, resilience and lived experience—may enable more participatory and inclusive approaches for unpacking the value and impact of arts and culture for individuals and communities. We see place inextricably linked with people and their lives, and so locate them within a political and social context. A sense of place, according to Cresswell, is found in the meanings associated with a place: the feelings and emotions a place invokes (2011, 136). More specifically, according to Malpas, “place is integral to the very structure and possibility of experience. There is no possibility of understanding human existence – and especially human thought and experience – other than through an understanding of place” (2018, 13). These two themes—value and impact and notions of place—encompass the multiplicity of geographical places encountered in this book, how geography and remoteness can affect all aspects of life and views on self, and how sharing these concepts through narrative and story-based creativity can build a clearer picture of what is valuable and impactful when evaluating arts-led engagement programmes. “Value and impact” and “notions of place” are both unpacked throughout this book in relation to evaluation. The three main findings we have found useful in evaluating value and impact include: 1.

2.

3.

Evaluation frameworks are vital, but there is a need for an inclusive shared language, and for these to be embedded from the outset and not “bolted on” at the end of a programme to provide meaningful impact. There is still a current disconnect between what is measured (by funders) and what is valued by stakeholders—and programmes that are not valued by all stakeholders are not likely to be impactful. Authentically engaging multiple stakeholders equitably needs to be designed into conceptional planning. Non-text-based tools should be an essential “third” method in evaluation. There has been a slow move over the last decade away from relying solely on quantitative and qualitative research methods for evaluating programmes, to also include

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an array of non-text-based tools, and these have proven to gather important rich data to better express intangible value. Our research also reveals that value and impact cannot be meaningfully evaluated without also considering notions of place—as we believe place fundamentally shapes the lives, experiences and perspectives of people who engage with arts and culture. Findings to date that we share in the case studies throughout this book include: 1.

2.

3.

Creativity and place speak to the heart of the collective social health of a community—participation and all its complexities of who, how, why and when need much more unpacking, but participation needs to be uniquely designed and locally relevant for that community to ensure likely value and impact. Place-based narratives that are non-text-based can be intrinsic instruments in communicating impact. A sense of belonging may be intangible, but arts-led, story-based activities have helped in “showing” stakeholders, including funders, what it looks like. Networks and connections are everything and uniquely individual—based on the place and their community.

Our book scopes both theory and practical approaches on these themes throughout, in many different circumstances. Each time, we are reminded of how much more research there is to do, as we still seem to be in the infancy of recognising this highly interdisciplinary field. But as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us first-hand, and as Hancox (2021, 18) subscribes, “in a world that is both more connected and at the same time fractured, finding meaning in our places and relationships, and sharing these authentically with each other”, is key for any healthy society to harmoniously exist and thrive.

References Belfiore, E. (2014). ‘Impact’, ‘value’ and ‘bad economics’: Making sense of the problem of value in the arts and humanities. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 14, 95–110. Belfiore, E. (2015). Foreword. In L. MacDowall, M. Badham, E. Blomkamp, & K. Dunphy (Eds.), Making culture count: The politics of cultural measurement (pp. ix–xi). Palgrave Macmillan. Belfiore, E., & Bennett, O. (2007a). Determinants of impact: Towards a better understanding of arm’s length encounters with the arts. Cultural Trends, 16, 225–275. Belfiore, E., & Bennett, O. (2007b). Rethinking the social impacts of the arts. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 13, 135–151. Centre of Social Impact. (n.d.). About social impact. https://www.csi.edu.au/about-social/. Accessed April 23, 2021 Cresswell, T. (2011). Defining place. In M. Himley & A. Fitzsimmons (Eds.), Critical encounters with texts: Finding a place to stand (7th ed., pp. 127–136). Pearson. Gattenhof, S. (2017). Measuring impact: Models for evaluation in the Australian arts and culture landscape. Palgrave. Hancox, D. (2021). The revolution in transmedia storytelling through place: Pervasive, ambient, situated. Routledge.

References

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Holden, J. (2006). Cultural value and the crisis of legitimacy: Why culture needs a democratic mandate. Demos. https://www.demos.co.uk/files/Culturalvalueweb.pdf. Accessed May 3, 2020 Jermyn, H. (2001). Proposed evaluation framework. Unpublished, cited in Reeves, M. Measuring the economic and social impact of the arts: A review. Arts Council England. MacDowall, L., Badham, M., Blomkamp, E., & Dunphy, K. (Eds.). (2015). Making culture count: The politics of cultural measurement. Palgrave Macmillan. Malpas, J. (2018). Place and experience: A philosophical topography (2nd ed.). Routledge. Radbourne, J., Glow, H., & Johanson, K. (Eds.). 2013. The audience experience: A critical analysis of audiences in the performing arts. Intellect. Walmsley, B. (2013). A big part of my life: A qualitative study of the impact of theatre. Arts Marketing: An InternationAl Journal, 3, 73–87.

Chapter 2

Understanding Social Value and Impact in the Australian Context

Abstract More than 30 years of focused research in Australia and internationally tells us that the majority of arts and cultural engagement improves connection, wellbeing, knowledge creation and knowledge extension, cultural maintenance, creative problem-solving, imaginative responsiveness and awareness of self in concert with others. Predictably, the COVID-19 pandemic has incited enormous discussion about the value of the arts in our lives. It is tempting, particularly in a time of relentless uncertainty, to continue to revert to established arguments or accepted ways of doing rather than taking this opportunity to present new ways in accounting for arts, culture and creativity. This chapter outlines how value and impact are often used interchangeably and as proxies for each other. It argues the need for relatable and contemporary language frameworks to account for a multiplicity of understandings related to the value and impact of arts and culture across diverse communities.

2.1 Introduction The notion of impact arising from arts and cultural engagement has been coloured by an economic element. Wesley Enoch stated in The Saturday Paper, “[m]etrics for success are already skewing from qualitative to quantitative. In coming years, this will continue unabated, with impact measured by numbers of eyeballs engaged in transitory exposure or mass distraction rather than deep connection, community development and risk” (2020, 7). This statement demonstrates the disconnect between the impact of arts and culture on individuals and communities, and what is measured. The requirement for arts and cultural projects or events to demonstrate markers of value to others from outside the project, thereby evidencing positive and measurable impacts on communities and individuals, is not a recent development. The use of public funds to create and deliver arts-based engagement has been long debated and documented. The term “value” is imbued with “the long-held belief of the twoheaded debate about the aesthetic and/or utilitarian outcomes of arts and cultural engagement” (Gattenhof, 2017, 18). To be more accurate: “[the] tension between the measurable and the immeasurable remains at the heart of the debates on cultural indicators” (Blomkamp, 2015, 11). Further, as Blomkamp notes, “[a]t the core of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Gattenhof et al., The Social Impact of Creative Arts in Australian Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7357-3_2

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the value system is how individuals, families and communities are affected and transformed by virtue of participating” (ibid., 11). This chapter scopes contemporary understandings of the value and impact of arts and cultural engagement for individuals and their communities.

2.2 Defining the Notion of Value The notion of cultural or public value is complex and divisive with opinions falling into two broad themes: economic and non-economic. Within these themes are a variety of conceptual frameworks supporting different philosophical viewpoints. The dominant understanding, economic value, includes the measurement of worth; the dollar value of art and the measurement of quality; and value for money. The current economic environment has sharpened discussions about the use of public funds to support the development and presentation of arts programmes and events. Within this climate, the need to prove that the arts offer value for money appears to be ever more pressing. In this context, it is not surprising that the arts and culture landscape have entered a moment where measurement and attribution of value are seen as critically important. Value, according to Belfiore (2014, 95), “has been inextricably linked to the challenge of “making a case” for the arts and for public cultural funding”. Walmsley (2013) makes the point that value can be harder to pin down than demonstrable benefits, “mainly because as a concept it is more elusive and intangible” (Walmsley, 2013, 74). Carnwath and Brown (2014, 9) agree by saying that defining value is complex because the term “carries many different meanings on its own and in combination with other terms”. They go on to define value as “not inherent in objects or events, but [as being] attributed to them by the beholder” (ibid.). As such, the value of arts and culture is “created in the encounter between a person (or multiple people) and an object (which may be tangible or intangible) as an idea or activity” (ibid., 8). The research concerning artistic and cultural value reveals a lack of consensus about the meaning of this terminology. Scholarly commentary (see Barnett & Meyrick, 2017; McCain, 2006) supports the need for a unified understanding of the terms artistic value, cultural value and public value, alongside agreement regarding evaluation measures and methods. Clarifying “what” the value is and for “whom” it is valuable will allow for a more accurate articulation of what cultural value is, more nuanced evaluation methods (Scott, 2010) and, according to Gilmore et al. (2017), improvements in the quality of art. Without a consensus about language and meaning, the cultural value conversation is reductive and “… subsumed by the problem of measuring the cultural sector…” (Cunningham in Meyrick et al., 2019, 81), limited to evaluation and judgement. John Holden defines “three types of cultural value: intrinsic value, instrumental value and institutional value” (2006, 11). Importantly, social and intrinsic worth is also considered in Holden’s articulation of cultural value. McCarthy et al. (2004) conducted a comprehensive review of the benefits associated with the arts, including

2.2 Defining the Notion of Value

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cognitive, behavioural, health, social and economic benefits, and various forms of intrinsic benefits. McCarthy et al., (2004, 3) use the term “instrumental benefits” when “the arts experience is only a means to achieving benefits in non-arts areas”, which may also be achieved by other (non-arts) means. By contrast, “intrinsic benefits” is used when referring “to effects in the arts experience that add value to people’s lives” (McCarthy et al., 2004, 37). What has proven most valuable in the study by McCarthy et al. is the explicit recognition, “that arts benefits—both instrumental and intrinsic—can have both private and public value” (2004, 4). Rationales for non-economic value concern the intrinsic and social significance of cultural value. Often experiential (Juncker & Balling, 2016; Meyrick et al., 2019) or expressive (Juncker & Balling, 2016), these include narratives of experiences with and through art and reflect benefits as experienced by individuals and communities (Scott, 2010). The New Zealanders and the Arts research report (Creative New Zealand, 2018a) finds that the benefits of engagement with, and attendance and participation in, arts and culture are both intrinsic and instrumental in nature. Eighty per cent of research participants believed the arts bestow a range of individual benefits, such as personal affirmation and “feel good” outcomes, and collective or national benefits including increased community cohesion and helping define a national identity (Creative New Zealand, 2018a, 11–13). The report notes that over half of research participants identifying as M¯aori reported that engagement in Ng¯a Toi M¯aori (M¯aori arts) improves wellbeing (ibid., 11). Although not the focus of current Australian political rhetoric, appreciation for arts and culture is observable in the opinions and values of Australians as evidenced in the landmark national arts participation studies commissioned by Australia Council for the Arts (2017a, 2020b). In fact, 84% of the 8928 respondents of the Creating Our Future: Results of the National Arts Participation Survey acknowledged that the arts have positive impacts on our sense of health and wellbeing, our capacity to deal with stress, anxiety or depression, and our understanding of other people and cultures (Australia Council for the Arts, 2020b, 7). Additionally, 68% of survey respondents affirmed that “the Arts make for a richer and more meaningful life” (ibid., 48). This response speaks to the intrinsic value of culture and lends itself to embodied notions of culture in which value is framed through social, symbolic and spiritual understandings (Meyrick et al., 2019; Scott et al., 2018; Throsby, 2001). Embedded in an aesthetic philosophy, this viewpoint represents the diversity of participants within the value debate, artist and receiver, and their various tastes, preferences, knowledges and experiences (Juncker & Balling, 2016). This diversity in cultural participants can be directly linked to the array of interpretations of cultural value (Barnett & Meyrick, 2017). Synchronously, diversity is observable in the breadth of cultural activities being practised and enjoyed. The concept of value, in recent times, has aligned the notion of public value with government agendas and policies around innovation. The concept of innovation is loosely tied to intrinsic benefits of arts engagement—in particular, aspirations of creativity. Innovation, at least in terms of arts and culture in Australia, is about economic advantage. This position is eloquently outlined in Haseman and Jaaniste’s paper The Arts and Australia’s National Innovation System 1994–2008 – Arguments,

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recommendations, challenges (2008). The paper’s central proposition is that “the arts sector – particularly the performing arts, visual arts and crafts, new media arts and creative writing – should be included in Australian Government innovation policy development and play a significant role in national innovation” (Haseman & Jaaniste, 2008, 5). The genesis of this position comes much earlier, through the release of Creative Nation: Commonwealth Cultural Policy (1994), launched as Australia’s first cultural policy, covering the traditional arts as well as film, television and radio, multimedia and cultural institutions. One of the policy’s flagship propositions was that “culture … makes an essential contribution to innovation” (Department of Communications and the Arts, 1994; Haseman & Jaaniste, 2008, 14–15). Building from this statement, Haseman and Jaaniste’s paper frames the treatise through six key arguments: the cultural argument: the arts create and promote an atmosphere of innovation the skills argument: a rich and immersive arts education builds the skills required of a future innovative workforce the knowledge argument: the arts create new knowledge for innovation through creative production and processes, including collaborations with other disciplines, such as science, within and beyond universities the commercialisation argument: the arts can convert new knowledge and research into profits through entrepreneurial activity the economic argument: the arts, as part of the creative industries, occupy a substantial, growing, enabling and innovative part of the economy the systems argument: the cultural sector is an innovation system within which various institutions and organisations behave as innovation hubs. (Haseman & Jaaniste, 2008, 5)

In considering the listed arguments, it is easy to see that value as it applies to innovation is clearly linked to productivity, income generation and workforce planning.

2.3 Rethinking Value Beyond Economic Outcomes Instrumental benefits such as economic outcomes are the pervading commodity in the current quantitative climate enveloping the arts, evident in reporting and research. Meyrick et al. (2019) conclude that without the guidance of a robust and aspirational cultural policy, the current instrumental view of the value of arts and culture will endure. Criticisms exist that “whole of government” approaches to cultural policy have inserted diverse instrumental agendas into policy and diluted the cultural dimension (Craik, 2013, 52). Foreman-Wernet (2020) compared the values articulated by the cultural agencies of 92 countries around the world, including Australia. Heritage was found to be the most common values-oriented theme, followed by national promotion of the arts,

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and articulation of national identity (Foreman-Wernet, 2020, 6–7), though “[a] theme that emerged less often was the value of Creativity and Expression” (ibid., 7). Some agencies highlighted social cohesion and wellbeing as part of the mission or value of arts and culture in the country, but these were the lowest articulated themes (ibid., 8–9). In a speech delivered to the Australia Council of the Arts Marketing Summit, titled On the Brink of a New Chapter: Arts in the 21st Century, Ben Cameron argued that arts organisations needed to rethink their relationship with communities and individuals. Cameron (2009) suggested three questions that arts organisations must answer in relation to the notion of value if they are to survive and have impact. Cameron framed the questions as: • What is the value my organisation brings to my community? • What is the value my organisation alone brings or brings better than anyone else? • How would my community be damaged if we closed our doors and went away tomorrow? While such questions could be seen within an economic framework of value around income generation through ticket sales, Cameron, in these questions, is challenging arts organisations to revise the nature of the cultural task. For Cameron, arts organisations can no longer afford to “think of themselves as producers or presenters of cultural product, rather they are orchestrators of social interaction with communities who are seeking opportunities for interactivity, participation, access and engagement” (2009). According to recent research by O’Sullivan and Huntley, such values are especially important for Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and communities (Australia Council for the Arts, 2020a). Meaningful and sustained community engagement, including opportunities for involvement and participation, is central to the development and presentation of cultural products in Aboriginal communities (Australia Council for the Arts, 2020a, 61). If we take Cameron’s (2009) position of redefining the cultural task beyond an economic transaction or, as Belfiore classifies it, “economic doxa” (2014, 95), but move it to a platform for social interaction, then it is imperative that the value equation ascribed to arts and culture is represented beyond numerical reportage. Across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, we can find examples where value has a broader attribution. The findings set out in Vital Signs (Australia Council for the Arts, 2010a) and the evolving New Zealand wellbeing approach and the Living Standards Framework (Dalziel et al., 2019) acknowledge that arts and culture have a central role to play in the overall wellbeing of a nation, its communities and citizens. The Australia Council for the Arts’ 2020 Domestic Arts Tourism Report highlights the value of arts and culture to Australia’s tourism priority. Findings include that “[m]ajor cities account for the largest volume of arts tourism”, but “the destinations where tourists are especially likely to engage with the arts are in regional Australia” (Australia Council for the Arts, 2020c, 20). A finding from the Australian Research Council-funded Creative Hotspots research shows that within the Cairns region, cultural soft and hard infrastructure must be “owned” locally (appreciated, engaged in, supported) before it can be successfully embedded within

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tourism strategy (Cunningham et al., 2019a, 19). Cunningham et al. (2019a, 2) found that Cairns has spent over ten years of cultural policy building local ownership, and now cultural tourism can be a prominent strategy going forward. Additionally, Cunningham et al. (2019b, 1) note that volunteering in arts-related activities in Central Western Queensland is “way ahead of national and state averages”, which speaks to the social value of arts and culture in remote communities. Across the literature, there is also a call to decolonise the approach to, and understanding of, the public and cultural value of engagement with arts and culture. Speaking from a Canadian First Nations perspective, Paquette et al., (2017, 282) state that “a post-colonial cultural policy needs to destabilise [and] challenge the colonial order and render precarious its certainties and identities. Cultural policy as a politics of recognition is doomed to fail because it does not challenge the symbolic order in place”. Paquetteet al., (2017, 270) make clear that “[m]any of the remnants of colonialism are most saliently felt through cultural institutions and policies – through their acknowledgement and, in some cases, unbridled flaunting of colonial rules via established and engrained social and political values and norms”. For First Nations peoples, “culture is far from a secondary or marginal concern” (Paquette et al., 2017, 280). Paquette et al. (2017) ground Canada’s cultural policy in its colonial history to identify some of its contentious grounds and build on the notion of resurgence to offer a constructive path forward for a post-colonial cultural policy and attribution of value in post-colonial and settler countries such as Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and Canada. Paquette et al. suggest that “resurgence is a path to decolonisation” (ibid., 281), to reclaim the notion of value through land, learning from traditional customs and culinary practices, and language. They write: we approach cultural policy and ethics as something that is practiced and open-ended – not as an institution, form of governance, or institutional configuration of sorts. The subjectivity of the agent who cares for culture, heritage, and Indigeneity is primordial, and building a post-colonial ethos is crucial. (Paquette et al., 2017, 282)

As noted by O’Sullivan and Huntley, years of research by the Australia Council for the Arts has highlighted “the need to build opportunities for First Nations decisionmaking … First Nations peoples’ self-determination must be central in theatre and dance-making in Australia, including greater opportunities for First Nations’ creative control” (Australia Council for the Arts, 2020a, 12). Australia Council for the Arts and Australian Think Tank A New Approach acknowledge a need to redefine the ambit and value attribution of the arts in contemporary society. Rather than ascribing the colonial dichotomy of intrinsic or instrumental value, a decolonial attribution may be more dynamic and inclusive as Indigenous cultural practices “do more than present heritage. They are sites where cultural processes and politics are negotiated and advanced” (Jones & Birdsall-Jones, 2014, 314). Aboriginal cultural centres such as Gwoonardu Mia in Western Australia’s Carnarvon region “are part of a more complex and historical shift in the communication of Aboriginal heritage that is likely to both complement and transform cultural maintenance practices” (ibid., 313), rather than replicating cultural maintenance practices of previous eras. Jones and Birdsall-Jones (2014, 312) say Aboriginal cultural

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centres provide value in terms of social benefits that include bridging social capital between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal residents and visitors, addressing tensions within the Aboriginal community and providing opportunities for young people to create their own futures. More recently, O’Sullivan and Huntley note Touring work in First Nations communities can also provide opportunities and pathways for the new generation of First Nations artists and arts sector workers – although this seems to be an undervalued and underestimated impact of First Nations creative output. (Australia Council for the Arts, 2020a, 56)

2.4 Understanding Impact Like value, the notion of impact arising from arts and cultural engagement is frequently understood in economic terms. Impact, for the purpose of this book, is defined as “an influence or effect on virtually anything, given its context” (Business + Impact at Michigan Ross, n.d.). This definition suggests that impact may be easier to demonstrate than value, which can be a subjective angle if one tries to capture data from individual or community arts engagements. The determinant of value is reliant on numerous factors, such as demographics associated with cultural and linguistic diversity, gender, language, sexual diversity, geographic location and socio-economic status. Carnwath and Brown (2014, 9) say that impact “implies that something changes as a result of a cultural experience”. Landry et al., (1995, 23) extend this definition by saying that impacts are seen through “the effects that go beyond the artefacts and the enactments of the event or performance itself and have a continuing influence upon and directly touch people’s lives”. What is clear is there is no firm consensus on the attribution of impact. Rather than providing clarity about the nature of what is evaluated, this confusion results in tensions for both arts organisations and researchers. As established in Chapter One, the debate about how to demonstrate the impact resulting from arts and cultural engagement by individuals and communities is longstanding in Australia and internationally, and it is contested and confusing territory. For Belfiore, particularly with arts experiences and products supported through public funding, the “problem lies in the way in which the attribution of value to the outcome of aesthetic encounters has become part of the technocratic machinery of cultural policy-making” (2015, 97). Further, Arlene Goldbard asserts deep concerns about the far-reaching implications of impact evaluation of arts and culture. Goldbard says: The trouble is, the very quest for metrics is contaminated with ideas and assumptions borrowed from worlds that have nothing in particular to do with community and creativity. The notion that everything of value can be weighed and measured, which is one of the most grotesque artifacts of post-Enlightenment thinking, is antithetical to the deep values of community cultural development. Indeed, in this domain, the search for metrics actually harms what it seeks to help. (2008, 1)

This overemphasis on numeric records that try to capture impact of arts engagement has placed us into “[d]atastan – the empire of scientism” (Goldbard, 2015,

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214). Using evaluation approaches that go beyond audience, subsidy and economic modelling can build a more comprehensive picture of the “alterations in the quality of life” (Brown & Trimboli, 2011, 617) that the arts create. Concurring with Goldbard (2015), both McCausland (2019) and Badham (2015) note the ways in which measurements of success set by agencies or funding bodies external to a community may contradict or diminish local priorities. Badham (2015, 195) writes that typical policy-oriented measures of cultural participation and cultural economics are not always relevant … [and] local understandings of cultural value and progress are not universally translated or easily compared. Targets set by external agencies can conceivably contradict local priorities.

What this discussion demonstrates is that there are questions being raised about the indicators used to provide knowledge about the audience experience. Indeed, critics (Radbourne et al., 2013; Walmsley, 2011) say that economic data anchored in ticket buying, attendance figures and the allied activity that Goldbard (2015) mentions do nothing to provide evidence about audience engagement. In a report entitled More than Bums on Seats (Australia Council for the Arts, 2010b, 30), a major Australian arts funding body noted that “if the link between the arts and the wide-ranging benefits they deliver could be more strongly established it would add even greater value to the arts”. Ten years on from this report, we are still struggling to find an authentic measurement approach to account for both the intrinsic and instrumental benefits of arts and cultural engagement.

2.5 Language and Approaches to Understanding Impact Current evaluation methods dominated by quantitative methods are, according to Holden (2004, 17), “increasingly being questioned, both in terms of the utility of methodologies employed and the extent to which the results illuminate our understanding”. The current impact frameworks and evaluation models focus on project outcomes generally tied to audience engagement measures, rather than on investigating why and how a project works, which can then be scaled up and replicated if necessary. Holden (2004, 22) believes this is a “missing ingredient” in the impact debate. Data-driven approaches have received detailed commentary around the “overfocus on economic indicators, and the fact that this domain is, inappropriately, currently positioned first” (Morton, 2014, 4). Brown and Novak (2007) discuss the dilemma of capturing data and reporting on outcomes. They say “[a]rts organisations, historically, have had difficulty articulating their impact. In the absence of other measures, board members, staff and funders often rely exclusively on demand metrics such as ticket sales and attendance figures to gauge success” (Brown & Novak, 2007, 5). Lachlan MacDowall concurs with this position:

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On the one hand, initiatives to make culture count can have an active and positive drive to include a cultural perspective, and to have it be made visible and taken into account in broader decision-making. On the other hand, too often, culture is made to count, in the sense that it is forced unwillingly and unhelpfully into systems of measurement, from where it can be pressed into the service of divergent agendas. (2015, 5; emphasis in original)

In an attempt to make the effects of arts and cultural engagement transparent to governments or funders, and manageable for arts organisations, the processes and frameworks put in place to help solve debates around impact have somewhat clouded the true nature of the activities and experiences themselves. This concern can be evidenced in the Vital Signs: Cultural Indicators for Australia document (Australia Council for the Arts, 2010a), where the predominance of reportage on national findings, when the cultural indicators have been applied, is expressed through graphs, tables of figures and percentages. Evaluations that look to assess the social impact of an arts programme tend not to assess it from an arts perspective—that is, “the evaluation does not discuss the artistic merit or quality of the work as well” (Badham, 2013, 100). As a vocal commentator in this field, Goldbard sounds a note of warning: In any context, choosing quantifiable indicators tends to promote what can most easily be measured and counted. It is common for assessors to choose indicators that are easy to track and crunch, whether or not they go to the heart of necessary learning. (2015, 222)

Discussing evaluations of First Nations policy in Australia, McCausland (2019) finds that while policy-makers (and funding bodies) expect visible, easily quantifiable outcomes, programme deliverers at the coalface of communities prioritise relationship-building, participation and capacity-building which “is a process that takes time and care that may not fit neatly into government funding cycles” (69). Both McCausland (2019) and Badham (2015) highlight the need for models and processes that are appropriate for diverse communities that privilege local voices and ascribe worth to locally relevant indicators of success. McCausland warns against decontextualising evaluations outside of specific places and communities and says, “the perspectives and priorities of their communities must be central in determining evaluation approaches, metrics and the nature of policy and programmes that are intended to benefit them. Context emerges as crucial” (2019, 75). Badham (2019, 212) suggests a relational and dialogic approach to unpack a community’s experiences and tacit knowledge, describing this as “a co-creative relationship” which includes an evaluation on the processes of designing and delivering an arts experience and event, as well as the impacts for participants and audiences. Providing cases of participatory evaluation from Australia, Badham emphasises the need for multiple entry points so that community members can provide feedback in the way most comfortable for them (2019, 215), instead of solely through surveys or questionnaires. Describing the experience and value of participatory evaluation, they state: Artists and participants report a greater sense of agency and ownership in the collaboratively developed, collected, and analysed material. This democratised and dialogic process of evaluation can then become integrated into practice as a form of critical reflection with the

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2 Understanding Social Value and Impact in the Australian Context aim to empower those whose knowledge and experience are ultimately at stake. (Badham, 2019, 216)

Further, Knell and Taylor (2011) argue for continued exploration of the interconnections between intrinsic and instrumental benefits and more, effective measurement of intrinsic value, which connects the measurement directly to the public’s experience of culture and what they value. Otherwise, the danger is that difficult to measure benefits – such as the aesthetic, spiritual or social – will continue to be underemphasised in policymakers’ cost–benefit calculus. (19)

There are a number of language frameworks that could be adopted to better measure intrinsic outcomes of engagement. By way of example, the following three frameworks attempt to frame the language for intrinsic impact assessment markers and chart change as a result of a cultural experience. While no single framework discussed below offers a complete set of indicators to capture impact in terms of public value, wellbeing and social cohesion, across the three frameworks there are languages and approaches to move impact evaluation beyond numeric data and into the field of human experience. Drawing on considerable work as evaluators of the impact of live performance for audience members, Brown and Novak-Leonard’s language framework (2007, 2013) in Table 2.1 employs an affective and place-based approach to accounting for impact. We present Brown and Novak-Leonard’s framework (2013, 227–228) as a table here for easier comparison with the following two frameworks. Brown and Novak-Leonard set out to “measure the short-term intrinsic impacts of audience members’ aesthetic experience at a performing arts programme” (2013, 224). The Table 2.1 Framework one: Alan Brown and Jennifer Novak-Leonard (1) Art as a means of feeling

Captures the audience member’s engagement in the arts experience by considering their feelings of aliveness, being emotionally charged and absorbed in the moment

(2) Art as a means of social bonding and bridging

Involves the connectedness that can emerge from arts experiences, both in an individual sense (with regard to self-understanding and identity construction) and in a community sense (with regard to community pride, including gaining an understanding of people different to yourself)

(3) Art as a means of aesthetic development and creative stimulation

Encapsulates outcomes associated with exposure to new art, artists or artistic styles and forms to progress an individual’s understanding of the context of art, regardless of the individual’s taste. This makes clear the value of aesthetic exposure

(4) Art as a means of learning and thinking

Speaks to the gathering and interpreting of new information about an issue, idea or culture. It relates to the art’s content and how it might challenge or provoke new thinking

Table adapted from Brown and Novak-Leonard (2013, 227–228)

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research attempted to “capture the immediacy of the experience”, and part of the research was to “capture what audience members could self-report within 24 h after their audience experience” (ibid.). Sample questions included: 1. 2.

“To what degree were you absorbed in the performance?” “To what extent did the performance serve to celebrate and sustain your own cultural heritage?”

Collating the responses from audience members allowed Brown and NovakLeonard to shape the impact statements seen in the framework. The downside of this framework is that it is focused on outcomes from an audience perspective, or what Dunphy et al., (2020, 479) describe as “receptive engagement rather than the full spectrum from receptive right through to creative participation”. That is, “it does not enable a complete measurement of outcomes” (ibid.). In Table 2.2, the measurable cultural (intrinsic) outcomes of engagement in cultural development activities have similar framing to Brown and Novak-Leonard (2013). Smithies and Uppal’s framework (2019) has been developed as part of their research through the Cultural Development Network based at RMIT University in Melbourne. Similar to how we presented Framework One, we draw from Smithies and Uppal (2019, 152) in Framework Two and present their ideas in a table format. Framework Two engages cognitive and emotive language to account for impact and uses a place-based focus to outline impact which can be described as belonging. The framework has been trialled in Australian and international contexts and was developed in response to the challenge of identifying language to account for the “… intangible nature of cultural activities that makes them inherently unmeasurable, while their ‘intrinsic’ properties render them essentially valuable” (Dunphy et al., 2020, 474). Commentary on the framework notes that Table 2.2 Framework two: John Smithies and Surajen Uppal (1) Has creativity been stimulated?

Increased desire to participate or create new cultural works by igniting imagination and curiosity

(2) Has an aesthetic enrichment been experienced?

Non-typical experiences (often moving experiences sparked by beauty, joy, awe, discomfort or wonder) that engage the senses to take an individual out of their everyday experience

(3) Has new knowledge, insight and new ideas been gained?

Stimulating the mind, deeper understanding, and critical and creative thinking and reflection

(4) Has the diversity of cultural expression been appreciated?

Appreciation of diverse cultural expressions and the way these interact with each other

(5) Has a sense of belonging to a shared cultural heritage deepened?

Providing context to the present and visions of the future by considering the past, including history and heritage

Table adapted from Smithies and Uppal (2019, 152)

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2 Understanding Social Value and Impact in the Australian Context the first three outcomes need to be elicited before the last two can occur: creativity needs to be stimulated, aesthetic enrichment experienced, or insights gained, before diverse cultural forms can be appreciated, or cultural belonging deepened. The first three outcomes are also alike because they are about individuals’ internal experience and relationship with themselves … The fourth and fifth outcomes, appreciation and belonging, are about a person’s relationship with others and the world around them … The fourth and fifth outcomes also contrast to the previous three in elucidating the ways an individual might identify with others, rather than having a unique internal experience. (Dunphy et al., 2020, 487)

The Smithies and Uppal framework overtly uses arts-based language and aesthetic disposition to account for the impact of the arts and cultural experience by individuals and communities. Other indicators of impact can be borrowed from indices developed outside of the cultural sphere, such as Daisy Fancourt’s discussion of the impact of arts in health (2017; Fancourt & Finn, 2019), adapted in Table 2.3. Aligning with our approach to presenting the previous two frameworks, we adapt Fancourt’s ideas (2017, Chapter Four; Fancourt & Finn, 2019, 3) to present them as an easily comparable table. Notably, the first five indicators in the cell titled 1) components are framed through affective language and have similarities to both Brown and NovakLeonard’s language framework (Table 2.1) and Smithies and Uppal’s measurable cultural (intrinsic) outcomes (Table 2.2). The responses in Fancourt’s ideas (2017; Fancourt & Finn, 2019), presented here in Table 2.3, are framed in a salutogenesis approach, that is, an approach focusing on factors that support human health and wellbeing, rather than on factors that cause disease (pathogenesis). Of particular note is that the model includes social outcomes that point to an indicator of social cohesion. What is noticeable across all three frameworks is the overt use of language and concepts associated with arts and cultural engagement. They are effectively using the language of the arts to report on the impact of the arts. Using the words of the participants to articulate impact and value may disrupt the dominant frame of intrinsic and instrumental value that we have so far used to talk about the outcomes of arts and cultural engagement. We need to embrace words and concepts that everyone can understand—not just those inside the tent of arts and culture. Otherwise, we will find ourselves possibly continuing the elitist, exclusionary and colonial narratives that have dominated the discourse. Table 2.3 Framework three: Daisy Fancourt (1) Components

Aesthetic engagement; involvement of the imagination; sensory activation; evocation of emotion; cognitive stimulation; social interaction; physical activity; engagement with themes of health; interaction with healthcare settings

(2) Responses

Psychological; physiological; social; behavioural

(3) Outcomes

Prevention; promotion; management; treatment

Table adapted from Chapter Four in Fancourt (2017) and subsequent work in Fancourt and Finn (2019, 3)

2.6 The Conundrum of Correlation or Causality

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2.6 The Conundrum of Correlation or Causality Allied to the debate for the need to demonstrate the impact of arts engagement is the tricky issue of demonstrating that interaction with arts and cultural events can lead to instrumental or intrinsic change. The need to prove that there is a causal link between arts and cultural engagement and impacts around change, at either an individual or societal level, is most commonly situated within educational contexts and the need for improved academic achievement, as well as in environments where social behaviours require remediation, such as reduction in crime rates or violence, and changes to health. While instrumental benefits seem to be the preferred way of reporting on the impact of arts and culture, there are problems with this approach because the causal evidence is usually weak. An example of this is when arts engagement makes claims about improvements in literacy and numeracy outcomes for students. As Ewing states, “[a]ttributing a direct causal relationship between study in, through or of the arts, and improved outcomes in other areas is problematic because there are so many other variables in classroom learning that cannot be controlled” (2010, 16). Similar studies by Fiske (1999) and Deasy (2002) also note the problem of establishing certain corollary effects through arts involvement. While not dismissing the findings articulated in the instrumental benefit studies, it is prudent to say that the evaluative research can, at best, make correlations between arts engagement and outcomes, but not confirm causality. Goldbard (2015) supports this position in saying instrumental value studies of arts engagement lack rigour, thereby being unable to prove causality. The issue of causality is not just situated in the reporting of intrinsic and, more commonly, the instrumental benefits attributed to arts and cultural engagement. Increasingly, evaluations of cultural product and cultural experiences are required to report within an economic frame—that is, an “input and output” model. Government and philanthropic funding agencies, both within Australia and globally, want to know about the economic impact of their investments. This impact factor connects directly with Haseman and Jaaniste’s (2008) argument about innovation within the arts and cultural sector outlined earlier in this document. Haseman and Jaaniste say that one of six activating dynamics for innovation in the arts is the economic argument: “the arts, as part of the creative industries, occupy a substantial, growing, enabling and innovative part of the economy” (2008, 5). The demonstration of economic growth allied to arts engagement is usually captured in post-event surveys focused on ancillary engagement related to the purchase of food or accommodation while attending the event, rather than data on arts engagement itself. Goldbard (2015, 217) calls this “the metrics effect” and states: For many years, the chief argument relied on the multiplier effect: when someone bought a theatre ticket, for instance, that lead to spending on transport, food and drink, and other such inputs into the local economy … Art was good for business. All true of course, but in no way uniquely true to arts activity.

Studies that track economic advantage through participation in the arts can be received more favourably by governments and arts advocates because, as Goldbard

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notes, they appear to take place within “… a scientific framework, far less ‘soft’ than arguments from pleasure, beauty or meaning” (ibid, 217). In an environment driven by quantifiable data reported through tables, graphs and percentages, we must ask if this consumer data around events allied to an arts experience—transport costs, food and accommodation—provide any real evidence of the value or impact of an arts and cultural experience for individuals or communities. Goldbard (2015) believes that such studies may falsify results in that they are not providing evidence for what they say they are investigating—in this case, engagement in an arts experience.

2.7 Conclusion This discussion reveals that an understanding of how and why measurement is undertaken to determine value and impact is needed rather than debating the merits attributed to cultural evaluation. Despite the cloudiness surrounding the attribution and activation of the term “value”, current literature shows that it remains a catchall term for reporting on the public funding of arts and cultural activities in many countries, including Australia, as governments and arts organisations are required to provide evidence of gain through quantitative evaluation methods. Australian government policy notes that “the arts have a big role to play in contributing … to the development of individuals able to communicate well, think originally and critically, adapt to change, work cooperatively, connect with both people and ideas, and find solutions to problems as they occur” (Australia Council for the Arts 2006, 3). While such a statement can be viewed as aspirational in terms of arts and cultural development in Australia, the fact remains that funders and governments, and perhaps the public, want to see what their taxes have paid for and how it has moved a nation forward in its aspirations. Once again, it comes down to the power of the dollar, or as Belfiore notes, [t]he fundamental issue that underlies questions of value and the preoccupations with evaluation and measurement – namely, the issue around the role that evidence, evaluation, measurement and quantification really play in policy rhetoric and in the decision-making processes that are at the heart of cultural policy-making. (2015, ix; emphasis in original).

According to Radbourne et al. (2013), there has been some shift in governments and evaluation approaches in response to the requirement to evaluate and report on arts and cultural engagements. They believe that “there is now a movement to identify and measure the intrinsic qualities of the arts, whether these are by artistic excellence, innovation or vibrancy” (Radbourne et al., 2013, 5). Goldbard speaks about usurping the numbers-based evidence approach (“Datastan”) by allowing “artists and cultural policy-makers to convey cultural value and meaning with the tools best suited for that purpose: story, image, metaphor and experience” (2015, 226). Within this ethos, Goldbard is calling for the impact of arts experiences to be reported through art forms and processes rather than “bean counting”. While text and numeric data are “dominant in academic research – vital for production, measurement and dissemination

2.7 Conclusion

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of research findings” (Durose et al., 2011, 8), there is equally an interest in “beyond text tools”, including storytelling, performance, art and photography. We assert that taking a performative research approach and using non-text-based tools, as well as adopting language and approaches discussed in this chapter, may provide an answer to Goldbard’s call to arms.

References Australia Council for the Arts. (2006). Creative innovation strategy. Australia Council for the Arts. Australia Council for the Arts. (2010a). Vital signs: Cultural indicators for Australia. https://www. arts.gov.au/publications/vital-signs-cultural-indicators-australia-first-edition-consultation-draft2010. Accessed February 26, 2020 Australia Council for the Arts. (2010b). More than bums on seats: Australian participation in the arts. http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/publications/. Accessed February 26, 2020. Australia Council for the Arts. (2017a). The National Arts Participation Survey: Culture Segments Australia. http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/connecting-australians-cul ture-segments/. Accessed February 26, 2020. Australia Council for the Arts. (2020a). Creating art Part 1—The makers’ view of pathways for First Nations theatre and dance. https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/creating-art-par t-1/. Accessed February 26, 2020 Australia Council for the Arts. (2020b). Creating our future: Results of the national arts participation survey. https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/creating-our-future. Accessed February 26, 2020. Australia Council for the Arts. (2020c). Domestic arts tourism: Connecting the country. https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/domestic-arts-tourism-connecting-the-country/. Accessed February 26, 2020 Badham, M. (2013). The turn to community: Exploring the political and relational in the arts. Journal of Arts & Communities, 5, 93–104. https://doi.org/10.1386/jaac.5.2-3.93_1 Badham, M. (2015). Democratising cultural indicators: Developing a shared sense of progress. In L. MacDowall, M. Badham, E. Blomkamp, & K. Dunphy (Eds.), Making culture count: The politics of cultural measurement (pp. 195–212). Palgrave Macmillan. Badham, M. (2019). Spectres of evaluation: Indeterminacy and the negotiation of value(s) in socially engaged art. In C. Poulin, M. Preston, & S. Airaud (Eds.), Co-creation practices (pp. 205–217). CAC Brétigny. Barnett, T., & Meyrick, J. (2017). The value of culture: A dilemma in five pictures. Griffith Review, 55, 182–191. Belfiore, E. (2014). ‘Impact’, ‘value’ and ‘bad economics’: Making sense of the problem of value in the arts and humanities. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 14, 95–110. Belfiore, E. (2015). Foreword. In L. MacDowall, M. Badham, E. Blomkamp, & K. Dunphy (Eds.), Making culture count: The politics of cultural measurement (pp. ix–xi). Palgrave Macmillan. Blomkamp, E. (2015). A critical history of cultural indicators. In L. MacDowall, M. Badham, E. Blomkamp, & K. Dunphy (Eds.), Making culture count: The politics of cultural measurement (pp. 11–26). Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, A. S., & Novak, J. L. (2007). Assessing the intrinsic impacts of a live performance. WolfBrown. Brown, A. S., & Novak-Leonard, J. L. (2013). Measuring the intrinsic impacts of arts attendance. Cultural Trends, 22, 223–233. https://doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2103.817654 Brown, S., & Trimboli, D. (2011). The real ‘worth’ of festivals: Challenges for measuring sociocultural impacts. Asia Pacific Journal of Arts and Cultural Management, 8, 616–629.

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Business+Impact at Michigan Ross. What is social impact? https://businessimpact.umich.edu/ about/what-is-social-impact/. Accessed December 8, 2019 Cameron, B. (2009). On the brink of a new chapter: Arts in the 21st century. Transcript. Australia Council for the Arts. Carnwarth, J. D., & Brown, A. S. (2014). Understanding the value and impacts of cultural experiences: A literature review. Arts Council England. publication/understanding-value-and-impactscultural-experiences. Accessed May 19, 2019 Craik, J. (2013). Creative Australia: Missed opportunity or new paradigm for a national cultural policy? Asia Pacific Journal of Arts and Cultural Management, 10, 48–54. Creative New Zealand: The Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa. (2018a). New Zealanders and the arts: Attitudes, attendance and participation in 2017. https://www.creativenz.govt.nz/ development-and-resources/new-zealanders-and-the-arts. Accessed June 4, 2019 Creative New Zealand: The Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa. (2018b). Pacific arts strategy 2018–2023. https://www.creativenz.govt.nz/about-creative-new-zealand/corporate-doc uments/creative-new-zealand-pacific-arts-strategy-2018-2023. Accessed June 4, 2019 Cunningham, S., McCutcheon, M., Hearn, G., Ryan, M. D., & Collis, C. (2019a). Australian cultural and creative activity: A population and hotspot analysis: Cairns. Digital Media Research Centre. https://research.qut.edu.au/creativehotspots/wp-content/uploads/sites/258/2020/02/Cre ative-Hotspots-CAIRNS-report-FINAL-V1-20191220.pdf. Accessed April 28, 2020 Cunningham, S., McCutcheon, M., Hearn, G., Ryan, M. D., & Collis, C. (2019b). Australian cultural and creative activity: A population and hotspot analysis: Central West Queensland: Blackall-Tambo, Longreach and Winton. Digital Media Research Centre. https://eprints.qut.edu. au/203691/. Accessed April 28, 2020 Dalziel, P., Saunders, C., & Savage, C. (2019). Culture, wellbeing and the living standards framework: A perspective. Ministry for Culture and Heritage. https://www.treasury.govt.nz/publicati ons/dp/dp-19-02. Accessed April 28, 2021 Deasy, R. (2002). Critical links: Learning in the arts and student academic and social development. Arts Education Partnership. Department of Communications and the Arts [Australia]. (1994). Creative nation: Commonwealth cultural policy, October 1994. Australian Government. https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/res ource-files/2013-03/apo-nid33126.pdf. Accessed June 6, 2020 Dunphy, K., Smithies, J., Uppal, S., Schauble, H., & Stevenson, A. (2020). Positing a schema of measurable outcomes of cultural engagement. Evaluation, 26, 474–498. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1356389020952460 Durose, C., Beebeejaun, Y., Rees, J., Richardson, J., & Richardson, L. (2011). Towards coproduction in research with communities. Arts and Humanities Research Council. https://ahrc. ukri.org/documents/project-reports-and-reviews/connected-communities/towards-co-produc tion-in-research-with-communities/. Accessed February 1, 2021 Enoch, W. (2020). After the virus: Radical optimism for the arts. The Saturday Paper, October 24–30. Ewing, R. (2010). The arts and Australian education: Realising potential. ACER Press. Fancourt, D. (2017). Arts in health: Designing and researching interventions. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198792079.001.001 Fancourt, D., & Finn, S. (2019). What is the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being? A scoping review. World Health Organisation. http://www.euro.who.int/en/pub lications/abstracts/what-is-the-evidence-on-the-role-of-the-arts-in-improving-health-and-wellbeing-a-scoping-review-2019. Fiske, E. B. (1999). Champions of change: The impact of arts on learning. The Arts Education Partnership and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Foreman-Wernet, L. (2020). Culture squared: A cross-cultural comparison of the values espoused by national arts councils and cultural agencies. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 50, 155–168. https://doi.org/10.1080/10632921.2020.1731040

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Gattenhof, S. (2017). Measuring impact: Models for evaluation in the Australian arts and culture landscape. Palgrave. Gilmore, A., Glow, H., & Johanson, K. (2017). Accounting for quality: Arts evaluation, public value and the case of ‘culture counts.’ Cultural Trends, 26, 282–294. https://doi.org/10.1080/095 48963.2017.1382761 Goldbard, A. (2008). The metrics syndrome. http://arlenegoldbard.com/wp-content/uploads/2005/ 12/Metrics-Syndrome-10-13-08.pdf. Accessed March 23, 2020 Goldbard, A. (2015). The metrics syndrome: Cultural scientism and its discontents. In L. MacDowall, M. Badham, E. Blomkamp, & K. Dunphy, (Eds.), Making culture count: The politics of cultural measurement (pp. 214–227). Palgrave Macmillan. Haseman, B., & Jaaniste, L. (2008). The arts and Australia’s national innovation system 1994– 2008—Arguments, recommendations, challenges. Council for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS) Occasional Paper, 7. Holden, J. (2004). Capturing Cultural Value: How Culture Has Become a Tool of Government Policy. London: Demos. www.demos.co.uk/files/CapturingCulturalValue.pdf. Retrieved 31 October, 2021. Holden, J. (2006). Cultural value and the crisis of legitimacy: Why culture needs a democratic mandate. Demos. https://www.demos.co.uk/files/Culturalvalueweb.pdf. Accessed May 3, 2020 Jones, T., & Birdsall-Jones, C. (2014). Meeting places: Drivers of change in Australian Aboriginal cultural institutions. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 20, 296–317. https://doi.org/10. 1080/10286632.2013.786059 Juncker, B., & Balling, G. (2016). The value of art and culture in everyday life: Towards an expressive cultural democracy. The Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society, 46, 231–242. https://doi. org/10.1080/10632921.2016.1225618 Knell, J., & Taylor, M. (2011). Arts funding, austerity and the big society: Remaking the case for the arts. Arts Council England. Landry, C., Bianchini, F., & Maguire, M. (1995). The social impact of the arts: A discussion document. Comedia. McDowall, L. (2015). Introduction: Making culture count. In L. MacDowall, M. Badham, E. Blomkamp, & K. Dunphy (Eds.), Making culture count: The Politics of cultural measurement (pp. 1–5). Palgrave. McCain, R. (2006). Defining cultural and artistic goods. In V. A. Ginsburgh & D. Throsby (Eds.), Handbook of the economics of art and culture (pp. 147–167). Elsevier. McCarthy, K., Ondaatje, E., Zakaras, L., & Brooks, A. (2004). Gifts of the muse: Reframing the debate about the benefits of the arts. RAND Corporation. McCausland, R. (2019). ‘I’m sorry but I can’t take a photo of someone’s capacity being built’: Reflections on evaluation of Indigenous policy and programmes. Evaluation Journal of Australia, 19, 64–78. Meyrick, J., Barnett, T., & Phiddian, R. (2019). The conferral of value: The role of reporting processes in the assessment of culture. Media International Australia, 171, 80–94. https://doi. org/10.1177/1329878X18798704 Morton, J. (2014). Vital signs: Cultural indicators for Australia local and national approaches. Public Forum presented at RMIT University, Melbourne. http://www.culturaldevelopment.net.au. Accessed April 11, 2015 Paquette, J., Beauregard, D., & Gunter, C. (2017). Settler colonialism and cultural policy: The colonial foundations and refoundations of Canadian cultural policy. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 23, 269–284. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2015.1043294 Radbourne, J., Glow, H., & Johanson, K. (Eds.). (2013). The audience experience: A critical analysis of audiences in the performing arts. Intellect. Scott, C. A. (2010). Searching for the “public” in public value: Arts and cultural heritage in Australia. Cultural Trends, 19, 273–289. Scott, K., Rowe, F., & Pollock, V. (2018). Creating the good life? A wellbeing perspective on cultural value in rural development. Journal of Rural Studies, 59, 173–182.

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Smithies, J., & Uppal, S. (2019). Australia. In I. W. King & A. Schramme (Eds.), Cultural governance in a global context (pp. 127–158). Palgrave. Throsby, D. (2001). Economics and culture. Cambridge University Press. Walmsley, B. (2011). Why people go to the theatre: A qualitative study of audience motivation. Journal of Customer Behaviour, 10, 335–351. https://doi.org/10.1362/147539211X13210329 822545 Walmsley, B. (2013). A big part of my life: A qualitative study of the impact of theatre. Arts Marketing: An International Journal, 3, 73–87.

Chapter 3

Building an Embedded Framework: Early Models

Abstract This chapter examines two earlier case studies that focus on attempting to measure value and impact in evaluation. A Queensland Smithsonian Fellowship provides the first case study, and the second documents the impact processes that were trialled in a regional community arts programme that had multiple stakeholders and sites and was geographically dispersed. Both case studies highlight the important need to embed an evaluation framework in a programme from the outset to ensure multiple stakeholders share their unique goals. An evaluation framework also helps to logistically build in formative evaluation check-ins throughout projects to review and refine practices. Within the case studies, doing this also gave us the structure to capture non-text-based, quantitative and qualitative data and stories that provide rich examples of tangible and intangible impact, beyond what was expected.

3.1 Introduction With our ever-increasing access to digital technology, tools and social media platforms, it has become easier than ever to access music, film, video and audio stories, archived images, newspapers and ephemeral material collections to use in the production of public cultural events. However, in the first decade of this new technological age it was a challenge to engage and stimulate public audiences, while also making best use of new emerging technologies. Some projects and events trialled incorporating “real people’s” life experiences into programmes and some focused on building online platforms to inspire virtual followings. The idea of integrating new media elements (such as digital storytelling or video “grabs” with artists or images) into production and curation while also capturing the “value” of creative events in an accessible archival online format was new but gaining attention for the possible importance of its use (Burgess & Klaebe, 2009). Simultaneously, political activity in Australia has instigated several significant changes in arts funding which has increased the necessity for artsworkers, especially those in community-based arts activities and events, to justify their funding requirements as resources diminish. Rhetoric in mainstream Australian media suggests that the current climate of funding cuts (see journalist Ben Eltham’s work in publications © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Gattenhof et al., The Social Impact of Creative Arts in Australian Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7357-3_3

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such as The Conversation, New Matilda, The Guardian and Overland) is facing vocal opposition. For instance, Eltham (2015) argues that the motivation for funding cuts to target small- to medium-sized arts organisations is clarified by a class-based analysis. For Eltham, “[o]nce we start using a class analysis of the MPACS [Major Performing Arts Companies], everything falls into place. Australia’s major arts companies are old, rich, white and European” (2015, para. 45): an argument which also informs Eltham and Deb Verhoeven’s 2020 article in the International Journal of Cultural Policy. In a recent article for The Conversation (2019), Eltham maintains that the shortage of federal arts funding requires local governments and groups to stretch their already thin arts funding thinner. Given the scarcity of funding and the need for artsworkers and organisations to “report back” on the impact and return on funding that their events have produced, it is crucial that events and organisations of all sizes can effectively report on the impact of their funded activities. However, there is an ongoing “reluctance to embrace evaluative processes, which they [artsworkers] see as not part of the artistic experiences, but rather as part of an extra administrative burden that reduces and ratifies the impact of the community arts project itself” (Hadley & Gattenhof, 2013, 5). As alternative funding strategies become increasingly necessary to pursue (e.g. targeting private or corporate philanthropy, or in more recent years, crowdfunding), we require adaptable evaluation strategies that address the requirements of all stakeholders regardless of funding scale and type. To improve evaluation methods, many researchers began to look beyond the quantitative measures (such as attendance numbers) that, as discussed in the previous chapter, are still largely privileged. By beginning to rigorously probe non-text-based “anecdotal” data, researchers began to ascertain whether narrative-driven arts-based public programmes, events and festivals could more accurately evaluate and measure their public worth and “value” to their stakeholders. This chapter provides findings from two earlier case studies that relate particularly to measuring value and impact in evaluation. A Queensland Smithsonian Fellowship provides the first case study. This presented an opportunity to work alongside leading researchers at the Centre for Folklife and Cultural Heritage to trial innovative ways of evaluating public narrative-driven arts-based programmes, specifically using the 2011 Smithsonian Folklife Festival as an applied research test site and as a chance to retrospectively examine the 2010 programme. The second case study documents the impact process undertaken by an evaluation team at Queensland University of Technology for the Animating Spaces regional community arts programme organised by (the now defunct) Artslink Queensland. Both case studies found that embedding an evaluation framework from the inception of a project helps to ensure all individual stakeholders’ unique goals are shared; builds in formative evaluation checkins throughout the projects to review and refine practices; and allows researchers to stay attuned to capturing non-text-based data (plus more traditional quantitative and qualitative information)—as well as be open to expected and unexpected stories that provide rich examples of impact beyond simply meeting project goals.

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3.2 Case Study I: Smithsonian Folklife Festival The Smithsonian Folklife Festival attracts over half a million visitors annually and is held outdoors on the National Mall of the USA in Washington, D.C., by the Smithsonian Institution’s (SI) Centre for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH). The tenday festival exhibits living cultural heritage by featuring community-based cultural exemplars of music, song, dance, crafts and cooking, storytelling, narrative sessions and highlights everyday work/life cultural practices. Festival content is drawn from the work of folklorists, cultural anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, academic and lay scholars and is produced by hundreds of technical staff, volunteers, sponsors and supporters. That the festival “… is an exercise in cultural democracy, in which cultural practitioners speak for themselves, with each other, and to the public” (Smithsonian Folklife Festival, 2021, para. 6) made it an ideal site and partner institution in which to conduct research into trialling an embedded evaluation framework.

3.2.1 Understanding Stakeholders: An Evaluation Project Management Framework Each Smithsonian Folklife Festival, like most cultural events and programmes (albeit larger), has a set of clearly defined stakeholders (funding bodies; external organisational partners; creative talent participants/artists/performers; and an audience) that the curators and programme producers work with to facilitate festival goals. By working with SI CFCH researchers to examine past, present and future festival programmes, all stages of the planning, development and delivery for each event could be explored in order to understand and progress evaluation methodology. Using this new approach to clearly understand various stakeholder expectations before a project commences delivered a clearer framework to evaluate impact and success after the event. The key research objective was to better equip organisations in producing an evaluation documentation agenda that could use evidence gathered at different points throughout the “cycle” of an event from all stakeholder points of view, which was a deviation from evaluation practices at that time. This richer evaluation framework process was designed as a project management tool: providing definitions, explaining evaluation processes and offering suggestions on how findings might be reported so feedback could be taken into consideration during each distinct (action research) phase, and practices adjusted if need be, during the programme cycle (demonstrated in Fig. 3.1).

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Plan/revise program

Assess needs and collect foundational data

Evaluate the program

Formative

Undertake the program

Summative

Fig. 3.1 Evaluation framework, highlighting formative and summative processes

3.2.2 Project Results, Findings and Analysis The project focused on the evaluation of narrative-driven arts-based public programmes at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, but these principles were subsequently applied and used by many Australian community groups and organisations— large or small—as a way of managing scope and scale (and importantly the budget) to maximise value and impact. In these early years, we were referring to non-textbased data as “performative” (Haseman, 2006) and later rich digital media packages or ephemeral digital data, but in recent times we have found the term non-text-based [or, as Durose et al. (2011) refer to it, “beyond text tools”] more encumbering. The results demonstrated that embedding an evaluation framework (such as that visualised in Fig. 3.2) improved the way we worked if used as a strategic project management tool, helping all stakeholders to understand the impact of their combined investment of time, effort and resources. This participatory process values the multiple perspectives of all stakeholders. Further, team members had a framework and space to think about and openly discuss how personal beliefs and assumptions might affect their evaluation philosophy. For instance, team members asked: who is heard, or not heard in the process? How are interpretations made and conclusions drawn?

3.2.3 Impact: Expect the Least Expected We found that programme management needed to carefully avoid the quagmire of external pressure and influence some funders might like to insist on, just to secure funding. If the expected effectiveness of the programme cannot be easily illustrated by

Built from the data so that a rich holistic assessment of the relevance to all project stakeholders can be made

Evidence Portfolio

Audience

Participants (artists/creatives)

External organisational partners

Organising institution

Funding bodies

Fig. 3.2 Arts-based evaluation approach. We apply the term “non-text-based” to describe what Durose et al. (2011, 8) have called “beyond text tools”

Video, photography, audio, visual notetaking, physical artefacts, arts-based activities

Provides a visual portfolio of the outcomes and events

Non text-based

Interviews, focus groups, questionnaires

Provides perspective

Tangible immediate evidence

Surveys, participatory/user figures including audience attendance numbers and social media data

Qualitative

Quantitative

Stakeholders

3.2 Case Study I: Smithsonian Folklife Festival 29

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narrating the benefits to a funder without having to seriously accommodate aims and goals, then the programme will be seriously compromised from the outset. However, we found funders were a crucial asset and ally, if all stakeholder outcomes and expectations were discussed and aligned from the outset, with no need to compromise on project goals and visions. More than one set of goals or visions of success (or expected impact) can be achieved if all stakeholders know, understand and respect multiple partner point of views. Creative “outside the box” thinking in the planning stage helped to ensure programmes and investment injections could purposefully align with goal targets appropriately. Often the real impact is not foreseen and is not articulated early on, so a space for being surprised by elements of success is also important. In fact, in an earlier project trialling this framework, open discussions with project stakeholders1 revealed that “sharing our experiences and stories at the end of the day were very powerful and moving”. The research team realised that the sharing of story was an impactful outcome, and that digital media upskilling and the digital story collection itself (which were two of the original goals of the funders) would become secondary consequences (Klaebe, 2011, 9). In another example, one of the SI Folklife Festival’s 2010 programmes had focused on the country of Colombia. When retrospectively following up with stakeholders on whether they thought the festival had met their expectations of success and impact, responses widely differed. The programme was sponsored by Colombia’s Ministry of Culture for approximately US$1 million to ensure the artefacts could be displayed and artisans could come from all over the country to participate and perform. The SI CFCH team were keen to present a rich and diverse cultural programme to (largely US) attendees—an educational programme that was logistically finally possible after decades of political unrest that had made it difficult for US citizens to travel safely to most regions of Colombia. But interviews with stakeholders revealed very different examples of perceived success and impact. One Colombian government official said, “if it cost us a million dollars and nearly a million people attended the event, that’s about a dollar per person for advertising our country in a positive light—and if every one of those people pauses in the coffee isle next time they are at the supermarket and considers buying Colombian instead of Ethiopian or Brazilian coffee for a change, then that is money very well spent for us”. While attendance crowds were large and clearly enjoyed the festival, there were other successes that provided insight into unexpected impact. The first was the SI CFCH curators noticed a lot of cultural exchange between artisans. Because it had been difficult, dangerous and expensive for Colombian citizens to travel around their own nation (particularly to remote regions) for decades, the artisans and performers who were sourced from all over the country and brought together in the USA for the fortnight were literally “swapping notes” on creative practices in the evenings when they were together at the hotel or catching up between 1

This was a digital storytelling project funded by the State Library of Queensland which captured Indigenous peoples’ personal responses to the Prime Minister’s Apology to the Australian Stolen Generation. A discussion of the project and the digital stories can be found on the John Oxley Library blog—a link which is included in the list of references.

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performances and visiting each other’s talks or performance events at the festival. The second impactful outcome not foreseen by any of the organising stakeholders was the use of (then still quite new) social media to independently (and organically) target two very distinct groups of attendees. Firstly, the fragmented Colombian diaspora had immigrated to the USA since 1948 (for a discussion of these experiences, see Valderrama-Echavarria, 2014), and secondly, there was a large group of American families who had adopted Colombian babies. For instance, between 2003 and 2009 Colombia was the 7th highest nation internationally adopting out babies and the USA was the number one receiver (Tessler et al., 2011, 37); no one had really foreseen this cohort as a target audience when planning the programme. There were many US families who said on exit surveys that they were attending the festival so they could safely share with their adopted child for the first time, first-hand, the cultural richness of their birth country.

3.2.4 Embedded Evaluation Framework: Continual Cycle of Improvement We found that evaluation improved the effectiveness of the process, provided support for maintaining the programme, and provided insight and helped project leaders make decisions. As an embedded project management tool, the framework helped organisers/producers with formative “check-ins” on how well a programme is progressing, as well as offering important insight to how continuing processes that support a programme are working. We also found that valuable evaluation processes assist, support, appropriately modify choice considerations, improve communication and enhance shared understandings between stakeholders, making clear the unique success indicators for each. These findings correlated with those of other smaller Australian projects we had previously undertaken. In particular, we found that evaluation processes need to be embedded and occur before, during and after a project in order to comprehensively appreciate and accurately capture the value to each stakeholder group. On return to Queensland in 2012, these findings were applied locally in smaller community-based settings: in a post-Cyclone Yasi disaster public history project in Cardwell (Klaebe, 2013) and as a post-Queensland Floods community engagement storytelling project in Warwick (Klaebe & Van Luyn, 2014; Van Luyn & Klaebe, 2015). A project management evaluation approach was developed for organisations large or small to follow that clearly explains how to better evaluate narrative-driven community engagement activities where artists or creative practitioners are engaged in storytelling in public spaces. We had the opportunity to see if a “road map” of instructions and a toolkit could be given to an organisation for them to affordably evaluate remotely, which is our second case study.

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3.3 Case Study II: Animating Spaces It is now generally accepted in Australia that evaluation should be an integral component of community-based arts events, but, as established in Chapter Two, it is still often unclear on what is being evaluated. Finding a way of providing measurable impact in co-created community-based arts events can be challenging for a variety of reasons, not least of which are the diversity of community groups, their responses to events, their geographical location (and access to mainstream arts events and activities such as museums, art galleries and performances), as well as varying opinion on what funders and communities—not to mention a project’s stakeholders—consider impactful. For Hadley and Gattenhof, in line with the Australia Council’s shift towards evidence-based outcomes, “the emphasis is now very clearly on artists, communities and corporations coming together in a socially and economically entrepreneurial way to create value for a community, city or culture” (2013, 7). Interestingly, this added complications to the Animating Spaces project, which saw difficulties in managing the mix of stakeholders (from state and local government, and the involved artists and artsworkers) and their different notions and expectations of success. The Animating Spaces programme was a medium-sized event that ran over three years. The programme included fifteen rural, remote and regional towns, targeting engagement of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities at forty-five cocreated community events. While this case study is just one example of a place-based programme, it does provide context to using personal anecdotal experiences as rich examples of the opportunities of using non-text-based data within evaluation and the challenges faced in “trying to make do with the budget at hand” to evaluate impact to appease a variety of stakeholders. It was important and necessary to identify stakeholders and carefully consider shared goals, connections and partnerships between artists, communities and corporations as markers of success, especially in a climate where funding of small-sized organisations had reduced. The Animating Spaces evaluation team faced key financial and geographical limitations, resulting in a type of “arms-length” evaluation design and implementation. By outlining the methodological approach of the evaluation and incorporating reflections of the evaluation process, this case study also highlights some early key learnings that retain applicability for current regional or community arts evaluations.

3.3.1 Project Design The cost of conducting evaluation was not initially factored in and instead had to be established from the already modest overall budget. Five locations were chosen annually from a pool of applicants and required local councils to match funding for the events2 . Each community was expected to run an event that comprised three activities. Artslink Queensland provided external support, such as mentoring and

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managerial experience, and required the appointment of community members to key management roles. The hierarchy of artsworkers was replicated in all the communities. While the employed four main staff (the community co-ordinator; three arts project co-ordinators) usually remained static, the number of artists and volunteers differed greatly per community. It is important to outline the various levels of involvement by community members as these individuals were included in the evaluation strategy. Artslink Queensland appointed a “Regional Arts Development Officer” (RADO), who was based in Brisbane, but remained in close contact with each regional community co-ordinator and provided significant training for key individuals in each community. This took the form of initial workshops and ongoing communication and visits throughout the planning and execution phases. A condition of the funding received by Artslink Queensland for the Animating Spaces project was the requirement to provide an external evaluation report to Arts Queensland. As E. Jane Davidson suggests in her seminal text Evaluation Methodology Basics (2005), an appropriate methodological approach for evaluation is crucial. Klaebe, who had experience in “embedded” evaluation in communitydriven arts projects (and in the Queensland Smithsonian Fellowship case study), was approached to design and provide an evaluation framework for this project. Budget restraints and the already established complex hierarchical web of stakeholders made the request to embed “DIY” evaluation into the programme challenging (to say the least). However, the team established a framework that included a mixed-methods collection process of quantitative and qualitative data, but also included the expectation to collect non-text-based ephemeral or “visual” data to help add richness and hopefully capture locally impactful narratives. This is an example of what Gattenhof calls “the third methodology” for evaluation (2017, 59) and what Klaebe had referred to as “embedded” evaluation (Klaebe, 2013; Van Luyn & Klaebe, 2015)—encouraging all stakeholders to negotiate and share their unique outcomes or goals from the outset and to engage in creative new media storytelling practices using ephemeral material such as images, video and social media to help capture the impact of the making of the art, as well as the performance itself, in and for local communities. Stakeholders articulated what their long- and short-term outcomes or goals were, and each community was also instructed to devise their own unique goals as markers of success for the evaluation team to strategically craft the evaluation instrument accordingly. These, along with the funder’s key performance indicators, formed the foundation of the evaluation framework (see Fig. 3.3). The framework (like in the first case study) was based on a combination of action research (Tacchi et al., 2003) and embedded evaluation, enabling the evaluation team to collect data and provide formative analysis and feedback to Artslink Queensland at multiple times throughout the cyclical process, for use and interpretation by the variety of concerned stakeholders. This occurred through the provision of interim reports throughout the three years: one for each community (15) designed to reflect upon their three events (45 in total) held within one programme; one annual report evaluating the five regional programmes (15 events) for Artslink, as the Queensland financial stakeholder; and the final triennial summary report (of all 45 events, in

Goals

Stakeholders

Short term goals 5 per community

Long term goals 5 per community

Unique goals Varying number per community

Unpaid Unpaid Artists Volunteers Audience

Paid Community Coordinator Arts Project Coordinator Paid Artists

RADO 1 x for the entire Animating Spaces project

Fig. 3.3 Evaluation framework, indicating the goals, communities and categories of stakeholders that participated in the questionnaires

Evaluation Framework

Communities

2015 Townsville Ipswich Logan Mackay Ravenswood

2014 Cooktown Gladstone Roma Samford Yeppoon

2013 Charters Towers Eudlo Hervey Bay Redlands Toowoomba

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15 regions, over three years) for Arts Queensland and the Australia Council, as underwriters, as Artslink was at this stage defunct (Klaebe et al., 2016).

3.3.2 Evaluation Methodology The three-year Animating Spaces programme itself was ambitious. Deliverables expected from the state government’s lead arts agency, Arts Queensland, included evaluation, but it could be argued that the budget did not reflect evaluation expectations. Therefore, in order for each community to receive the somewhat limited budget awarded, Artslink Queensland stipulated the condition that each community needed to collect the evaluation data directly themselves. While there is a shift towards more collaborative and embedded approaches for evaluation (Klaebe, 2013; Van Luyn & Klaebe, 2015), this distanced evaluation technique (Gattenhof, 2017, 36) was financially necessary. Queensland is Australia’s second largest state, and one of the least densely populated, making frequent travel from the capital city of Brisbane to Artslink sites impossible. The map of Queensland in Fig. 3.4, which specifies the 15 Animating Spaces locations, illustrates this challenging geographic distance. As such, the evaluators did not enter the field directly and instead were collating and analysing the data provided to them “at arm’s length”. A large proportion of the data collected was a mix of quantitative data related to attendance numbers and qualitative questionnaires: anonymous questionnaires for unpaid community attendees and volunteers, and identifiable questionnaires for paid artsworkers. The majority of the anonymous questionnaires were completed in the communities, in hard copy, at each Animating Spaces activity. Very few were completed digitally. These paper responses were collected by the RADO and delivered (literally stuffed into a large envelope) in raw form for the evaluation team, who then transcribed the data into a spreadsheet, per community, mapping responses against each stakeholder’s desired long-term, short-term and unique goals. These questionnaires collected the simple response data. Most questions required a multiple-choice response (e.g. no, maybe, yes, definitely) with space for further comment available. These questionnaires were adapted a little over the course of the three years, based on formative feedback the evaluation team received (such as the time taken and [in]convenience of filling out a form in the field; the design and formatting for easy completion in situ; and general communication or “plain speak” issues). However, all changes incorporated were continually mapped against the goals being measured to ensure that long, short and unique goals were still addressed. These data were then analysed and communicated back to communities and other stakeholders in each region in the form of short interim reports. These were written in a style appropriate for community members (including local council members) to easily access and learn from, so as to incorporate ideas into any future creation and execution of local arts-based programmes. There was a high level of reporting: five interim reports (one for each region); an annual report prepared for Artslink Queensland and its stakeholders; Animating Spaces website (no longer viewable);

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Fig. 3.4 A map of Queensland specifying the 15 Animating Spaces locations. Queensland comprises a land area of over 173 million hectares (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021). To put this land mass further into perspective, Queensland is over 2.5 times larger than the state of Texas, USA

Animating Spaces Vimeo channel (Artslink Queensland, 2015b); an interim publicfacing report; and a final report (Klaebe et al., 2016). What is perhaps more unusual in this approach was the objectivity of the evaluation team, which was the result of the limitations of the methodology: the extended evaluation team did not attend any of the events or meet with any of the community

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members. While there were limitations to this approach (such as the lack of ethnographic observational data of the events), it was a necessary budgetary limitation for Artslink Queensland, as the geographical regional distance and time between the 45 events, over three years, were too financially burdensome. In order to somewhat counteract this limitation, within their evaluation design the evaluation team incorporated impactful digital stories made from non-text-based data such as images and videos taken, chosen, collected and provided by community members themselves and then collated and professionally edited by a videographer for Artslink. Viewing the Toowoomba video (Animating Spaces Toowoomba, 2017), for example, demonstrates how the data captured become a much more rich and visual, and we suggest meaningful way to report impact back to funders, rather than through written reports alone, even if the process was not seamless.

3.3.3 Data Collection The process of data collection was designed to be simple, as Artslink needed the collection to be undertaken by the community members themselves. The evaluation phase was briefly explained to the artsworkers in an initial training session with the RADO, but from comments the evaluation team processed, it seems this training was at best cursory. Not surprisingly, the reality of getting unpaid (or only basically paid) people to collect data proved difficult: as they began their Animating Spaces experience, the importance of the data seemed too intangible and vague to value (and it was not within their scope to care). As mentioned earlier, the evaluation team designed the questionnaires, with input from Artslink Queensland. Although the questionnaires were simple, Artslink wanted a significant number of findings and the process, particularly in the first year of the project (2013), was too time consuming for participants. In retrospect, packing too many questions into the survey instruments made the process arduous. Ongoing improvements continued to be made after interim “check-ins” to “shorten and sharpen” the survey instruments. The process improved in years two and three of the Animating Spaces programme (2014 and 2015), most likely attributed to the embedded evaluation process, which enriched the education provided to the communities through the (more experienced) RADO, and by being able to give authentic examples of community feedback and learnings from events held in the previous year to other communities. For instance, the 2014 communities were able to view tangible examples of the 15 community events held in 2013, through the impact videos and by reading the annual report during their RADO training session at the outset. The RADO could show and speak of real stories of success and also share lessons learned, making the collection of data more tangible and important for each individual community.

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3.3.4 Non-text-Based Digital Visual Data A key component of the evaluation of Animating Spaces was the inclusion of social media and non-text-based digital ephemeral data. Although the use of social media was not exceptionally powerful in all communities, by including a process that evaluated online impact, the evaluation team was able to identify the communities who had engaged with online mediums that generated some level of impact. This process was performed, through necessity, on an ad hoc basis: many communities relied on online news sources, but at that time very few used social media tools such as Facebook or Instagram effectively. Further, many of the communities had poor Wi-Fi coverage. For the communities that did have poor Wi-Fi coverage, the online tool Storify allowed the team to capture the online narrative of presence at event activities to better articulate impact. While there was improvement over the course of the project’s three years (which may have been as a result of improved regional Internet access and consumer uptake of social media during this period), it is still possible to conclude that social media played a minor role in the Animating Spaces project overall. Regardless, social media has proven to illuminate audience engagement in politics and societal debate (see Highfield, 2016, amongst others). Social media’s impact on reading audience engagement in the arts is an emerging field requiring further establishment.2 Physical social connections and the inclusion and sharing of information on public notice boards at schools and in supermarkets are also worth exploring for advertising activities and events in a small regional town (as opposed to a city). The evaluation team found that in one town, more than half the attendees (male and female of various ages) found out about the scheduled events by seeing them advertised in a poster at the local hairdressing salon, for instance. This speaks to our discussion on Notions of Place in Chapter Four and work we have undertaken more recently in Western Queensland and North West Tasmania (Mackay et al., 2021), and this is an area ripe for further research, particularly in regional, rural and remote locations more widely. The other notable rich non-text-based data collected in the Animating Spaces project were produced into impact digital evaluation stories. This speaks to Gattenhof’s (2017, 59–62) proposed “third methodology” for evaluation that is centred on ephemeral material or “performative research” (Haseman, 2006). Drawing on her experience in undertaking community digital story projects, Klaebe recommended these performative pieces or “visual vignettes” be key outputs evidencing the value of the programmes, in a way that richly complemented the questionnaire data and reports. On instructions from the evaluation team, each community collected images, video and vox pop style video “grabs” from various stakeholders (artists/artsworkers, councillors/mayors, volunteers/audience) throughout the planning and delivery phases of each project. Artslink Queensland then commissioned the production of short videos with the ephemeral material to catalogue each regional 2

Some relevant research is Lovejoy and Saxton’s (2012) discussion of non-profit organisations and their use of social media, as well as the ongoing discussion of social media as a marketing tool for promotion (see, for instance, Mangold and Faulds [2009]).

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programme (three events each), including the voices and stories of artsworkers and community members. Annual compilation videos were also produced (such as the one in Artslink Queensland 2015a), clearly branded as Artslink Queensland content, showcasing elements of the events that were unable to be articulated as impactfully in annual reports alone. In this instance, these recordings are both functional as evaluation outcomes, but also tools that could be utilised to promote and attract future funding opportunities. These outcomes were appreciated and shared by the communities they represented and proved to be incredibly valuable to the overall evaluation process of each event, as well as valuable for clearly capturing the scale and potential impact of the events for the purpose of reporting on funding.3

3.3.5 Analysis, Reflections of the Process and Findings Critical self-reflection was an important part of the evaluation process and integral to the overall Animating Spaces project during this three-year period. Artslink Queensland was the contact for the evaluation team, working closely with the RADO to incorporate improvements to their process throughout the project’s lifespan, based on the evaluation team’s results. Unlike Hadley and Gattenhof’s (2013) documented experience with Creating Queensland, there were no complications in terms of the stakeholders’ desired goals, as each stakeholder group expectations had been well defined, documented and broadly shared from the outset, and the process was managed through Artslink Queensland and shared directly in partnership with the communities.4 The entire evaluation data collection process was facilitated by Artslink Queensland, with guidance from the evaluation team: the RADO introduced and facilitated the need for evaluation to the communities (workshop materials, such as PowerPoints and instruction sheets, were developed and provided by the evaluation team); was responsible for the collection of the data and delivery to the evaluation team; and was responsible for appointing a videographer to produce the digital media packages; upon receiving the team’s reports, they also handled the post-dissemination process. There were three main outcomes that emerged from reflection and analysis of the Animating Spaces case study: authenticity of reporting; illuminating impact; and the effect of ongoing embedded evaluation.

3

See, for instance, the 2014 conglomerated community videos: https://vimeo.com/111475772 https://vimeo.com/search?q=animating%20spaces 4 During each community’s training, an evaluation PowerPoint presentation was included that outlined the process of evaluation, what it meant, and the practicalities of the collection process. It was during this process that Artslink Queensland advised communities that they were expected to establish their unique goals and their desired KPIs to indicate success.

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3.3.6 Authenticity of Reporting Previous examples of evaluation suggest that brokering a relationship amongst all stakeholders and the ability to clearly and appropriately disseminate findings postevent are key elements to a successful evaluation process. However, in this instance, the brokering amongst stakeholders was facilitated through Artslink Queensland directly: they were the contact for local communities; local councils; and Arts Queensland. All stakeholders shared their goals individually with Artslink Queensland, who in turn gave them to the evaluation team to collate and find synergies and differences to incorporate. Dissemination of the evaluation team’s findings was also the responsibility of Artslink Queensland. Artslink Queensland reported all evaluation findings back to the communities directly, as well as to Arts Queensland, and all annual reports (including videos) were publicly available on their website (no longer accessible, but videos are still available on Vimeo [see Artslink Queensland 2015a for a compilation video and Artslink Queensland 2015b for all individual videos]). Although it might appear that this eradicated some of the legitimate concerns raised by evaluators like Hadley and Gattenhof (2013), it is important to consider how they also may have changed elements of the evaluation process. For instance, it is possible to consider that individuals may feel required to be “loyal” in providing feedback to the company that provided payment for their services, thus potentially diluting criticism. In this instance, the organisational body and the main contact body (Artslink Queensland) were the same. The funding to the community was provided and managed through Artslink Queensland, and it was their appointed RADO who was usually the communities’ first point of contact with the organisation and who provided mentoring and advice on processes for budgeting, developing timelines and ensuring the deliverables of the project were met. Therefore, the process of Artslink Queensland being responsible for collecting the data may have inadvertently shaped the data received from the communities. It is difficult to comment on exactly what sort of implications this may have, although the evaluation team noted the intentions of Artslink Queensland remained encouraging and positive throughout. Artslink had an audacious desire to push the boundaries of new evaluation practices (even if within a very meagre budget), and accurately capturing challenges that needed addressing was as important to them as highlighting successes throughout the project’s duration. That said, many community members would have been unaware of the intricacies of these arrangements, and regardless, the data collection process would have provided similar responses. However, some of the people more closely involved in the higher-level managing roles (e.g. the community co-ordinators or arts project co-ordinators) may have responded differently when asked to provide feedback on their experience working with the RADO and the funding support they received from Artslink Queensland. Although the survey instruments used to gather data included disclaimers that indicated the responses would not affect the working relationships with Artslink Queensland, it is, of course, difficult when funding is involved for people to feel able to provide the most authentic data. They may be reluctant to divulge the full

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details of their challenges, especially when relating to the difficulties they may have faced that affected how effectively they utilised the funding they received. Another important point is that Artslink Queensland included the need to complete evaluation as a necessary component in order to receive payment for all paid positions. While this approach was effective in ensuring all levels of evaluative data were received by the external evaluation team, the implications of combining evaluation with payment bring challenges to collecting true “warts and all” data.

3.3.7 Illuminating Impact It was a critical, not negotiable contingency on the funding being granted by Artslink that an evaluation process be included in the Animating Spaces programme. The reports and compilation digital media videos were very well received by funders. Even so, there were difficulties in showing (at the time) the “big picture” value that evaluation offered to each community or to articulate why it was of use for them. It can be a challenge to convince audience and participants that feedback and evaluation are more than just numbers of attendees. Indeed, it proved very valuable and important to engage the community in the production of digital media packages to help tell the story and show the benefit of sustained support of regional events to funders. In fact, it was these digital vignettes or personal community event stories that really resonated and demonstrated unique impact in each place. It was certainly apparent that most Animating Spaces communities were uncomfortable speculating whether Animating Spaces events would provide long-standing impact, but this is unsurprising and hard to surmise definitively without any longitudinal evaluation follow-up evidence. This is an evaluative finding, and worth noting that this may also speak to the often-intangible benefits, community-based arts events provide but cannot be adequately captured without building in post-evaluation longer-term processes.

3.3.8 Embedded Evaluation Throughout the Project Although time intensive, the approach to evaluation in the Animating Spaces example illuminates how useful an embedded evaluation framework and processes can be in capturing useful and effective qualitative, quantitative and non-text-based data. Collecting data at each community event allowed for quite a significant amount of information analysis on multiple levels. Statistically, the quantity of quantitative and qualitative data collected was limited; however, the ability to combine three types of data and regularly check in, compare and report on fifteen activities from five events, held in five communities each year, for three years was very useful. Artslink Queensland implemented changes throughout the project’s lifespan as a result of the interim evaluation reporting processes; as such, this allowed for ongoing review of the

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evaluation tools, and in fact, the design, formatting and wording of the questionnaires did change over time. The evaluation team also improved their internal processes and techniques, such as also collecting and reporting on the social media data.

3.4 Conclusion Arts evaluation in Australia (and arguably internationally) is still challenged by tensions of how to measure impact and value. While peak funding bodies are largely not providing prescriptive evaluation measuring techniques, they still rely predominantly on evaluation reports produced from quantitative and qualitative data. We assert that including non-text-based data such as rich digital media videos to capture the more intrinsic benefits, value and impact that co-created community arts-based activities can offer might also be beneficial. Although the increased funding that would be required to ensure evaluation is undertaken in a uniform manner across the sector is largely absent, unfortunately making a more comprehensive embedded evaluation framework and rich data collection process is still rare. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival case study demonstrated that using an embedded evaluation model that values the goals of all stakeholders; employs regular “check-in” interim review points to refine practices; and collects an array of qualitative, quantitative and non-text-based data, can provide practical evaluation-focused project management processes for larger programmes, as well as smaller community events. This approach can not only help to ensure success goals are articulated and measurable, but that unexpected impact may also be recognised and documented, whether in a report or through rich digital ephemeral data that is packaged to visualise the abstract non-physical impact arts-based cultural programmes can provide. By exploring the Animating Spaces project in the second case study, these three value and impact-related findings could be exemplified in a distanced evaluation, attempting to address the limitations of “arms-length” external evaluation and budget and geographical restraints. While this approach was very effective in showing the impact of the event “at the time”, it fell short in being able to assess longer-term goals. It is possible that further experimentation embedding non-text-based data collection early in the evaluation process may provide ways of working with the budget restrictions that many arts and community organisations face. These two early case studies underscore that value and impact are not straightforward to measure, but that embedding an evaluation framework from the inception of a project to ensure all stakeholders’ uniquely individual goals are shared is critical. These case studies also show the importance of being open as an evaluator to identifying intangible impact that may differ from stakeholders’ early expectations and articulations of success. Finally, these case studies assert how visual impact stories are a meaningful way to publicly share the value and impact of arts-based programmes more generally with communities and society, along with the funders. In the next chapter, we continue the theme of value and impact by presenting a case

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study that particularly focuses on challenges faced in regional and remote communities and examines what the subtle shift from consultation to engagement can deliver to under-served communities. Acknowledgements Klaebe received funding as a Queensland Smithsonian recipient (2011). Klaebe also received funding from Artslink Queensland to complete the Animating Spaces evaluation that is discussed in this chapter. The authors gratefully acknowledge Kerryanne Ferrar and Letitia Norton from Artslink Queensland, as well as the evaluation team: Professor Helen Klaebe, Dr Liz Ellison and Grace Kirk.

References Animating Spaces Toowoomba. (2017). Real time, your time. Animating Spaces video [5:09], November 23. https://vimeo.com/244180184. Artslink Queensland. (2015a). Animating spaces 2015: Compile. https://vimeo.com/146186277. Accessed April 28, 2017 Artslink Queensland. (2015b). Videos. https://vimeo.com/artslinkqueensland. Accessed April 28, 2017 Arts Queensland. (n.d.). Getting started with evaluation. http://artsengage.initiatives.qld.gov.au/ images/documents/artsqld/Arts%20Acumen/FINAL%20-%20Getting%20started%20with%20e valuation%20-%20updated%20August%202015%20-%20PDF.pdf. Accessed May 18, 2017 Arts Queensland. (n.d.). Regional arts fund. http://arts.qld.gov.au/aq-funding/funding/201-wor kflow/6170-regional-arts-fund. Accessed May 18, 2017 Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2021). Region summary: Queensland. https://dbr.abs.gov.au/reg ion.html?lyr=ste&rgn=3. Accessed April 22, 2021 Burgess, J., & Klaebe, H. (2009). Digital storytelling as participatory public history in Australia. In J. Harley & K. McWilliam (Eds.), Story circle: Digital storytelling around the world (pp. 155–166). Blackwell Publishing. Davidson, E. J. (2005). Evaluation methodology basics: The nuts and bolts of sound evaluation. Sage Publications. Durose, C., Beebeejaun, Y., Rees, J., Richardson, J., & Richardson, L. (2011). Towards coproduction in research with communities. Arts and Humanities Research Council. https://ahrc. ukri.org/documents/project-reports-and-reviews/connected-communities/towards-co-produc tion-in-research-with-communities/. Accessed February 1, 2021 Eltham, B. (2015). The excellence criterion. Overland 221. https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/ issue-221/feature-ben-eltham/. Accessed May 19, 2017 Eltham, B. (2019). Federal arts funding in Australia is falling, and local governments are picking up the slack. The Conversation, September 30. https://theconversation.com/federal-arts-fundingin-australia-is-falling-and-local-governments-are-picking-up-the-slack-124160. Accessed April 23, 2021 Eltham, B., & Verhoeven, D. (2020). A ‘natural experiment’ in Australian cultural policy: Australian government funding cuts disproportionally affect companies that produce more new work and have larger audiences. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 26. https://doi.org/10.1080/102 86632.2018.1436167. Gattenhof, S. (2017). Measuring impact: Models for evaluation in the Australian arts and culture landscape. Palgrave McMillan. Hadley, B., & Gattenhof, S. (2013). Brokering evaluations of partnerships in Australian community arts: Responding to entrepreneurial tendencies. Journal of Arts & Communities, 4, 231–249. https://doi.org/10.1386/jaac.4.3.231_1

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Haseman, B. (2006). A manifesto for performative research. Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy: Quarterly Journal of Media Research and Resources, 118, 98–106. Highfield, T. (2016). Social media and everyday politics. Polity. Klaebe, H. (2011). Digital technology and public apology: Responses by Indigenous Australians to a government saying sorry. In 61st Annual International Communication Association Conference, May 26–30. Boston, MA. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/76424/10/Boston_ethnicity_RaceinComn_. pdf. Klaebe, H. G. (2013). Facilitating local stories in post-disaster regional communities: Evaluation in narrative-driven oral history projects. Oral History Journal of South Africa, 125–142. Klaebe, H., & Van Luyn, A. (2014). In the wake of Cyclone Yasi: Facilitation and evaluation in community narrative-driven projects. In I. Bartkowiak-Théron, & K. Anderson (Eds.), Engaging Australia: Case studies of university-community engagement (pp. 132–150). Palgrave Macmillan. Klaebe, H., Ellison, E., Gilpin, C., Kirk, G., & Webster, K. (2016). Evaluation of Artslink Queensland’s animating spaces 2013–2015: Final report. Artslink Queensland. https://eprints.qut.edu. au/98249/. Accessed August 21, 2016 Lovejoy, K., & Saxton, G. D. (2012). Information, community, and action: How non-profit organizations use social media. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 17, 337–353. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2012.01576.x Mackay, S., Klaebe, H., Hancox, D., & Gattenhof, S. (2021). Understanding the value of the creative arts: Place-based perspectives from regional Australia. Cultural Trends, 1–18. https://doi.org/10. 1080/09548963.2021.1889343. Mangold, W. G., & Faulds, D. J. (2009). Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix. Business Horizons, 52, 357–365. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2009.03.002 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. (2021). About us: Mission and history. Smithsonian. https://festival. si.edu/about-us/mission-and-history/smithsonian. Accessed March 25, 2021 State Library of Queensland. (2018). Responses to the National Apology to the Stolen Generations: Brisbane. John Oxley Library blog, February 12. https://www.slq.qld.gov.au/blog/responses-nat ional-apology-stolen-generations-brisbane. Accessed March 25, 2021 Tacchi, J. A., Slater, D., & Hearn, G. N. (2003). Ethnographic action research: A user’s handbook. UNESCO. Tessler, R., Tuan, M., & Shiao, J. L. (2011). The many faces of international adoption. Contexts, 10, 34–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/1536504211427866 Valderrama-Echavarria, C. (2014). Fragmented ties: Colombian immigrant experiences. MA in History. Boise State University. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/61733895.pdf. Accessed March 25, 2021 Van Luyn, A., & Klaebe, H. G. (2015). Making stories matter: Using participatory new media storytelling and evaluation to serve marginalised and regional communities. In J. A. McDonald & R. Mason (Eds.), Creative communities: Regional inclusion and the arts (pp. 157–173). Intellect Press.

Chapter 4

Nothing About Us Without Us: Co-creation with Communities for Impact Assessment

Abstract The frameworks for regional and remote arts funding and delivery have shifted along a continuum of community ownership to fly-in-fly-out arts events, and with each change, the approaches to community consultation and project evaluation have also changed. What has not changed significantly is the underlying belief that regional and remote communities need arts and culture brought to them, and that urban arts events can be transplanted into these communities. This chapter explores methods and processes which aim to place the people most affected by community programmes at the heart of the design and development of the programmes and at the centre of funding strategies. The concerns and capacity of the community need to be the primary source for guidance in delivering impactful and sustainable arts and cultural events in under-served communities.

4.1 Introduction For decades, regional, rural and remote communities in Australia have been the beneficiaries of countless arts programmes and projects aimed at improving some aspect of the community or the wellbeing of community members. The frameworks for funding and delivery have shifted along a continuum of extremes of community ownership to fly-in-fly-out arts events, and with each change, the approaches to community consultation and project evaluation have also changed. What has not changed significantly is the underlying belief that regional and remote communities need arts and culture brought to them, and that urban arts events can be transplanted into these communities. The consequence of this misconception is the lack of policy developed specifically for regional arts funding that responds to community capacity and need. This potentially disadvantages regional communities by failing to adequately value the creativity and talent already existing in communities, failing to determine which skills might be built and left in community and failing to acknowledge that all communities are unique. The term “regional arts” is a catch-all for vastly different activities and areas: from large prosperous regional centres with populations of over a hundred thousand and within a couple hours of driving time to a capital city, to isolated remote townships of under a thousand, only accessible by plane in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Gattenhof et al., The Social Impact of Creative Arts in Australian Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7357-3_4

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that time frame. The current “one-size-fits-all” approach to regional arts funding, by Australian federal, state and some local governments and philanthropic bodies, leaves communities on the margins of decision-making and often left to manage the logistics of unwanted and expensive fly-in-fly-out1 arts programmes. Another overarching absence in much of the discussion around regional arts is that arts and culture offer real potential to address complex social issues and to support community-led solutions. There are seemingly intractable challenges in regional and remote Australia that demand an approach that acknowledges that good ideas about what local communities need already exist within those communities, and only collaboration with these communities is required. The project discussed in this chapter responds to research over the past fifteen years (see Dunphy, 2009, 2015) that has categorically demonstrated the benefits of participation in arts and cultural activities in regional communities; the desire in communities to develop activities rather than predominantly receive arts programmes from outside; and recommendations to develop approaches for working directly with communities from consultation to evaluation. Invariably, one of the stated aims for most funded arts projects in regional and remote communities is impact, which is generally measured at the completion of a project using both metrics and tools that are removed from the local context and lived experience of the community. We have discussed at length how impact is defined and measured in earlier chapters of this book; however, it is important here to explicitly articulate and underscore how impact has been conceived in terms of social impact. For Landry et al. (1993, 9), the study of impact in an arts context “is essentially about the transformative power of the arts in terms of personal and social development … along a continuum of totally negative to totally positive”. As we have introduced in Chap. 1, they offer this working definition of the social impact of the arts: “[t]hose effects that go beyond the artefacts and the enactment of the event or performance itself and have a continuing influence upon, and directly, touch people’s lives” (ibid., 50). Experience collaborating with communities has demonstrated that in order to accurately and meaningfully assess the impact of community programmes, you need to first understand what impact would look like for that unique community and what success means for the participants. What might be considered successful by funding bodies or cultural organisations is unlikely to also be seen as success for community participants. The perspectives, lived experiences, ambitions and hopes of all stakeholders involved in community events rarely align, despite the good intentions of all parties. Meaningful assessment of impact requires clarity about who the project is for rather than who it is by, and courage to centre the voices and views of the most under-represented in the equation to truly and accurately assess the impact of a project. This will also require a shift in the thinking and evaluation expectations 1

Fly-in-fly-out arts programmes tend to involve a project employing artsworkers from outside a community to “fly in” to the community to deliver the programme and to “fly out” once the project concludes. These contracted artsworkers are often based in urban locations or regional locations a great distance from the community where the project is taking place, hence the need for the artsworkers to fly to the community.

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of funders, in how evaluation is designed and embedded from the outset, and in how citizens are offered opportunities to proactively engage and not passively receive arts activities in their communities if they wish. This chapter explores methods and processes which aim to place the people most affected by community programmes at the heart of design and development of the projects and at the centre of funding strategies. The concerns and capacity of each community need to be the primary source for informed decision-making and guidance for delivering impactful and sustainable arts and cultural events in under-served communities. In order to make the best decisions with and for end-users, funding bodies and arts organisations require rigorous processes and avenues to support deep engagement between stakeholders, which is not an easy commitment to make, but can prove to be impactfully worthwhile.

4.2 Community Engagement Versus Consultation As we discussed in Chap. 1, throughout communities, human services organisations and community development groups, and all levels of government, there are tacit agreement and understanding that creativity and culture make significant contributions to the wellbeing and success of those who participate in such projects and the wider community. Despite this, how this contribution is understood, assessed and articulated remains the same. As we have established in previous chapters, current evaluation strategies tend to focus on quantitative research methods and measures, yet funders have sensed such an approach is not always appropriate nor accurate for under-represented and under-served communities (see Boydell et al., 2017; McNiff, 1998). To understand the impact and value of arts and culture for individuals and communities, a collaborative and co-created framework is needed to facilitate meaningful assessment, community buy-in, legacy of outcomes and targeted use of funds. For researchers or artsworkers seeking to collaborate successfully with communities to design, develop or deliver projects and events, there is much that can be learned and adapted from narrative research methods as inclusive and responsive consultation frameworks. Social/narrative research projects often create and analyse a series of individual stories to reflect the multiplicity of voices and heterogeneous experiences in any environment. Narrative research and praxis focus on a “more holistic research process while sharing mutual responsibilities to enhance understanding of local phenomenon and explore the transformative possibilities for improving local context” (Blodgett et al., 2011, 523). Stories or narratives used in this way do not have to promise widespread understanding and resolution of social issues or inequality simply because a narrative has been created and shared by those directly affected. Rather, they signal that there is more to be done and understood, and these changes need to be established from within those local contexts. Stories are also more likely to be authentically shared orally or visually, as opposed to text-based. Increasingly, there is a prevalence of “non-experts” and community members instigating their own

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storytelling or engagement projects. For Andrews et al. (2013, 302), “[t]he elaboration of research methods by non-experts brings into existence forms of social research that destabilise the expertise and authority of the social sciences … social scientists could interpolate these others as collaborators rather than as research subjects”, or as passive receivers of projects thrust upon their community. An emerging set of practices are increasingly common, and their starting point is an invitation to dismantle the monolithic distinction between experts and non-experts or professionals and amateurs. Under these new circumstances, the conventions of our methods to treat others as informants or simply audiences must be suspended, and we are forced to explore how to articulate tacit and local knowledges anew (Andrews et al., 2013, 3–4). Part of this challenge is to reconsider the concept of community consultation. Traditionally, consultation is undertaken with key stakeholders in community, which in regional and remote communities usually means the local council, the known venues (galleries, theatres and libraries) and recognised local artists. While all of these perspectives are useful and necessary, they rarely capture the complexities and contradictions within any community. Instead, the process amplifies the voices and opinions of people who already have access to a range of arts activities and whose own livelihood may indeed rely on favourable (to their needs) external consultation (and subsequent funding) being undertaken. Aside from the issues and potential conflict of interests, the very notion of consultation has become increasingly problematic as endless projects or policies have ostensibly gone through a consultation process only to completely ignore the wishes of those consulted. In this way, consultation has come to be seen as something akin to “we asked what you thought and then ignored most of it”. The methods through which consultation is often conducted are also set up to exclude a vast number of people in any community. Whether this exclusion is due to factors such as requiring community members to present a professionally written submission as part of the consultation; conducting consultation during work hours; asking people to give personal data as part of a consultation, or that simply asking direct or challenging questions can be intimidating for members of the public who already feel under surveillance or without agency over key aspects of their lives. This is especially acute in communities of colour, disadvantaged communities and for young people. A philosophical and practical shift from consultation to engagement allows for deeper, more inclusive and more people-centred practices. Engagement suggests a reciprocal relationship, one in which by working together and respecting differing points of view a project which reflects the community might be created.

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4.3 Meaningful Community Engagement is All About Relationships and is Place-Based The terminology for arts projects in community includes community arts, community-led arts, socially engaged arts, activist arts and community-engaged arts practices. While ultimately they mean much the same, the language has shifted at times to avoid pejorative perceptions about community or “amateur” arts. There is, in certain circles, a sense that community arts are “second-tier” arts or more concerned with being earnest than quality. While this view is changing slowly, as we briefly discussed in Chap. 1, a binary between intrinsic and instrumental arts remains deeply embedded in the arts and cultural sector in Australia. The privileging of output over process is at the heart of this binary framework. When we value process and inclusion over the outputs, we also signal that the relationships integral to any community project succeeding are the most important component. Jade Lillie’s excellent book The Relationship is the Project (2020) upends the traditional understanding of what might constitute a successful arts project and clearly outlines a way of working to ensure respect for the people in the communities where projects are being created or rolled out. Lillie’s description of community-engaged practices states: Community-engaged practice is not an art-form. It’s not an add on. It’s a way of working: a deep collaboration between practitioners and communities to develop outcomes specific to that relationship, time and place. (2020, 9)

It would be impossible to rigorously determine what the impact of an event, programme or policy is without first understanding the context of where it was delivered or the lived experience of those directly affected by it. Nonetheless, cocreating key impact indicators with end-users and designing for impact at the inception of a project remain, overall, radical approaches to community engagement. Often, neglecting to do this is not due to bad intentions but to the limited resources of organisations. Deep engagement can be time consuming and expensive for underresourced and understaffed organisations. Two examples of streamlined processes— albeit developed after long and expensive research projects—are outlined later in this chapter to illustrate that community engagement can be nuanced and nimble simultaneously. We mentioned earlier in this chapter that the efficacy of evaluation or impact assessment is not only how you evaluate a project (which frameworks) but what you evaluate (the metrics). As discussed in the previous chapter, what you evaluate or assess is ideally informed and shaped by the participants, end-users, all stakeholders and the wider community. This means that the features of a project deemed important reflect the needs and capacity of the people and place, rather than only the agenda of governments (local, state or federal) or funding bodies. McCausland’s research (2019, 65) reflects that the tension between measuring importance according to community and according to a funding body and the metrics that are meaningful for each is consistent and ongoing.

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An approach described by Greenhalgh et al. (2016) suggests that the best way to achieve impact and address the research-practice gap is to adopt a knowledge cocreation approach by drawing on existing principles of co-production. As Langley et al. (2018) note, this includes: • using a systems perspective that recognises the interrelationships between different parts of a system rather than focusing on any one part; • positioning research (and we would also suggest consultation) as a creative enterprise that has human experience at its core; and • paying attention to the quality of relationships within the partnership, applying facilitation techniques that consider power-sharing and utilise conflict as a positive force. Arts-based community engagement and co-creative processes allow for different forms of knowledge to be made visible, expressed, blended and activated or used, enabling stakeholders to learn the practical implications of applied projects. This process also supports the retention of knowledge and approaches within the community for future use and creates toolkits, products and objects within a local context that contributes to the likelihood of uptake and use. This would suggest that participation is a set of choices and a continuum of practices rather than a fixed and homogenous activity, and this way of thinking is especially useful for projects seeking to affect social change through a foundation of place-based creativity. Projects that set out to inform and/or affect change are as distinct from one another as any other creative works, and the ways in which they seek to connect with audiences are, ideally, distinct from project to project. Relationship-focused community engagement requires that from the outset of a project, the potential participants or community members be supported to determine for themselves: how to frame the project, how to go about designing the activities, how to include the people who will contribute and/or benefit most, and how to determine if the project was a “success”. In the context of community engagement or consultation processes, this necessarily means that topics of discussion and debate will be different from those that are decided by people from outside the community, and often focus on strengths and capabilities in the community rather than deficits and challenges. When individuals are encouraged to respond to questions about themselves and their place with freedom from being interviewed necessarily on camera or writing down their opinions, and instead have the freedom to choose, for themselves, what to focus on as being important, the responses are very different. The authors have all led several research projects about the impact of arts and culture on under-served communities, and rural and remote communities in particular. Generally, we do community engagement in-person through a series of creative workshops during which a series of questions and provocations are posed to a diverse group of participants to orally discuss. Then, we work through the responses collectively with the participants and attempt to make sense of what the overarching ideas are. We also conduct some vox pop interviews to camera with the participants if they are willing. This has been an effective, though at times imperfect, engagement process, and provides a means of collaborating with communities. Naturally, participants

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may experience their community, town or environment in vastly different ways and conflicting or competing opinions can emerge throughout the workshop process. A goal is to acknowledge these differences and collaboratively work towards greater understanding rather than consensus or agreeance. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted this way of conducting community engagement and required new approaches but more importantly an unprecedented flexibility on the part of researchers and a willingness to relinquish control over data collection and engagement. The authors experienced this first-hand as part of a threeyear research project investigating the social impact of the creative arts in Australia.2 A series of workshops were planned across three communities for our first round of data collection. When COVID-19 hit, we cancelled all travel and needed to decide how to proceed with data collection. We considered simply postponing but realised that we had no guarantee when we would be able to freely travel around Australia again. Initially, while we considered designing a set of online surveys to distribute within the community, this idea was soon dismissed due to the problematic nature of surveys as data collection with communities who are marginalised and already feel misunderstood or overly policed by official agencies. Eventually, we chose the most challenging option: developing a series of online creative activities that allowed space for participants to respond in the ways that felt relevant for them. After reviewing the first round of responses to the online creative engagement, it was obvious that by stepping entirely out of the picture as researchers and instead creating a space for engagement, the activities yielded unexpected insights into the creativity and culture of the communities. This will be discussed further in Chap. 9, but what the experience did show that is relevant to this chapter is that putting the community front and centre in community engagement can not only be a philosophy but must also be a set of actions that will restore a more equitable power balance between stakeholders and champion the communities first and foremost. Place-based engagement is not simply being physically present in a geographic location; it adheres to encompassing a more nuanced and expansive philosophy of place, such as Malpas’ declaration, introduced in Chap. 1, that “place is integral to the very structure and possibility of experience... There is no possibility of understanding human existence—and especially human thought and experience— other than through an understanding of place” (2018, 13). Beyond the philosophical concept put forward by Malpas, what is place? It is a term and an experience that is at once familiar and vague. As human geographer Tim Cresswell states: [p]lace is a word that seems to speak for itself. It is also a problem as no-one quite knows what they are talking about when they are talking about place. Place is not a specialised piece of academic terminology. It is a word we use daily in the English-speaking world. It is a word wrapped in common sense. (2011, 127)

2

The project is titled The Role of the Creative Arts in Regional Australia: A Social Impact Model. It is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project (LP180100477). Further information can be found by following the link in the reference for the “Home” web page for Regional Arts and Social Impact in the reference list.

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Cresswell goes on to distinguish between space and place (2011), stating that place suggests meaning and attachment, while space is more associated with abstraction and action. Similarly, Marxist human geographer Doreen Massey makes the point that space and place sit in opposition to one another and that while space might be viewed as ephemeral, place can be considered in the context of positionality and “one’s place in the world” (1991). Three things gather in place: materialities, meaning and practices, which is also true of arts and cultural activities.

4.4 Co-design: By the People and Process Over Outcome Design is both a practice and a process: “as a process, design is an approach to problem-solving that is human centred and collaborative” (Langley et al., 2018, 3). This description of design can also mean it is a practice and process of exploration in recognition that important discoveries occur through trial and error. Part of this process is the act of prototype which allows for hands-on, practical activities that let participants understand the strengths and limitations of a process or product, and identify future directions, instead of leaping to propose a finished product. Co-design, which sits within design methodologies more broadly, has an emphasis on process, where facilitation brings different participants together to elicit and share first-hand experiences and knowledge perspectives (Björgvinsson, 2008) and to develop a collaborative and representative design. It is imbued with a purpose of empowerment and engagement and recognises that the knowledge that stakeholders bring is both explicit and tacit. This shared understanding of others’ experience in the early stages of building trust between diverse stakeholders helps to combat misconceptions, which ultimately obstruct collaborative and situated solutions to complex issues. As part of a co-design philosophy, Langley et al. (2018) posit the act of collective making as a specific approach that is focused not on what is being made but on what is being communicated. The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum has long championed design’s vital role as a problem-solving discipline for addressing humanitarian concerns. In the By the People: Designing a Better America project (2016/2017), the Cooper Hewitt turned its attention to poverty in the USA, which it views as a growing and complex crisis exacerbated by the devastating effects of climate change and uneven economic growth. Cynthia E. Smith, the Curator of Socially Responsible Design, travelled tens of thousands of kilometres to visit regions with the highest poverty rates in America and directly engage communities—listening, valuing and incorporating local expertise. This was essential to building trust and strengthening local capacity in such an ambitious and large-scale project. Co-design processes can also help empower community members to advocate for social change by making complex public policies clearer and create avenues for bridging seemingly entrenched societal divides for a shared prosperity. Over the course of the engagement conducted in this project, genuinely innovative solutions were developed for clients such as the Bronx

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Parole Office to make their space calmer and more inviting for those who often must wait many hours for their appointments. What we can learn from the By the People project is that it is possible to design an approach to community engagement that both harnesses the specificity of the people and place and can be transferred across a range of settings. This can be achieved by using prompts rather than questions and to make the questions general in nature but particular in possible responses. The process conducted for community engagement, in both By the People and the co-creation project discussed in Sect. 4.6, is one that facilitates shared discussions to contextualise the responses—a process which then illuminates patterns, absences and solutions. In By the People, there was an expectation of a practical, tangible outcome at the completion of the process; conversely, in the process described in Sect. 4.6 (the arts-led or co-creative process), the desired outcomes were to have an increased understanding of the context and needs of a community and/or a pathway to action.

4.5 Co-creation: Situated Languages to Communicate from Within Remote Communities The move from co-design to co-creation is one which shifts focus from making in a practical and useful way (albeit one that is inclusive of skill and confidence levels) to creatively sharing perspectives and experiences to generate both empathy and connection. Co-creation should consciously seek to have low barriers to entry and engagement, and to experiment with embodied, intuitive and creative modes of communication (which while prompting oral responses, we categorise as non-textbased tools) suited to the community for shared decision-making. Alongside this, the processes must “address power differences, level hierarchies and connect the hearts and minds of participants” (Langley et al., 2018, 6). This includes engagement processes and activities that are facilitated (but not controlled) to ensure that multiple voices and experiences are equally represented. Traditional focus groups can unwittingly encourage those who already possess the most power and confidence to express themselves most readily and subsequently dominate the process. The role of the creative arts in regional and remote communities is obvious to the outside observer. However, the everyday ways in which the creative arts are important to communities are easily overlooked in traditional community consultation and evaluation. Priority has been too often placed on high-profile productions; quantitative measures for evaluating success; or that the projects are seen solely as an opportunity to deliver public announcements about government-funded projects. Much of the crucial, life-changing, innovative and capacity-building work in rural and remote communities is invisible, “ordinary” and done by volunteers and does not have its own box to tick on arts grant applications, which tend to prioritise “capital A” arts experiences, such as theatre or music performances, and high-profile artists,

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over everyday craft and creative activity. In one of our research sites, a local artists group lamented the decision by a funding body to not fund a series of workshops by well-respected artist from the region. The reason given was that the artist was not “well known” enough to warrant the grant. This was despite them having the specific skills the group wanted to hone and being from the immediate area which meant supporting the local economy and ability to follow up with participants’ progress. This disconnect between what is funded and what is valued by communities poses a significant issue for sustainable community arts practices and programmes. As the divide between urban and regional communities seems to be becoming even more stark and wide, and with the recent pandemic lockdowns prompting more regional segmentation and the need to autonomously function, it is worth considering that the arts and creative engagement have the potential to be powerful methods for communication and building understanding. As previously mentioned, co-creative community engagement processes place the voices of regional and remote communities at the heart of arts projects and funding strategies. This approach posits that these voices need to be the primary source for informed decision-making and guidance for developing and delivering impact and sustainable arts and cultural events with and for communities. In order to make the best decisions for and with end-users, funding bodies and arts organisations require processes and avenues that support meaningful engagement and consultation between stakeholders. Rigorous and responsive engagement and collaboration facilitate a deeper understanding of the community you are working with—its strengths, how it sees itself and what community members want to amplify about themselves and their place. This approach of engaging with communities is not without challenges—it can be more time consuming than other approaches and can result in exposing entrenched issues in the community that may require resolution before progress can be made. However, over time, the process can support and encourage arts organisations to align themselves with communities around shared synergies, and build trusting relationships which are crucial to long-term success.

4.6 Creative Community Engagement: Tim Fairfax Family Foundation Toolkit As discussed throughout this chapter, nuanced engagement methods that capture the creative capacity of a community; the future skills required for a sustainable career in the arts; and manage local community challenges are essential to adequately address needs and encapsulate the valuable contribution of regional, rural and remote communities. The researchers in the project discussed in this section were funded by the Tim Fairfax Family Foundation to design and test an accessible approach to engaging directly with communities on funded arts activities and cultural events. The aim of this toolkit is to provide specific, grounded processes for organisations

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to make the most of their time and to gather detailed information that can be used both in designing activities and later in evaluating and reporting. The toolkit comprises a series of creative prompts and resources for facilitating a workshop which allow for the distinct needs and capacities of diverse communities to emerge. It enables arts organisations to facilitate a conversation around community, creativity, place and legacy, which can generate insights across these four themes. These insights can be used to collaborate with communities to design and deliver arts experiences that are meaningful and relevant for them rather what might be considered important to funding bodies. This process supports the delivery of high-impact outcomes for all stakeholders and dramatically builds the potential for productive, ongoing relationships between funding bodies, arts organisations and regional communities. The data gathered and tools developed from this project provide useful insights for funding bodies to make strategic decisions about where to spend limited funds; for arts organisations to develop long-lasting relationships; and importantly for communities to be empowered to have agency in decisions made about their communities and to develop their own ongoing processes and networks to continue taking the lead in funding opportunities.

4.6.1 Project Design In developing the toolkit, we wanted to re-frame the process of collaboration from a hierarchical one of communities at the bottom, arts organisations in the middle and funding bodies at the top to a dynamic, fluid and equitable relationship between stakeholders all pursuing the same goals. One of the goals of this research was to bring a community together through the engagement process and to support conversations between community stakeholders that may have never occurred previously. The researchers identified that bringing a wide range of community members together for the engagement process might amplify voices and perspectives not always taken into consideration in traditional consultations. Some of these community members may not have always been involved in discussions about arts, culture and creativity in their community, and inviting their contributions increases the richness of ideas, illuminates diverse perspectives as well as shared values and broadens understanding of the reach and impact of the arts within a community. We also decided to use a series of open-ended prompts to generate productive conversations, instead of using traditional individual written responses, and to adopt a more holistic approach to the creative arts that includes ideas and conversations about community and place. Each of the creative prompts in the toolkit explores specific ideas such as “what are you most proud of in your community?” and “which venues or locations are underused/undervalued in your community?”. The prompts are open-ended to encourage in-depth discussion rather than simple answers, and they are also targeted to focus the conversation and generate insights that can inform and direct both arts programming and funding applications. As already discussed, the current “one-size-fits-all” approach to arts funding outside of metropolitan areas

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Fig. 4.1 Name tags used for the community engagement workshops held in Roma and Charters Towers. The design of the name tags placed the opinions, hopes and values of participating community members at the centre of focus

can leave communities on the margins of decision-making and perhaps dealing with expensive and unwanted fly-in-fly-out arts programmes. Therefore, we also decided to co-create potential events as a group in order to tease out some of the responses to projects and to empower the community as collaborators in developing events. This toolkit was trialled in two rural and remote Queensland communities: Charters Towers and Roma. In Charters Towers, the workshops were delivered at the Dalrymple Creative Cultural Community Centre in June 2018 over two days (June 8–9) with 30 participants from the arts and cultural sector. In Roma, engagement was conducted over three days in August 2018. Specifically, a creative consultation workshop for 14 young people (14–17 years old) was held and this workshop will be the focus of the discussion in Sect. 4.6.3 (Figs. 4.1 and 4.2).

4.6.2 Charters Towers Charters Towers is located around 100 km inland from the major regional centre of Townsville in Northern Queensland and a 14-h drive from the state’s capital, Brisbane. As a regional centre, it has several competing arts organisations who rarely communicate with one another. These workshops were the first time local

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Fig. 4.2 Responses from some community members at the workshops in Charters Towers

arts sector leaders had been in a room together to discuss their strategies and activities. It became clear that there is a great deal of energy and expertise in the town, but a lack of collaboration was the cause of significant frustration. On the first day of workshops, the researchers welcomed 16 participants from a range of local organisations including Charters Towers Regional Council, Towers Arts, Dalrymple Creative Cultural Community Centre, local architects and arts venue operators. During initial conversations, numerous issues and disagreements arose. The facilitator reminded the group that a successful discussion did not mean the group must agree rather success was demonstrated by greater understanding of different perspectives. What became evident in the subsequent feedback was that a deeper understanding of the work each organisation and individual was undertaking in the community was finally achieved through the community workshop. For example, frustrations eased as participants identified that, while their organisations frequently seemed in competition for

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the same funding and resources, their perspectives around the importance of art and culture to the vibrancy and sustainability of their community were much the same. The creative prompts asked participants: “Creativity in this community can be described as…”; “The most pressing challenge facing this community is:” “A venue or place that is under used or under-utilised is:”; and “Projects we see too much of are…”. The themes that emerged from these community feedback responses were that there is a great deal of activity and potential in and around Charters Towers, but that a network or system to build and support this potential is missing. Participants identified a number of solutions to some of the challenges their local arts sector experiences, including the need for a local events calendar to prevent organisations scheduling clashing activities. Charters Towers is a boarding school town, providing secondary school education to day students as well as boarders from remote agricultural properties. While it has several schools and secondary education is a significant local industry, creative arts and community projects which involve and amplify youth voices are almost completely absent in the town.

4.6.3 Roma Roma is situated in the drought-declared Maranoa Shire, which is located a five-hour drive from Brisbane. Additionally, outback Queensland has the highest youth unemployment rate in the country at 67.1% as of January 2018 (Brotherhood St Lawrence Report, 2018). All 14 students involved in the two-hour creative consultation workshop were from Roma Senior College, and four teachers, including the college principal, also participated. During this workshop, we used a slightly different series of prompt cards to those deployed in Charters Towers, and two new cards were also added to the series: “what does creativity mean to me?” and “what types of creative skills would I like to develop?”. These were designed specifically to encourage conversation and reflection amongst the group of young people. These prompts were included to elicit specific responses to inform the project funders how they could best support the young people in this community to imagine creative careers for themselves. The findings through this process uncovered a range of insights that would have been difficult to ascertain through direct questioning, because it let participants respond openly. As highlighted in Chap. 3, this allows for expected and unexpected impact stories to emerge. Over the course of the workshop, several issues became apparent, the most obvious being that young people cannot be what they do not see represented around them. This meant that the students had ideas about the creative skills they would like to develop, such as videography, and what they may like to do with these skills, such as film-making; however, they had no clear pathway to developing those skills nor any points of reference of relatable people who have been successful in these areas. The students overwhelmingly liked living in a rural community but were acutely aware of the limitations that living there presented for their futures. They were also very vocal about feeling left out of the existing arts and cultural activities, which echoed opinions in Charters Towers. The teachers at

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the school advocated fiercely for more inclusive arts and cultural events for their students, along with more opportunities to develop creative digital skills.

4.7 Conclusion We are witnessing a global shift around the ways in which government and nongovernment organisations design and deliver services addressing complex social and public health issues. This shift is predicated on creating with end-users rather than for end-users (Bason, 2010) and on addressing the ways in which we recognise and value the voices and experiences of under-represented individuals (Hancox, 2017). As discussed throughout this book, the social impact potential for arts and culture in regional and remote communities has only recently begun to be acknowledged in a cohesive way and articulated from the point of view of the communities impacted. Arts and culture encompass a range of aesthetic expressions and identities, including those that may not always fit with dominant perceptions of the arts as situated within museums, galleries, theatres and concert halls. Instead, these expressions and identities embrace notions of wellbeing and social impact that may sit outside traditional frameworks. The wide-ranging benefits arising from the integration of community-led creative activities into health and social impact are gaining recognition amongst medical professionals as well as public health researchers and are only likely to increase since COVID-19. A new public discourse is needed about what the arts contribute to social impact and wellbeing, and what they offer in terms of meaningful communicative methods, development of inclusive places and compelling avenues for sharing knowledge for all members of society (see Belfiore, 2014; Belfiore & Bennett, 2007a, 2007b; MacDowall et al., 2015; Radbourne et al., 2013). Within the community engagement discussed in Sect. 4.6, the two sites of Charters Towers and Roma were different in geographical location; access to major centres; prosperity; population; and climate. Despite the differences, there were many surprising similarities between the aims, hopes and challenges of the communities. Co-creating with communities at the outset of any project development, using processes similar to those discussed in this chapter, goes some way in supporting community voices to drive creative change in their own communities. In the next chapter, we extend the discussion of co-creation through an analysis of participatory artmaking in communities, including the challenges that small and under-resourced arts organisations experience as they seek to enable the coexistence of multiple voices in collaborative and community-based art. Acknowledgements Hancox received funding as a Queensland Smithsonian recipient (2017). Hancox also received funding from the Tim Fairfax Family Foundation to complete the research discussed in Sect. 4.6 of this chapter. The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Charters Towers and Roma communities as well as the research team: Associate Professor Donna Hancox, Dr Sasha Mackay and Bryan Crawford.

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References Andrews, M., Squire, C., & Tamboukou, M. (2013). Doing narrative research. SAGE. Bason, C. (2010). Leading public sector innovation: Co-creating for a better society. Policy Press. Belfiore, E. (2014). ‘Impact’, ‘value’ and ‘bad economics’: Making sense of the problem of value in the arts and humanities. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 14, 9–110. Belfiore, E., & Bennett, O. (2007a). Determinants of impact: Towards a better understanding of arm’s length encounters with the arts. Cultural Trends, 16, 225–275. Belfiore, E., & Bennett, O. (2007b). Rethinking the social impacts of the arts. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 13, 135–151. Björgvinsson, E. B. (2008). Open-ended participatory design as prototypical practice. Co-Design, 4, 85–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710880802095400 Blodgett, A. T., Schinkie, R. J., Smith, B., Peltier, D., & Pheasant, C. (2011). Indigenous words: Exploring vignettes as narrative strategy for presenting research voices of Aboriginal community members. Qualitative Inquiry, 17, 522–533. Boydell, K. M., Cheng, C., Gladstone, B., Nadin, S., & Stasiulis, E. (2017). Co-producing narratives on access to care in rural communities: Using digital storytelling to foster social inclusion of young people experiencing psychosis (dispatch). Studies in Social Justice, 11, 298. Brotherhood of Saint Laurence. (2018). An unfair Australia? Mapping youth unemployment hotspots. Brotherhood of Saint Laurence. Cresswell, T. (2011). Defining place. In M. Himley & A. Fitzsimmons (Eds.), Critical encounters with texts: Finding a place to stand (7th ed., pp. 127–136). Pearson. Dunphy, K. (2009). Developing and revitalizing rural communities through arts and Creativity. Cultural Development Network. Dunphy, K. (2015). A holistic framework of evaluation for arts engagement. In L. MacDowall, M. Badham, E. Blomkamp, & K. Dunphy (Eds.), Making culture count: The politics of cultural measurement (pp. 243–263). Palgrave. Greenhalgh, T., Jackson, C., Shaw, S., & Janamian, T. (2016). Achieving research impact through co-creation in community-based health services: Literature review and case study. The Milbank Quarterly, 94, 392–429. Hancox, D. (2017). From subject to collaborator: Transmedia storytelling and social research. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 23, 49–60. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856516675252. Hancox, D. (20190. Creative community consultation toolkit: Final report. Tim Fairfax Family Foundation. Landry, C., Bianchini, F., & Maguire, M. (1993). The social impact of the arts: A discussion document. Comedia. Langley, J., Wolstenholme, D., & Cooke, J. (2018). Collective making as knowledge mobilisation: The contribution of participatory design in the co-creation of knowledge in healthcare. BMC Health Services Research, 18, 1–10. Lillie, J. (2020). The relationship is the project: Working with communities. Brow Books. Malpas, J. (2018). Place and experience: A philosophical topography (2nd ed.). Routledge. Massey, D. (1991). A global sense of place. Marxism Today, 24–29. McCausland, R. (2019). ‘I’m sorry but I can’t take a photo of someone’s capacity being built’: Reflections on evaluation of Indigenous policy and programmes. Evaluation Journal of Australia, 19, 64–78. McNiff, S. (1998). Art based research. Jessica Kinglsey Publishers. Radbourne, J., Glow, H., & Johanson, K. (Eds.). 2013. The audience experience: A critical analysis of audiences in the performing arts. Intellect. Regional Arts and Social Impact. 2021. Home. Queensland University of Technology. http://research.qut.edu.au/raasi/. Accessed April 21, 2021

Chapter 5

Arts-Based Methodologies for Fostering Inclusion and Understanding with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Communities

Abstract The capacity for creative and arts-based activities to support inclusive and innovative means of communication, advocacy or development for under-represented or under-served communities is still being fully understood and articulated by researchers. However, the communities themselves are often far more advanced in their use of these methodologies to generate inclusion and understanding. This chapter explores two projects, Building Inclusive Classrooms and Room 17 Goes Large, which were both undertaken in partnership with Milpera State High School. The projects drew on a range of creative methodologies as a means of identifying and explicating the lived experiences of refugee and asylum seeker young people in relation to secondary and post-secondary education. In both projects, the research teams and participant collaborators were focused on uncovering meaningful and inclusive methods to share the perspectives of the young people participating. This focus meant that many traditional forms of data collection and dissemination (such as requiring participants to read, write, speak and comprehend English and Australian culture) were inappropriate, and some of the research team, particularly those from the fields of health and education, found it challenging to expand their traditional concepts of research to also include non-text-based methods such as expressing narratives and emotions using oral, visual and audible means. In both projects, all stakeholders were extremely positive about the outcomes of the research, which furthers our discussion of the value of non-text-based research methods and provides an example illustrating the importance of moving beyond purely quantitative or traditional qualitative methods.

5.1 Introduction The capacity for creative and arts-based activities to support inclusive and innovative means of communication, advocacy or development for under-represented or underserved communities is still being fully understood and articulated by researchers. However, the communities themselves are often far more advanced in their use of these methodologies to generate inclusion and understanding. This chapter explores two projects, Building Inclusive Classrooms and Room 17 Goes Large, which were © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Gattenhof et al., The Social Impact of Creative Arts in Australian Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7357-3_5

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both undertaken in partnership with Milpera State High School. The projects drew on a range of creative methodologies as a means of identifying and explicating the lived experiences of refugee and asylum seeker young people in relation to secondary and post-secondary education. In both projects, the research teams and participant collaborators were focused on uncovering meaningful and inclusive methods to share the perspectives of the young people participating. This focus meant that many traditional forms of data collection and dissemination (such as requiring participants to read, write, speak and comprehend English and Australian culture) were inappropriate, and some of the research team, particularly those from the fields of health and education, found it challenging to expand their traditional concepts of research to also include non-text-based methods such as expressing narratives and emotions using oral, visual and audible means. In both projects, all stakeholders were extremely positive about the outcomes of the research, which furthers our discussion of the value of non-text-based research methods and provides an example illustrating the importance of moving beyond purely quantitative or traditional qualitative methods.

5.2 Milpera State High School Community Milpera State High School was the site for both projects as the research team have long-standing relationships with the school community. For the projects, the school community was defined as teachers, school staff members, students and their parents and carers. Milpera State High School (Milpera) is based in Brisbane, Australia, and is a specialised school providing intensive English language education and settlement services to newly arrived students from non-English-speaking migrant, refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds. The school is rich in cultural and linguistic diversity, and the cultural profile of the students is dynamic as forced migration and immigration patterns shift due to global conditions. In 2018, approximately 150 students aged between 11 and 18 years attended Milpera, representing over 20 countries. This diversity is also reflected amongst the school staff members, many of whom are multilingual or have also made the journey to Australia from other nations. The learning environment at Milpera is designed to prepare students for entry into a regular schooling system in Australia (Milpera State High School, 2019), and there are a number of mainstream Brisbane high schools that Milpera students tend to transition to. Generally, students spend between six and 18 months at Milpera depending on their needs and capacities. All students who attend Milpera speak languages other than English upon enrolment, and they are all recent arrivals in Australia (less than two years). The approach to teaching at Milpera is best described as “student-focused”, which manifests as a commitment to the strengths, needs and ambitions of each student. This commitment includes putting the experiences of the students and their first country at the centre of their learning and their settlement in Australia. Along with this personal attention, the curriculum is linked to Australian curriculum subjects but also tailored to meet the specific learning and development needs of culturally and

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linguistically diverse (CALD) students. School staff members describe Milpera as a “bridge to mainstream education” (Milpera State High School, 2019). In contrast to mainstream Australian schools, Milpera’s position as a specialised English language and resettlement school means that it prioritises newly arrived students’ English proficiency and acculturation. However, there are a range of features that distinguish Milpera from mainstream schools that are not solely focused on the backgrounds of the students and are transferable across many secondary schools. These include the conscious inclusion of parents, carers and siblings of current students in the Milpera community and strong research partnerships to support an evidence base for the learning and teaching at the school. Both actions create an outward looking and expansive atmosphere for the school and students, which in turn creates a sense of safety and curiosity for the newly arrived students. As this chapter will explore, arts, culture and creativity all have an important role to play in the development of this unique atmosphere and community at Milpera.

5.3 Building Inclusive Classrooms Project The 2017–2018 Building Inclusive Classrooms project was a competitive research project funded by the state government’s Education Department, Education Queensland, through the Education Horizon Grants scheme. Education Horizon identifies a series of priority areas each year and invites researchers and research teams to design a project to address one of those priority areas. In 2017, the priorities were: • • • • • • • •

Empowered learners The diverse learner Health and wellbeing Pedagogy, curriculum and assessment Leadership, expertise and support Community connections and integration Transitions, pathways and lifelong learning Learning in the twenty-first century.

This project responded to the empowered learners, the diverse learner and health and wellbeing priorities, and built on past research with schools that have large numbers of students from refugee and migrant populations. That previous research conducted by members of the Inclusive Classrooms team highlighted the challenges for school communities resulting from disengaged students in classrooms, and the risk of CALD students becoming disengaged due to a lack of inclusivity in the classroom and wider school community. While representing a minority of children, for every “disengaged child” the effects can be far-reaching: impacting long-term education quality; impacting peers, classroom climate and continuity of teaching; and impacting teacher wellbeing. This project further developed previous research exploring the Psychosocial and Academic Development of Students from Diverse Backgrounds. That research yielded insights into the Milpera learning environment,

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demonstrating innovative processes instrumental in promoting culturally and linguistically CALD students’ settlement and wellbeing. The overarching aim of the Inclusive Classrooms project was to deploy dynamic and creative methods to widely disseminate the successful aspects of the Milpera environment to the Department of Education community for maximum impact and sharing. To do this, the research team designed the project to identify the specific aspects of the Milpera school environment that are most important for supporting students’ wellbeing and inclusion, and avenues to articulate these from the perspective of the most important stakeholders: the Milpera school community. Previous projects by a team of health researchers (see Khawaja et al., 2017; Wong et al., 2018) had examined the pedagogical philosophy of Milpera and the levels of resilience amongst the students compared to those in students from non-refugee, non-asylum seeker and non-migrant backgrounds. While the findings of these projects were insightful, the scope and research methods of previous projects were unable to deeply examine the culture of Milpera, how the school fosters a sense of belonging and creates inclusion in classrooms, and how those most directly impacted by the culture experience it. Understanding and articulating something as abstract and often invisible as culture requires research methods (both for collecting and disseminating data) that are nuanced as well as transferable for diverse participants and are able to capture the voices of those who are often overlooked by official data in traditional research projects.

5.3.1 Research Design The interdisciplinary team from Creative Industries and Psychology at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) designed a set of arts-based activities which could explore the meaning and experience of belonging across a range of languages, levels of English language proficiency and culturally appropriate approaches. There were three separate workshops for each of the different participant groups: Milpera staff; Milpera students; and Milpera parents and carers. In the first activity, we asked each participant group to describe their understanding and experience of belonging in ways that were designed to be age and culturally appropriate for that specific group: • Staff were asked to tell a story of a time when felt they belonged. • Students were asked to draw a food/object/place they associate with belonging. • Parents/carers were asked via translators to tell us what belonging means in their first language. Teacher’s aides from a range of cultural backgrounds participated in the workshop to outweigh the number of teachers in an effort for the students to not feel like they were in a regular class and had to do the “right thing”. We also ensured that the activities and discussions with students were framed as informal and fun rather than “work”. After an initial period of adjusting to the workshops, the students engaged in the tasks and prompts with a great deal of enthusiasm and collaboration. However,

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due to a lack of English language proficiency and shyness, they were less comfortable talking to the research team than to each other. We had designed the tasks with this in mind and the drawings that we had asked them to create were very rich sites of information. These visual representations of how the students understood and experienced belonging provided excellent points of reference for further conversations. Initially, some Milpera school staff and members of the research team from psychology were sceptical of this creative research process and of the value of the data being produced. They were uncertain how a series of questions about belonging and responses that included pictures of food and family objects could be translated into useful insights. However, as clear patterns and trends began to emerge through these activities and conversations, all stakeholders in the room became increasingly aware that this process resulted in much richer and meaningful data than they had expected. Separate workshops with the parents of the children were augmented by teacher’s aides able to translate all discussion into the language of participants and vice versa. Through this process, we developed a shared language from each workshop around belonging and inclusion, and we then coded those responses across all the workshops and participants to determine patterns and intersections of responses to create a series of prompts that could be used by all participants to respond to in a set of short digital stories. The prompts for the digital stories were: “when are the times you feel you belong at Milpera State High School?” and “who helps you to belong here?”. Digital stories were designed to capture the voices of the participants through a variety of approaches in an easily sharable format. For example, the digital stories with and by the students used their voices, but because of the shyness of some students in front of the camera we also included the pictures they had drawn in the workshops to further articulate their response. Similarly, in the digital stories with parents and carers we wrote out the belonging translation from their first language to English to provide context for their experiences. These digital stories were designed to centre participants’ voices and experiences in a way that could provide clear direction about how to best create and implement policy and processes that improve the experiences of participants and incorporate the strengths and contribution they can make to their learning and thriving in a school environment. One digital story comprises school staff members’ reflections on their experience of belonging at Milpera, and the second encompasses the ways in which students and families experience school belonging. The voiceovers in the digital stories comprise a compilation of staff, student and parent voices describing what belonging means to them, how they experience belonging and how Milpera fosters belonging and a sense of family and community. The participants’ drawings and notes were important visuals in the completed digital stories. The research team screened the digital stories in other school environments in order to stimulate important discussions about inclusive schooling practices. The outcomes of the creative workshops and digital stories with these groups have implications and benefits beyond the Milpera community and for educators working with children from refugee and migrant backgrounds. This project sought to identify “what works” in the context of Milpera to illuminate a multiplicity of perspectives

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and experiences of school belonging and to be able to share these findings with other schools to implement in ways that could work for their school community. The workshops were guided by the principles of digital storytelling: the creative processes sought to illuminate and extrapolate on the personal, lived experiences of participants and used digital technologies to record and share these experiences with audiences. Understood as a co-creative, facilitated media practice by which participants are guided to produce self-representational short films (Spurgeon, 2013; Spurgeon et al., 2009; Worcester, 2012), digital storytelling as a research methodology is valued for being intensely collaborative and “ideal for use in participatory projects, where the aim is to do research in collaboration ‘with’ rather than, ‘on’ participants” (de Jager et al., 2017, 2550). Using digital storytelling methodologies in the research collaboration with Milpera enabled understandings of school belonging to be cocreated between researchers and participants and provided a means for recording and sharing the expertise of participants with other educators. The workshop processes represent an adapted form of more traditional approaches to digital storytelling, as researchers sought to respond to the needs of the participants and capture the data most useful for this research. For instance, rather than supporting each participant to “create short, personal stories using a small selection of still images, a script written and recorded in first person, with all elements put together in a movie-making application” (Spurgeon, 2013, 6), the workshops instead stimulated a shared conversation between researchers and participants about what it means to belong. Drawing on arts-based methodologies and specifically non-text-based tools and methods such as drawings, visual and oral material, this project aimed to identify and amplify the specificities of the Milpera school environment that are crucial for supporting the Milpera students’ wellbeing.

5.4 Room 17 Goes Large Project In 2018, a team from the School of Creative Practice at QUT were funded by the Widening Participation Programme to collaborate with students who are currently significantly under-represented in higher education to explore non-traditional avenues for them to consider post-secondary education. In particular, the team were interested in ways for the students to re-frame and re-imagine the university campus as a creative and safe space for them and to also make clear the contribution this student cohort would make to the university. The research team again partnered with Milpera State High School, engaging with 16 senior students for this project. Culturally and linguistically diverse young people are under-represented in higher education and face a range of challenges and obstacles in attending university. These challenges and obstacles are often external to the student or their abilities and ambitions. Some universities in Australia are still attempting (like all levels of Australian schooling and education) to shed themselves of the traditional image of their central student body as white, middle-class/private school educated and male (Hatchell, 2007). Even as there

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are genuine institutional moves to make universities more accessible and inclusive, there are systemic issues that still need to be addressed. The purpose of this project was to develop creative avenues for CALD students to both see a place for themselves in the higher education system and suggest ways that universities could reflect their values and perspectives. Students involved in the programme were mentored by QUT School of Creative Practice staff to create music, dance and film works, which were presented as either recorded outputs or live performances. Students could focus on any discipline/s of their choice and were treated by staff as the directors of the content they created. Each creative discipline (music, dance and film) was led by two early career mentors who were completing or had recently completed their Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at QUT. At the end of the week’s programme, the students presented a performance at the QUT CreateX festival,1 showcasing the creative outcomes of the project to friends and family as well as QUT and Milpera staff. The research team then set about determining the impact of the programme in supporting post-school transition for the 16 students. Importantly, the approach used by the research team recognised the participants as experts in their own lived experience and positioned them as “active agents in the process of creating knowledge, reaching a collective objective and solving problems” (de Vos et al. 2011, 493). By focusing on the strengths and capacities of the participants, we were also able to adapt the activities and explore shared solutions articulated through the dialogue. This strength-based foundation has the potential to increase participants’ awareness of their own personal strengths (see Bandura, 2001; Morrice, 2013; Norton & Sliep, 2019). This is crucial for marginalised young people, and particularly young people displaced by war and forced migration, to be able to imagine and create a positive future in a new country. This study used a combination of qualitative research methods including artsbased consultation workshops, semi-structured interviews and participatory and codesigned creative practice to generate and collect data about students’ perceptions of higher education. The research design strived to position the voices and aspirations of the students and their experience of Milpera at the centre of the data collected. The approach of the research team aimed to foster a process of social inclusion which Whiteford (2017, 59) describes as “ensuring people are able to participate fully in the societies in which they live, and in so doing that their unique identities are represented and respected”. A crucial element of the research design to enact this was the co-creative model of practice which supported the students to engage with and develop creative works on their own terms rather than “learn” a creative discipline from an expert. As a group of researchers experienced in community arts and engagement, the research team was familiar with arts-based processes and practices that engage participants in exploring abstract concepts such as values, and which enable the

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QUT CreateX is a biennial festival of the university’s Creative Industries Faculty. It includes performances, exhibitions, digital media screenings and experiences, panel discussions, and engages QUT staff, students and industry partners. See https://createx.qut.edu.au/.

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unique strengths of participants to be embraced. Milpera is the site of a significant amount of research, particularly from health and education research projects, and this project consciously chose non-traditional research methods, as conventional research methods, standardised psychometric instruments and textual expressions alone (as well as data collected in dominant languages alone) may have failed to adequately capture the everyday nuances and complexities of migration and the health of refugees. Further, these more traditional research methods may serve to reinforce stereotypical perceptions of refugees as helpless victims that need to be studied, uplifted and cured (Guruge et al., 2015, 2). Huss et al. (2015, 684) found that arts-based methods enable communication “between different sectors and power levels” and can destabilise “dominant global ‘expert’ knowledge”. Thus, arts-based methods—and specifically, non-text-based methods of dance, film and music— were adopted as a means of critiquing “expert” university knowledge and values by privileging the perspectives of students from refugee backgrounds. Huss et al. (2015, 685) find that arts-based methods create “a safe, indirect symbolic space for those without power to define their needs”. Previous projects with Milpera students and staff revealed that creative and arts-based methods elicited more meaningful and representative responses than traditional research methods, as exemplified in the Building Inclusive Classrooms project above. The use of non-textbased storytelling as a means through which to amplify the voices and perspectives of the students and their families reflects the role of the creative methods used in the Room 17 Goes Large project. Emerging research has highlighted that art and music allow children to represent their experiences in contexts of reduced stress (Harris, 2007). In Room 17 Goes Large, this environment of reduced stress was created quite quickly as the students began working with peer mentors and staff from QUT on creative works. The choice of creative discipline was directed by participants on a session-by-session basis, leaving them to experience and occupy each of the creative domains at their own pace. The specific format of the creative workshops is best described in a publication by the research team: A standard session breakdown could see six participants involved in dance activities, five participants involved in music making and singing in either two of the music studios, three students roaming with film cameras or editing, while the remaining two participants might be working on creative writing tasks. These numbers would shift subtly throughout the day as energies and interests evolved, or as group projects changed emphasis. As content matured throughout the workshop programme, the dynamics evolved from a process-oriented creation to presentation-oriented rehearsal and preparation. (Whelan et al., 2020, 3)

The use of creative and experiential non-text-based methods can reveal and illuminate deeper meanings and more intimate insights into issues (Brady & O’Regan, 2009). In particular, these methods supported the participants to provide personal responses in ways that are not confrontational and do not make them excessively vulnerable (Galheigo, 2014). The mix of verbal (narrative responses) and non-verbal (musical and embodied) creates personalised opportunities to contextualise the lives and hopes of the participants and to mitigate the effects of uneven power relationships within the research project (see Fox, 2015; Oliveira & Vearey, 2017), and Guruge

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et al. state they also are better situated “to capture the complexity of migration and the experience of refugees” (2015, 75). These approaches and the strength-based philosophy create a conceptual framework that centres the voices of the participants and values their experiences and agency. A series of pre- and post-creative development engagement workshops were conducted to understand participants’ perceptions of the challenges and opportunities of post-school transition as well as to reveal the ways in which students’ previous experiences contributed to the types of skills and strengths they now possessed. During the post-creative development workshop, students answered the same questions as in the pre-creative development workshops to gauge any changes in their perceptions of higher education. These workshops were conducted at Milpera in the Room 17 classroom. In designing these workshops, which combined focus group and creative engagement processes, Milpera staff advised the research team that when asked questions, students would often aim to please and would give answers they thought would be favourable. This was also an issue that had arisen in the Creating Inclusive Classrooms project, and we knew that creative approaches to answering questions (use of drawing, storytelling, etc.) assisted in students responding openly. The research team therefore devised pre- and post-project workshops that would be more collaborative and less formal than a standard focus group to help address this, and to maintain engagement given the participants’ age range. It was impossible to audio record every participant’s contribution during the workshop, as they worked simultaneously on questions. Therefore, we collected the participants’ notes, as well as made audio recordings, to build a more holistic account of the workshop. Despite our attempts to create a fun and safe atmosphere, the responses and the behaviour of the students during these workshops were in stark contrast to their behaviour on the university campus working on the creative outcomes. Their willingness to share personal experiences was heightened when collaborating and creating on the university campus. For example, a participant group who named themselves “the Generous Boys” wrote and performed a song—Mwenye Wivu (Swahili for jealous envy)—about their shared experiences of being in refugee camps and how this impacted them and their families. The Generous Boys were four young men between the ages of 14 and 17. Three were originally from different nations in Africa and one from Syria. This is a topic that would not have been brought up in the workshops. In fact, we struggled at times to even get the students to talk in the most general way about their career aspirations. In the workshops, students would more readily share responses to abstract questions such as “what would an ideal university look like”, than respond to more personal questions about their hopes. However, through collaborative artmaking the participants were able to articulate an important and influential part of their lives. These experiences also provided context for some of the responses about post-secondary study that privileged teamwork, collaboration and respect. The arts-based methods were also chosen to best enable refugee and migrant background students and their wider community to communicate and define their post-school transition needs to the university community, and to also make the findings more accessible for a wider audience. The live performances of the creative outputs at CreateX were powerful and profound moments of sharing for the young

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people and for their families and teachers in the audience. It was also an important experience for the university staff in the audience, who had not been involved in the project, to bear witness to the stories and experiences of the Milpera students and to be challenged in their own assumptions about who universities are for.

5.5 Conclusion The concepts of inclusion and belonging can be abstract to the point of irrelevance, particularly for those most impacted by them, if they are not understood or articulated in ways that can inspire or support action. For many marginalised and under-represented young people, being included and having a sense of belonging bring powerful tangible benefits. As such, it is crucial for educational institutions to continually change and improve their systems and processes that have the capacity to include or exclude these cohorts. Being able to understand, value and incorporate the lived experiences of those who experience exclusion is a necessary part of changing and improving those environments, and research or engagement methods to facilitate meaningful communication of lived experiences must be consciously part of any project working in this space. While quantitative tools and methods can “flatten or silence” (Ewick & Silbey, 1995, 199), the lived experiences and personal voices of research participants, arts, culture and creativity are profound mechanisms to reveal and illuminate these experiences in ways that disrupt existing power structures and inequities inherent in institutions. They also offer innovative pathways to redesign new and more equitable environments for learning and teaching not only that welcome diverse students and reflect their values, but which also uplift their capacities and strengths in ways that fundamentally change the institutions and signal more inclusive futures. This chapter has demonstrated the value of non-text-based tools and data for capturing and understanding intangible value—such as the ways in which school culture supports belonging—and for communicating impact in ways that authentically reflect lived experiences. The value of arts, culture and creativity for giving voice to and communicating the experiences of under-represented cohorts is a theme picked up in the next chapter, which explores challenges that arts organisations face in striving to include multiple voices and views in collaborative and participatory art. Acknowledgements The projects described in this chapter were funded by Education Queensland through the Education Horizon Grant scheme and the Widening Participation Fund. We acknowledge the work of the research teams including Professor Robert Schweitzer, Professor Nigar Khawaja, Associate Professor Michael Whelan, Dr Freya Wright-Brough and Yanto Browning. The authors would like to thank the Milpera community for their generosity and courage. It is truly a remarkable community and a privilege which collaborate with them.

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References Bandura, A. (2001). Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective. Annual Review Psychology, 52, 1–26. Brady, B., & O’Regan, C. (2009). Meeting the challenge of doing an RCT evaluation of youth mentoring in Ireland. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 3, 265–280. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1558689809335973 de Jager, A., Fogarty, A., Tewson, A., Lenette, C., & Boydell, K. M. (2017). Digital storytelling in research: A systematic review. The Qualitative Report, 22, 2548–2582. de Vos, A. S., Strydom, H., Fouche, C., & Delport, L. (2011). Research at grass roots: For the social sciences and human services professions. Van Schaik. Ewick, P., & Silbey, S. S. (1995). Subversive stories and hegemonic tales: Toward a sociology of narrative. Law & Society Review, 29, 197–226. https://doi.org/10.2307/3054010 Fox, M. (2015). Embodied methodologies, participation, and the art of the research. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 9, 321–332. Galheigo, S. M. (2014). WFOT 2014 congress. WFOT. Guruge, S., Hynie, M., Shakya, Y., Akbari, A., Htoo, S., & Abiyo, S. (2015). Refugee youth and migration: Using arts-informed research to understand changes in their roles and responsibilities. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung, 16, 15. Harris, D. (2007). Pathways to embodied empathy and reconciliation after atrocity: Former boy soldiers in a dance/movement therapy group in Sierra Leone. Intervention, 5, 203–231. https:// doi.org/10.1097/WTF.0b013e3282f211c8 Hatchell, H. (2007). Privilege of whiteness: Adolescent male students’ resistance to racism in an Australian classroom. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 7, 99–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/136133 2042000234240 Huss, E., Kaufman, R., Avgar, A., & Shouker, E. (2015). Using arts-based research to help visualise community intervention in international aid. International Social Work, 58, 673–688. https://doi. org/10.1177/0020872815592686 Khawaja, N., Ibrahim, O. E., & Schweitzer, R. (2017). Mental wellbeing of students from refugee and migrant backgrounds: The mediating role of resilience. School Mental Health, 9, 284–293. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12310-017-9215-6 Milpera State High School. (2019). Our school. https://milperashs.eq.edu.au/our-school. Accessed September 29, 2020 Morrice, L. (2013). Refugees in higher education: Boundaries of belonging and recognition, stigma and exclusion. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 32, 652–668. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 02601370.2021.761288 Norton, L., & Sliep, Y. (2019). #WE SPEAK: Exploring the experience of refugee youth through participatory research and poetry. Journal of Youth Studies, 22, 873–890. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 13676261.2018.1548758 Oliveira, E., & Vearey, J. (2017). MoVE (methods: visual: explore): Examining the use of participatory visual and narrative methods to explore the lived experience of migrants in Southern Africa. Working Paper 50. Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium, University of Sussex. Spurgeon, C. (2013). The art of co-creative media: An Australian survey. Journal of Cultural Science, 6, 4–21. https://doi.org/10.5334/csci.53 Spurgeon, C., Burgess, J., Klaebe, H., McWilliam, K., Tacchi, J. A., & Tsai, M. (2009). Co-creative media: Theorising digital storytelling as a platform for researching and developing participatory culture. In T. Flew (Ed.), Communication, creativity and global citizenship: Refereed proceedings of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association Conference (pp. 274–286). Australian and New Zealand Communication Association. Whelan, M., Wright-Brough, F., Hancox, D., & Browning, Y. (2020). The generous boys and the nice to meet you band: Students from migrant and refugee backgrounds as leaders in reshaping

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university values through creative arts-based programmes. International Journal of Inclusive Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2020.1813820 Whiteford, G. (2017). Participation in higher education as social inclusion: An occupational perspective. Journal of Occupational Science, 24, 54–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/14427591.2017.128 4151 Wong, C. W. S., Schweitzer, R., & Khawaja, N. (2018). Individual, pre-migration, and postsettlement factors in predicting academic success of adolescents from refugee backgrounds: A 12-month follow-up. Journal of International Migration and Integration, 19, 1095–1117. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s12134-018-0589-6 Worcester, L. (2012). Reframing digital storytelling as co-creative. IDS Bulletin, 43, 91–97. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1759-5436.2012.00368.x

Chapter 6

Co-creating Stories with Communities: Collaborative Art and Meaningful Participation

Abstract Participatory and collaborative approaches to artmaking are embedded within Australia’s arts and cultural sector. Through a diversity of programs and creative processes, arts organisations provide avenues through which individuals and communities may participate in the creation of their own stories. Projects which engage communities as participants or collaborators in the production of arts content are driven by a range of intentions around social change and cultural democracy. Further, they often involve arts organisations working collaboratively with a range of non-arts organisations and sectors to deliver projects that are locally impactful. Despite the importance of collaborative work to Australia’s cultural sector, such projects are challenging for arts organisations to manage and sustain. A range of individual, artistic and organisational agendas intersect in arts projects sustained by collaboration in ways that can be highly productive, though may also produce profound challenges. While projects are driven by the best possible intentions around amplifying the voices and stories of under-represented cohorts, artistic and ethical challenges arise when the agendas of multiple organisations intersect with those of community participants. This chapter explores the challenges of collaborative artmaking (digital storytelling and a short play) and important principles of embedding shared expectations of what success and impact will look like into projects from the outset. In doing so, the chapter considers how arts organisations and practitioners may better enable the coexistence of multiple voices in participatory art.

6.1 Introduction Participatory and collaborative approaches to artmaking are embedded within Australia’s arts and cultural sector. In cities and towns, arts and cultural organisations are collaborating with diverse sectors and cohorts of their communities to provide avenues through which people may participate in the creation of their own stories. Creative projects that engage communities as both participants and collaborators in the production of art are driven by a range of intentions around social change, community engagement and cultural democracy. While diverse in art form, method and location, and driven by “a plurality of values”, community-based arts projects © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Gattenhof et al., The Social Impact of Creative Arts in Australian Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7357-3_6

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are characterised by their intersectoral, place-based nature and interest in working “in” and “with” communities (Badham, 2013, 100–101). Amongst the many potential social outcomes of collaborative and participatory art, a core goal is to engage community members in the representation of their own lives and identities. Acknowledging the diversity of partnerships, art forms and creative practices which may be encompassed in a discussion of community-based art, this chapter is interested in the processes by which arts organisations foster productive collaborations and meaningful participation within communities. Community-based arts projects that engage community members as storytellers and participants are often enabled through collaborations between multiple organisations and agencies and thus encompass numerous organisational interests and agendas. Creative partnerships across diverse sectors—including arts and culture, health and community services, local government and commerce—are a prevalent and important part of Australia’s creative sector. However, collaborative projects also represent spaces of struggle: a variety of organisational and personal agendas intersect in such projects in ways that can be highly productive, though may also produce profound challenges for arts organisations and their participating community members. This chapter discusses the work of social impact arts organisation Creative Regions in order to explore challenges encountered and principles by which arts organisations may enable the coexistence of multiple individual and organisational objectives in community-based art. While participatory art encompasses the important potential of creating more nuanced representations of lives and communities, artistic and ethical challenges arise as arts organisations strive to negotiate a range of intersecting organisational, funding and artistic objectives, as well as the personal intentions of the community members whose stories are invited. In previous chapters, we identified the importance and value of co-creative community engagement processes for centring the experiences and voices of community members in project design and delivery processes. This chapter extends this discussion through exploring participatory artmaking (digital storytelling and a short play) within a small and under-resourced organisation seeking to enable the coexistence of multiple voices in collaborative art. Here, we map some of the tensions which emerged in Creative Regions’ participatory arts projects involving multiple organisational and community stakeholders and then present considerations for enabling community participation in ways that are authentic and meaningful to those communities.

6.2 Collaborating with Communities In Australia and overseas, arts and cultural organisations are routinely collaborating with their communities—including its residents, and a range of businesses and service providers—to increase the breadth and relevance of creative work, grow access and engagement and develop new revenue streams. The term “collaboration” is used here to encompass collaborative art projects in which community members are invited to participate in the creation of meanings and artefacts, as well as creative partnerships

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between arts organisations and a range of agencies and services within and outside of the creative ecology. The term “collaboration” acknowledges the embeddedness of arts and cultural organisations within communities, and the webs of personal and professional relationships and networks which make creative work possible and impactful in specific locations, and for particular cohorts and identity groups. Arguably, artists and arts organisations have always worked collaboratively with residents and diverse sectors to shape the social and cultural character of their communities. Research in Australia and elsewhere has highlighted the interconnections and interdependencies between arts organisations and sectors—including health, education and regional development, local businesses and community support services— that characterise creative production in rural and regional communities and sustain rural creative ecologies (Bartleet et al., 2019; Duxbury, 2020; Mackay et al., 2021; Skippington, 2016; Skippington & Davis, 2016). For Redaelli (2019, 179–181), ability to collaborate and facilitate dialogue between disparate sectors and groups is a core function and benefit of the arts in communities. As facilitators, artists and arts organisations enable conversation between residents, local government and services such as health to identify shared goals; as collaborators, they work with a range of businesses and service providers to address local issues (Redaelli, 2019, 180). Janamohanan (2020, 238) also asserts that artists “have never been separated from their social surroundings … ‘What is not socially-engaged?’” (emphasis in original). From these perspectives, creative production within places and communities is fundamentally collaborative and participatory. Nonetheless, there are financial, strategic and policy mechanisms which are driving increased collaboration. Cross-sector collaboration and community participation can be seen as pragmatic responses by arts organisations seeking to demonstrate their social role and secure and legitimise public funding (Dewinter et al., 2020). Decreased public funding for arts and culture and increasingly diversified and sometimes contradictory demands over what they “do” for society have necessitated arts organisations to develop strategic approaches to intersectoral partnerships and highlight their role as connectors within communities to meet these demands (Dragi´cevi´c Šeši´c, 2020, 44). As Jackson (2020, 33) observes in the Australian context, “collaboration has become the norm rather than the exception” as artists and arts organisations work with a mix of service providers, businesses, universities, communities and all levels of government to fund their activities and create impact. Current arts and cultural policy and funding in Australia encourage arts organisations to collaborate with communities, non-arts organisations and sectors. Australia’s peak national arts funding and advisory body, the Australia Council for the Arts, describes developing and sustaining cross-portfolio connections and supporting arts and cultural organisations to collaborate across sectors as key strategies for strengthening the country’s cultural and creative industries (Australia Council for the Arts, 2019, 23). Further, it specifies supporting “projects and activities that enhance and strengthen social connections” and community and social cohesion as part of its equity, access and inclusion remit (ibid., 19). In reviewing the objectives of peak national arts bodies around the world, O’Hagan (2016) finds that the goals of the Australia Council for the Arts are those which are most strongly linked to societal

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benefits including identity and social cohesion, experimentation and innovation and economic spill-over effects. These objectives are interrelated: aims related to societal outcomes and social impacts may be realised through strategic partnerships between arts and culture and sectors such as health and education. Recent reports of the arts funding landscape demonstrate the importance and prevalence of collaborative working within Australia’s arts and cultural sector. For example, in The big picture: Public expenditure on artistic, cultural and creative activity in Australia, Fielding and Trembath (2019, 6) note that “[t]he federal government is committing 18.9 per cent less expenditure per capita to culture compared with a decade ago”. Meanwhile, local government and state government expenditure has increased by 11% and 3.9%, respectively (Fielding & Trembath, 2019, 6). Creative Partnerships Australia has also noted the significance of private sector support for arts and culture, with arts organisations now receiving almost as much income from the private sector as from government funding (Jones, 2018, 20). On average, private sector support for Australian arts organisations—through corporate partnerships, sponsorships and donations—comprised 25% of all funding received, compared with 27% received through government funding (ibid.). The increase in private sector and local government support for arts and culture over recent years suggests that arts organisations are increasingly turning to their communities and partnering with local organisations to design and deliver localised impact in place. Creative activities and arts programs enabled and sustained through collaboration are producing myriad social outcomes for the communities participating in them. Collaborations between organisations and individuals from arts and health sectors are supporting communities to engage with wellbeing education (Anthony et al., 2018) and providing avenues for positive representation of self and community (Sonke et al., 2019, 21). Creative partnerships between arts organisations, artists and government departments are supporting regional development and contributing to communitybuilding and social cohesion (Rentschler et al., 2015) and in other cases enhancing the visibility of communities, their identities, issues and challenges (Haviland, 2017, 113). These and numerous other examples of impactful projects globally highlight the prevalence of collaborative artmaking and the importance of this practice for the arts and cultural sector and the communities it serves. Despite these examples of impact and the financial, strategic and policy factors which are encouraging organisations to take collaborative approaches to artmaking, collaborative projects are difficult to manage and sustain, especially in projects which invite participation from community members. As arts organisations work to produce impactful creative work at the intersection of numerous organisational, artistic and non-artistic agendas, it is possible that the objectives and motivations of participating community members could be deprioritised or overlooked. Tendencies to emphasise the positive aspects of collaborative and participatory art can mean that underlying motives, the complexities of the process and organisational and structural influences are diminished or omitted (Alpalhão, 2019, 158; Dewinter et al., 2020, 2; Preston, 2019, 29–30). These underlying motives may include the need to turn to new, non-arts sources of funding or strategic alignment with other organisations and sectors. Rimmer (2020, 298) writes that “community artists and community-based

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arts organisations operate in a landscape fraught with tensions and contradictions, as they negotiate a course between their principles, the requirements of their funders and the expectations of those with whom they work”, not least the individual objectives and expectations of participating community members. Tensions—both fruitful and unproductive—inevitably emerge as multiple agendas intersect. The case of Creative Regions provides an avenue to explore such tensions and how they may be managed to support outcomes that are impactful for collaborators, as well as participating community members.

6.3 Co-creating Stories at Creative Regions Creative Regions is a multidisciplinary arts organisation based in regional Queensland. It collaborates with its community and diverse partners “to produce arts and cultural experiences that are relevant to regional people and that add value to regional communities” (Creative Regions 2020). As a small non-profit and “micro-business” (Eltham & Verhoeven, 2020, 87), the organisation employs fewer than five staff members and depends on collaborations with individuals and other organisations in the region to produce work that is locally impactful. It secures philanthropic and commercial investment, state and local government funding to produce activities, programs and events that are place-based—that is, reflective of their community, and responsive to local issues and needs. Like many very small arts organisations in regional Australian communities (see for example Bartleet et al., 2019; Mackay et al., 2021), Creative Regions’ work is inherently collaborative and intersectoral. The company consults with community members to design projects that are wanted, relevant and meet the needs of particular cohorts or identity groups. Historically, each of its projects have involved a minimum of three organisational collaborators from a range of sectors including arts and culture, education, community services and health and featured different types of partnerships. As the case study presented in Chap. 7 will also demonstrate, these projects have been enabled through a mixture of formal and informal, personal and professional relationships and partnerships that are strategic, financial and/or co-creative. A large proportion of Creative Regions’ projects are participatory and invite community members to shape, inform and co-create new work in collaboration with its staff. Amongst the many ways Creative Regions invites participation, a popular and effective method is to invite specific cohorts and identity groups to use art and creativity to author and represent stories about their lives and experiences. The digital storytelling project Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place and the short play Elephant in the Room are two projects which used collaborative and participatory processes to support self-representation. Developed and delivered in 2016–2017, each project engaged local teenagers, aged 13–17, as participants who worked with Creative Regions to create digital and theatrical narratives that were screened and performed to audiences. Each project aimed to provide young people with an opportunity to represent their own lives and experiences and to enable these to be acknowledged

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and better understood within their community. In both cases, artistic and ethical challenges arose as Creative Regions endeavoured to provide its youth participants with a genuine opportunity for participation and self-representation and ensure project outcomes were meaningful to them, while also meeting the objectives of multiple project partners and stakeholders. Participation supposedly reconfigures traditional structures of representation and voice and enables the emergence of alternate meanings and the non-authoritarian production of knowledge (Jenkins & Carpentier, 2013; Preston, 2019, 26). Subsequently, opportunities to participate seem to promise a more inclusive approach to cultural production and to result in more nuanced and authentic representations of individuals and communities. As participation is invited in particular circumstances and shaped by contextual factors such as funding and organisational aims and parameters, it is useful to think of participation as a spectrum ranging from nominal or surface level participation to “full participation” (Jenkins & Carpentier, 2013, 3) or co-creation (Poulin, 2019, 12–13). Co-creation can be understood as the most intensive or “highest” form of participation in which “[t]he participant shares responsibility for developing the structure and contents of the work in collaboration and in direct dialogue with the artist” (Helguera in Poulin, 2019, 18). The idea of co-creation signals collaborative authorship and suggests a democratic approach to creative content production, while also acknowledging that participatory art is a facilitated, social process which involves overlapping mutual as well as differing purposes (Haviland, 2017, 32). Importantly, co-creation illuminates power relations and provides a tool to consider the agency of organisations and individuals (Preston, 2019, 26; Spurgeon et al., 2009, 275). Applied to the Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place and Elephant in the Room projects, cocreation foregrounds how young people’s participation occurred as part of funded projects in which several organisational factors were implicated in and influential to the processes and outcomes. Neither project reflects the level of shared responsibility or equal power positions which constitute some definitions of “full participation’” (see Jenkins & Carpentier, 2013, 3; Preston, 2019, 26). Yet, co-creation offers a means of framing Creative Regions’ approach to working collaboratively with stakeholders and with youth and challenges experienced. It enables the consideration of processes and principles by which numerous agendas may be managed to achieve meaningful outcomes for all parties.

6.3.1 Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place The digital storytelling project Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place was developed through a partnership between Creative Regions, community service provider UnitingCare Community (UCC), Stepping Black Indigenous Corporation and four state high schools located in the Bundaberg region in Queensland. Funded by UCC, the project was designed to complement the objectives of UCC’s Guwanu Community and School Engagement (CaSE) program which aimed to strengthen relationships

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between local schools and Aboriginal communities, and to increase school attendance. Creative Regions consulted with Indigenous Corporations and elders in the region and worked closely with Stepping Black and UCC’s CaSE program workers to develop a program that could meet myriad aims. These included providing Indigenous students with an accessible and enjoyable form of school-based participation; developing participants’ digital media skills; empowering youth by supporting them to author positive self-representations and encouraging them to feel their stories were valued by their families, teachers and peers. These aims were brought together in a six-week program of digital media and narrative skills development workshops which guided participants to create short, audio-visual stories about the people and experiences that were significant to them and their aspirations for the future. The project concluded with a free, public event at the local council-run theatre where participants’ digital stories were screened to an audience of their family members, school teachers and project stakeholders. Each organisation fulfilled different roles throughout the project: UCC funded Creative Regions to design, manage and deliver the project, and UCC’s CaSE workers provided input over aims and timing; Creative Regions contracted two filmmakers from Stepping Black to co-facilitate digital storytelling workshops with a Creative Regions staff member who had experience in digital storytelling; and the schools provided equipment such as laptops and simple video-making software, booked classrooms as venues and encouraged students to participate. The students’ teacher (one teacher per participating school) and CaSE worker attended every workshop. These people were well known to the students and worked with the facilitators from Creative Regions and Stepping Black encouraging students, brainstorming story ideas and assisting with scriptwriting (Fig. 6.1). As a workshop-based project which supported a minority cohort to use digital technologies to represent their own lives and experiences, in their own voices, Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place reflects the processes that have underpinned successful digital storytelling projects globally (see, for example, Hartley & McWilliam, 2009). Likewise, this project reflects challenges and complexities that are common to collaborative and participatory art projects—such as tensions around ideas of “quality” in projects sustained by participation, and questions of authorship and ownership as facilitators influence the content and style of participants’ narratives (see, for example, Haviland, 2017, 46). In Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place, the digital storytelling processes and some project aims aligned with the ideals of co-creation and associated goals of inclusive representation and empowerment; however, in many ways, the project seemed structurally ill-suited to realising these goals in full. Most obviously, digital storytelling was deployed to fulfil the agendas of organisations, not of the young storytellers, and these organisational goals at times undercut the principles of the co-creative process (Haviland, 2017, 8). The complex web of agendas which underpinned the project, along with stakeholders’ differing ideas about what constituted success, produced barriers for storytellers and some ethically unclear moments for facilitators. The objectives of Creative Regions, UCC, Stepping Black and the four schools were in many ways complementary. All collaborators wanted to provide a genuinely

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Fig. 6.1 Students developed short scripts for their digital stories. Image courtesy of Creative Regions

positive experience for Indigenous high school students and support them to represent themselves in the way that was authentic to them. Yet, during workshop delivery, it became clear that the many aims which the collaborators had agreed to, and which underpinned the project, were not always well aligned. For example, in order to suit the objectives of UCC’s CaSE program and ensure participants would be able to attend, it was important that the digital storytelling workshops were held on school grounds and during school hours. However, the school environment was also a barrier for some students who felt singled out and estranged from their peers as they were excused from normal lessons to attend workshops. While 19 students participated in the first week of workshops, only 12 saw the project through to its end. Teachers reported that one student stopped attending workshops because of comments her friends had made about participating in a special and exclusive program. The objectives of the collaborating organisations sometimes diverged, and these tensions were clearly reflected in the digital stories themselves. For example, CaSE workers and school teachers were conscious of the type of self-representations young people produced and monitored the content of students’ stories to ensure positive tone and message, and that students did not represent themselves or their families in a negative way. In one instance, a teacher edited a student’s script in an attempt to ensure “it did not give the wrong impression” of the student and their family. This was an ethical concern for some facilitators who felt the teacher’s editorial influence was at odds with the idea of self-representation and objectives of youth empowerment.

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Facilitators from Creative Regions and Stepping Black brought artistic objectives to the project and felt pressure to produce creative content of sufficient narrative and audio-visual quality to maintain professional reputations and justify the funding from UCC. The digital stories were to be screened at a public event to an audience which included project stakeholders, and as such, there was pressure to ensure the production of content that was narratively satisfying and enjoyable. While shaping story content and sound and visual quality may have made the digital stories more enjoyable for audiences, some facilitators were concerned that these edits made the stories less authentic or less meaningful to the young people who had created them. It seemed that the stakeholders in the room placed emphasis on different objectives, with some prioritising artistic quality and the telling of the “right” kinds of stories, while other facilitators and stakeholders hoped for “full participation”, providing space for students to represent themselves in whichever ways they wanted to (Fig. 6.2). Far from being a neutral process, then, students’ storytelling and selfrepresentations were mediated by the intersecting objectives and values of their CaSE workers, teachers and workshop facilitators (Dush, 2013; Thumim, 2009). The tensions generated by these intersecting objectives enabled, shaped and limited students’ participation and the stories they created. The digital stories are examples of co-creative media as they are products of collaboration and reflect the influence

Fig. 6.2 Participants selected personal photographs for use in their digital stories. Image courtesy of Creative Regions

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and involvement—enabling and limiting—of organisations. Yet, intersecting organisational objectives were not overall a negative feature of the project. At a base level, the collaboration between the organisations made the project possible, and despite numerous challenges, Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place achieved some highly positive outcomes for participants, facilitators and stakeholders. According to anecdotal evidence and post-project student surveys, these successes included educational and learning outcomes, increased self-confidence and greater representation and acknowledgement of Indigenous people in the community (see Mackay, 2019 for a discussion of project outcomes). The challenges that arose provide an opportunity to identify processes and strategies for supporting participation that is meaningful and less fraught in projects sustained by collaboration. For instance, considering the students’ objectives and what they may hope to learn or achieve through a digital media and narrative skills development program would have helped position participants as equal stakeholders from the outset of the project. While well-meaning, the assumptions made by project stakeholders of what success, value and participant engagement would look like were not always optimal. Including students’ voices and views in initial discussions about the project so that their varying aims and expectations could have been acknowledged, shared, discussed or altered could have resulted in a very different conversation and project, and potentially richer outcomes in terms of self-representation and self-determination for an under-served cohort.

6.3.2 Elephant in the Room While Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place is an example of challenges that can arise in projects underpinned by numerous organisational agendas that have not been shared and agreed from the outset, Elephant in the Room highlights ethical tensions at the intersection of facilitators’ and participants’ objectives within a collaborative project. The short play Elephant in the Room was the outcome of a collaboration between Creative Regions, the local regional Council and youth and family care service provider Churches of Christ in Queensland (CoC). Creative Regions had secured funding from the local council to create a socially engaged theatre production and, through consultation with CoC, determined the production would focus on raising awareness of the most pressing concerns and issues experienced by young people in the community. This broad project brief was refined through consultations with school chaplains, teachers and focus groups with high school drama students who were asked to identify the big issues in their lives. Mental health and the challenge of managing privacy and relationships via networked technologies emerged as critical issues. Over the course of three months, Creative Regions worked with youth participants to author and produce a short play which presented these issues from the perspectives of teenage characters.

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Like Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place, Elephant in the Room was from the outset driven by a mix of tacit and explicit motivations, organisational requirements and aims. These can be summarised as community engagement; participation; social impact; artistic quality and excellence. These aims reflect Creative Regions’ mission and underpin all its projects to a greater or lesser extent; achieving them was also important for meeting the objectives of funders and collaborators. For instance, producing new work which would engage the community and be socially impactful locally was important for justifying Council funding. Nurturing a new strategic relationship through collaborations with CoC provided a means for Creative Regions to meet their social impact agenda and develop new funding avenues for future projects. Participation by community members was also linked to the social impact agenda given the possibility for enabling youth voice and representation. Artistic quality and excellence were important for maintaining organisational reputation in the small community which Creative Regions depended on for support and who expected a certain level of quality and entertainment from the company. The broad organisational aims which drove the genesis, design and development of Elephant in the Room were articulated slightly differently at the project level. The aims of the project were to give voice to the issues and concerns experienced by local youth, in young people’s own voices; provide youth service providers with insight and better understanding of how young people understand and respond to the issues they identify as their priorities; provide a skills development opportunity; meet project costs through ticket sales and engage the community through providing an enjoyable local event. As in Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place, it was sometimes difficult to reconcile all of these aims within the processes of delivering the project. The most obvious friction arose in the process by which Creative Regions and CoC sought to include youth voices and achieve authentic representation of young people’s experiences. While developing Elephant in the Room, these two organisations were collaborating on a separate project which involved digital storytelling workshops with teenagers within CoC’s child protection program. These workshops intended to empower a vulnerable cohort to describe their experiences of foster care and identify and articulate positive experiences and hopes for their futures. Participants’ stories were screened once to an audience of their caregivers and were not made public for child protection purposes. This digital storytelling project was not originally intended to inform the development of the socially engaged theatre production. However, Creative Regions and CoC stakeholders thought Elephant in the Room could offer a more nuanced and varied representation of local young people, their experiences and concerns, by incorporating some of the themes and issues that had been voiced through the digital stories. This was also a decision of convenience given the tight timeframe for delivering the theatre production. However, when CoC stakeholders and Creative Regions staff explained to the digital storytellers that they wanted to give voice to their experiences by incorporating some general themes and issues into a play, a 15-year-old storyteller became angry and said “you can’t just take bits of my story and put them into some play. That’s my story and no one else’s” (Pike et al., 2020). The organisations saw artistic

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and strategic value in selecting fragments of young people’s digital stories for representation in the short play and thought the storytellers may enjoy the opportunity for a more public voice; however, in the storyteller’s view, this was neither a “right” nor helpful avenue for representing their story. In this case, the opportunity for voice that Creative Regions endeavoured to provide was not one that was useful or meaningful to young people whose experiences they sought to represent. This scenario raises distinct concerns about consent, story ownership and the ethics of reusing or recycling creative content that is self-representational. By suggesting they would use the digital stories to craft a representation that fulfilled organisational purposes, the organisations risked reproducing the forms of silencing and oppression that their projects essentially sought to address (Matthews & Sunderland, 2017, 26). In the end, the digital stories were not used as material for Elephant in the Room. Tensions also arose around youth voice, participation and the aim to produce a creative work that provided service providers and stakeholders with new insights into young people’s issues and experiences. Elephant in the Room was based on the perspectives that had emerged through consultation processes and was developed in collaboration with six drama students who had agreed to participate in the script development and public performance. Despite aims around giving voice to youth experiences and providing an opportunity for them to participate in the representation of their perspectives and concerns, it was always important that these voices serve a specific purpose determined by organisations. This was similarly experienced in Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place. A benefit of participatory art is that power relations between those who have traditionally been represented by others—such as youth—and those who have usually spoken for them—such as adults—may be reconfigured or equalised. However, when the collaborating organisations define project structure, aims and outcomes, without input from community members who will participate, participation risks being surface level only and existing power relations are reinforced. In the case of Elephant in the Room, students were encouraged to develop their own characters for the play, write scenes and dialogue and Creative Regions workshopped their writing with them. However, in seeking to fulfil their artistic objectives and ensure the performance was informative to CoC stakeholders and other service providers, Creative Regions privileged their artistic and strategic objectives over those of the students. For instance, Creative Regions determined the focus and messaging of the play in consultation with adult collaborators and stakeholders, rather than this being a participant-directed process. To compensate for this a little, each student wrote and performed a monologue for their character which remained unedited. While the suggestion and hope was that the project would represent young people’s experiences, in their own voices, these voices were heavily mediated by organisational intentions in order to achieve organisational priorities. Elephant in the Room was performed by the six drama students once to a public audience. Those students reported that being involved in the production had been a highly enjoyable skills development experience, and stakeholders from Council and CoC felt their investment in the project had been worthwhile. Anecdotal and post-performance surveys showed that the performance was warmly received, and

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that it had successfully conveyed a strong message “on the dangers of social media” (audience member feedback). Yet, this well-intended comment suggests that, in its attempt to provide clear messaging about a youth issue, the play gave a generalised overview of the complex lives and experiences of the young people the project had sought to give voice to. The play gave voice to a youth issue, which satisfied organisational collaborators, but it seemed less successful in giving local young people a voice on their own terms. This may have limited the project’s potential to be impactful for youth participants, beyond providing a skills development opportunity. Like Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place, Elephant in the Room also fell short of some definitions of co-creative art. The students “took part” in the production, from characterisation and scripting to set design and performance. They also infused the narrative with their own experiences and perspectives. Yet, with reference to Poulin’s (2019, 18) definition of co-creation, they did not participate in the development of the structure or aims of the project and responsibility for the outcomes was not equally shared as all decisions were ultimately determined by Creative Regions. The students participated by informing the content of a creative work within a structure established by an organisation (Poulin, 2019, 18). Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place can be similarly summarised. These limitations do not mean that these projects were unsuccessful—on the contrary, both appeared to result in some highly positive outcomes for participants and stakeholders. However, the challenges of managing multiple stakeholder objectives within participatory projects are worth noting as these significantly shape participation and the opportunities they promise for voice and self-representation.

6.4 Considerations and Emergent Strategies Arts organisations—especially those in the small-to-medium sector, such as Creative Regions—are working in highly collaborative and intersectoral ways to deliver impactful work within their communities. Doing collaborative work is an objective and increasingly expected, as suggested by Australia’s national arts advisory and funding body (see Australia Council for the Arts, 2019), and is vital for organisations like Creative Regions which rely on non-government funding for survival. Yet collaborative arts projects are complex and time-consuming for such organisations to manage as there are a broad array of agendas to negotiate and fulfil. These challenges are compounded within projects which invite participation. Participatory projects sustained by collaboration, such as Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place and Elephant in the Room, produce challenges at ethical, artistic and practical levels. Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place demonstrated that, despite some shared values and the collaborative and consultative approaches taken to identify project aims, tensions were produced as stakeholders approached the project from different frames and positions. Once participants began to produce self-representational stories, the malignment of the numerous project agendas became clear. Elephant in the Room further illuminated challenges which can emerge when not all stakeholders are

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involved in the early conversations around project structure and aims. These challenges became obvious during project delivery as the objectives of stakeholders intersected with the needs and interests which participants had for their narratives. The fact both projects invited personal stories and self-representations from young people makes these complexities and challenges especially visible. Organisations such as Creative Regions are simultaneously responsible to the community members whose participation and stories they invite, as well as the partnering organisations upon which these projects depend for financial, strategic or artistic support. Walker (2019, 46) summarises that arts organisations have the challenge of mediating “the complex and often competing influence and demands of different groups with different stakes and interests”, not least the individual objectives and expectations that participants bring to projects. Yet, as participation is usually invited because of funding received, or in order to fulfil organisational and funding objectives, the aims, intentions and needs of participants can be overlooked. As Matthews and Sunderland (2017, 34) observe, this means “the lines between promoting participation and promoting the appearance of participation can sometimes be very blurred”. Taking a critical look at participation within projects sustained by collaboration helps identify considerations, and strategies arts organisations may deploy to negotiate intersecting agendas and allow the existence of multiple individual and organisational voices in community-based art. There has been much discussion of best practice and ethical considerations in artistic work involving community participants, including oral history and digital storytelling, and applied theatre (see for example Afolabi, 2018; Matthews & Sunderland, 2017; Young, 2017). These efforts have raised considerations with relation to specific art forms, methods and processes and have problematised the participation of community members—particularly those who belong to under-served or minority cohorts—in projects which serve organisational and institutional agendas. For the most part, however, the delivery of arts projects sustained by collaborations, and that meaningfully engage community members as participants and storytellers, rests on the expertise of individual practitioners and has not yet been articulated as a set of principles or considerations. Some general principles and considerations for negotiating multiple agendas in ways that support communities to self-determine the processes and outcomes of arts participation may include determining not only which values and objectives are shared by collaborating organisations, but which differ; prioritising long-term partnerships over short-term deliverables and involving participants as collaborators in the ideation and design of projects and delivery and evaluation or assessment—all of which are discussed in more detail below.

6.4.1 Identify Differing Values and Objectives Identifying shared values between organisations across different sectors is the first step in developing a collaborative project. Yet, the case of Indigenous Stories, Stories

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of Place shows that bringing all partners together and reaching agreement over shared expectations is not always enough. Collaborators bring different personal and professional subjectivities to the room, and these significantly influence project processes and outcomes. These differences are not always self-evident. As a result, having a conversation about where values and expectations might differ is also critical. What does success look like for every stakeholder, including the participants? This needs to be described from the outset with all stakeholders as a more transparent negotiation of how ownership, inclusion, consultation and consent will be achieved during the project (see Pike et al., 2020).

6.4.2 Prioritise Long-Term Partnerships Rather Than Short-Term Deliverables A challenge is that “[c]ollaborations are often reduced to doing something in the least amount of time for the least amount of money” (Jackson, 2020, 34). At the same time, in a climate of reduced funding for arts and culture, arts organisations in Australia and overseas are seeking sustainable relationships with community members and with a range of arts and non-arts organisations. This tension was visible in Elephant in the Room which sought to cement a new partnership with CoC through a one-off project that had an especially short timeframe for delivery. It is possible that complexities experienced in this project could have been ameliorated through a longer-term program. This is a consideration for funding bodies as funding timeframes and budget constraints do not always allow for deep and long-term engagement with communities to build relationships of trust and opportunities for participants to have creative control. Research by O’Sullivan and Huntley (Australia Council for the Arts, 2020) highlights that long-term funding is especially critical for creative projects produced by Australian Indigenous artists and communities. Meaningful and sustained community engagement, including opportunities for involvement and participation, is central to the development and presentation of arts and cultural products and experiences in Aboriginal communities (Australia Council for the Arts, 2020, 61). While many funding bodies and stakeholders expect impact to be immediately visible and quantifiable, program deliverers at the coalface of communities know that relationshipbuilding, capacity-building and meaningful participation are processes that take time to both foster and measure and which do not always fit within funding cycles (Mackay et al., 2021, 12; McCausland, 2019, 69). There is a need for funding bodies to adjust their expectations and shift away from the desire for instant impact and results. Without adequate resourcing, arts organisations and project facilitators may miss opportunities to both create and capture the longer-term impacts of a project. Arts organisations and funding bodies already recognise the value of intensive community engagement and multi-year projects for communities. For small arts

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organisations, multi-year projects support the development of trust, relationshipbuilding and community members’ and organisations’ investment in the project. Longer-term projects can shift the relationship between organisations and community members from transactional to a more meaningful one characterised by mutual understanding and respect. In the examples of Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place and Elephant in the Room, longer timeframes for project design and delivery may have enabled more trust to be built between Creative Regions and youth participants, and for more clarity around shared and diverging agendas and visions between project facilitators and collaborators. Both Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place and Elephant in the Room speak to the value of working towards project outcomes that are long-term, rather than aiming for short-term success. As in much social impact work, impact is not immediately visible and takes time to emerge (see also Mackay et al., 2021; McCausland, 2019). As highlighted in Chap. 3 in the Animating Spaces example, long-term collaboration is preferable (and possible) for small arts organisations who are already embedded in their community or who work from grant to grant, project to project. This makes long-term evaluation of programs possible, enabling better collaboration with and for communities (see the organisations Big hART and Red Ridge1 for examples of the benefits of long-term programming and engagement, as well as the case study presented in Chap. 7). Success may be measurable in one project, but we argue that finding value and impact is about examining a portfolio of work delivered over time and ensuring that we are working for the most optimal benefit of the community, rather than prioritising only the outputs that funders and stakeholders expect in the short term.

6.4.3 Involve Participants as Collaborators One of the clearest limitations in the two cases presented here is that the interests, needs and expectations of each project’s youth participants were not determined prior to project delivery. To a large extent, in Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place, the opportunity to participate, to share a story and represent themselves, was treated as a gift to young people (Alpalhão, 2019, 166)—an opportunity. This approach meant that the intentions that youth participants might have had for their involvement were overlooked. In Elephant in the Room, the six participants were willing volunteers, but they had limited control over the consolidated narrative that was produced, and their voices and objectives were secondary to those of the organisational partners. Greater 1

The Australian arts and social impact organisation Big hART is an example of a small arts company which prioritises multi-year programming in order to build genuine relationships and foster lasting impact in communities. Red Ridge Interior Queensland is another small Australian organisation which has developed long-term programs to address entrenched social challenges in their community. The work of these organisations highlights the value of long-term projects for collaborating with communities, as well as the fact that projects with lasting legacy cannot be properly evaluated in the short term.

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attention to the ideals of co-creation—through ceding more control over project design and involving participants in decision-making processes—could make such projects authentically meaningful for participants and therefore more impactful to the partnering organisations who aimed to empower and support them. When all project stakeholders (including participants) are not included and represented equally from the beginning of a project, existing power relations are maintained rather than disrupted. At a project level, this means collaborating organisations shape projects to ensure best outcomes for their organisations, and this limits the scope for surprising or unexpected benefits and outcomes to occur for participants. Community members and participants are the best placed to identify what their needs are, and their voices should be centred into project design. Participants are also best placed to identify what success looks like for their community or cohort. Approaches to impact assessment, such as participatory evaluation (Badham, 2019) referred to in Chap. 7, implemented at the start of projects, can include the voices of community members in the identification of indicators of progress and success. Such approaches can support participants’ ownership and control in the projects designed to benefit them from beginning to end.

6.5 Conclusion Collaboration is a strong and important feature of arts and cultural production in Australia. Collaborative art supports numerous agendas within arts organisations, and many of Australia’s national objectives for arts and culture through helping increase access to the arts for diverse audiences and creating new funding streams, thereby contributing to the sustainability of organisations and their impact in communities. Nonetheless, projects where multiple organisational agendas exist can produce challenges for arts organisations and their participating communities. It is important to develop clear ways of navigating these to ensure work is impactful not only at organisational levels, but for all stakeholders including participants whose stories and communities are ultimately at stake. Collaborations between arts, culture and creativity and diverse, non-arts organisations and sectors can enable organisations to meet innovation agendas as unique collaborations result in distinctive work. For arts organisations such as Creative Regions which produce creative work that is locally impactful within communities, places and locales, creative partnerships with local and regional organisations and stakeholders from within and outside the arts sector can expand all organisations’ potential for impact. While this chapter has explored challenges that can emerge in arts projects sustained by the funding and goals of multiple stakeholders, the next chapter analyses a creative partnership where collaboration between multiple arts and non-arts stakeholders was pivotal to impact and success. Acknowledgements Mackay was a producer at Creative Regions in 2015–2017 and involved in the development and delivery of the community-based arts projects described. The authors would

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like to acknowledge Creative Regions and its staff, as well as the young people who participated in these projects and so generously shared their stories and experiences.

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Young, S. (2017). The ethics of the representation of the real people and their stories in verbatim theatre. In E. O’Toole, A. Pelegrí Kristic, & S. Young (Eds.), Ethical exchanges in translation, adaptation and dramaturgy (pp. 21–42). Brill Rodopi.

Chapter 7

Creative Partnerships for Social Impact: Addressing Domestic Violence in Regional Queensland

Abstract This chapter takes the verbatim theatre production It All Begins With Love as a case study to examine how partnerships between an arts organisation and community and health service providers enabled this project to achieve social impact in regional Queensland. A collaboration between a social-impact arts organisation and numerous local and regional community service providers, this production sought to raise awareness of and stimulate discussion about domestic and family violence in non-metropolitan communities throughout Queensland. A formal evaluation of the production conducted by Central Queensland University (CQUniversity) concluded that It All Begins With Love raised social consciousness of domestic violence amongst audience members through authentic narrative and the creation of a safe space for the issue to be demystified and explored. In this chapter we explore the local networks and collaborative partnerships which underpinned the development and delivery of It All Begins With Love. We argue that the social embeddedness of the arts organisation and its relationships with key individuals and organisations supported the project’s potential to achieve these public health outcomes within communities. It All Begins With Love is taken in this chapter as an example of effective partnerships between arts and non-arts organisations to develop a creative work which expanded all stakeholders’ potential for achieving social impact within communities.

7.1 Introduction This chapter takes the verbatim theatre production It All Begins With Love as a case study to examine how partnerships between an arts organisation and community and health service providers enabled this project to achieve social impact in regional Queensland. A collaboration between social-impact arts organisation Creative Regions and numerous local and regional community service providers, this production sought to raise awareness of and stimulate discussion about domestic and family violence in non-metropolitan communities throughout Queensland. A formal evaluation of the production conducted by Central Queensland University (CQUniversity) concluded that It All Begins With Love raised social consciousness of domestic violence amongst audience members through authentic narrative and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Gattenhof et al., The Social Impact of Creative Arts in Australian Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7357-3_7

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the creation of a safe space for the issue to be demystified and explored (Madsen, 2016, 2017). In this chapter, we explore the local networks and collaborative partnerships which underpinned the development and delivery of It All Begins With Love and in particular the partnership between Creative Regions, UnitingCare Community (UCC) and CQUniversity. We argue that the social embeddedness of the arts organisation and its relationships with key individuals and organisations supported the project’s potential to achieve these public health outcomes within communities. It All Begins With Love is taken in this chapter as an example of effective partnerships between arts and non-arts organisations to develop a creative work which expanded all stakeholders’ potential for achieving social impact within communities. Throughout Australia’s urban, rural, regional and remote communities, creative practitioners, local governments, health workers and service providers are embracing arts and culture as a critical sector in developing and sustaining healthy and inclusive communities. Connections between arts and culture and diverse policy areas including health and regional development have been visible in Australia’s arts and cultural environment since the 1970s, reflected in the rich fields of practice termed community art, socially engaged art and community cultural development (Badham, 2010, 2013; Correa, 2007; Wreford, 2016). Inherently interdisciplinary, multi-art form and often politically motivated, this work is defined by its intention to foster positive social change and involves collaborative partnerships across and beyond the arts and cultural sector within communities. Laaksonen (2012) uses the term “creative intersections” to encompass a spectrum of interactive collaborations between arts and non-arts sectors and stakeholders, including financial and strategic, and casual and intentional collaborations. The terms “partnership” and “collaboration” highlight the intentional, strategic and co-creative relationship between several organisations to develop and deliver It All Begins With Love. In rural, regional and remote areas, the social embeddedness and collaborative nature of arts and culture has been noted as a key feature of communities, where creative activity is “enmeshed in local social networks and expectations” (Mayes, 2010, 5) and characterised by “networks and flows of people, information and creative production” (Duxbury, 2020, 3). Local arts and cultural activity in rural and remote communities is entwined with community development and identity and valued for its role in enhancing social cohesion, wellbeing and resilience (Bartleet et al., 2019; Duxbury, 2020), while collaboration and partnerships between arts organisations and services, businesses and agencies outside of the local arts and cultural ecology can be a key strength of regions, towns and communities (see for example Bartleet et al., 2019, 176). The development and delivery of It All Begins With Love reflect these social, embedded and collaborative characteristics. The production emerged and was sustained through individual relationships, local networks and the financial commitment and strategic involvement of numerous partners. These included the arts organisation Creative Regions, local government, the state government of Queensland, CQUniversity, non-profit health and community service providers such as Relationships Australia, Access Community Services Limited, UCC and cultural and community venues in towns and cities throughout regional Queensland. Cross-sector projects that centre arts and culture and intend

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social impacts are often initiated by the arts and cultural organisation involved (BOP Consulting, 2018, 2019; Laaksonen, 2012), and the arts can be the “connector” between diverse cohorts and sectors of communities. Nonetheless, the delivery and sustainability of such projects often hinge on the involvement of non-arts partners (see for example Bartleet et al., 2019, 176), and the nature of the collaborations can define project outcomes and success. In the case of It All Begins With Love, Creative Regions seeded the idea for a theatre project which responded explicitly to a community challenge, and the organisation leveraged its community relationships and knowledge to secure the financial, strategic and co-creative partnerships that would make the project possible and impactful. This chapter focuses its discussion on two key partnerships Creative Regions fostered which were critical to the project’s impact. The first is the collaborative partnership with UCC which supported It All Begins With Love to achieve social and public health outcomes through their close involvement in script development and the tour of the production through regional communities; the second is the evaluation partnership with CQUniversity, which had long-term impacts for Creative Regions through expanding the organisation’s capacity to define, measure and articulate the impact of its work.

7.2 Connecting the Arts with Public Health and Community Services: Creative Regions and UCC Creative Regions is a small, non-profit arts organisation based in the regional coastal city of Bundaberg, Queensland. The company’s core business is socially engaged art, and it collaborates with rural, regional and remote communities throughout central Queensland to design and deliver arts activities and events that reflect the interests and are responsive to the needs of those communities. Creative Regions was founded in 2008 (Creative Regions, 2020). As mentioned in Chap. 6, the organisation has historically employed between two and four full-time staff members, and it secures philanthropic, state and local government funding and commercial investment to produce creative and cultural experiences across a range of art forms. All its work involves collaboration, and its diverse partners have included local council, schools, urban-based arts companies, tourism agencies, Aboriginal corporations and some of Australia’s largest charities and service providers. Its board of directors represents diverse sectors of the Bundaberg community including health, education, community services and tourism. When Creative Regions’ artistic team floated their intent to develop a theatre project that responded to a community challenge, board members from health and community service sectors identified domestic and family violence as the single most intractable, social and public health issue Bundaberg was facing at that time. One board member in particular was central to brokering connections between Creative Regions and the local domestic and family violence interagency committee which

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comprised of UCC and all health, care, justice and community services in Bundaberg. UCC is one of Australia’s largest charities and offers community services in almost 500 cities and towns across Queensland and the Northern Territory, which are the two states ranking highest on Australia’s disadvantage index (UnitingCare Community, 2020). The partnership UCC formed with Creative Regions was simultaneously financial, in the form of monetary and in-kind investment in the project, strategic and co-creative, in the sense that UCC was involved as a collaborator in project development and delivery (Lewandowska, 2015, 37). For Creative Regions, such a partnership with UCC was essential financially, but also strategically and artistically. As outlined in Chap. 6, in a climate of arts funding austerity, diverse sources of income are imperative and sustained, and longterm partnerships with other organisations are desirable over short-term funding and sponsorship. Further, in rural, regional and remote areas, interlinkages between creative and cultural initiatives and other social and economic sectors are important due to the small size of communities and limited human and other resources (Duxbury, 2020, 11). From an artistic and strategic perspective, a partnership with UCC expanded Creative Regions’ capacity to achieve its remit of developing arts and cultural experiences that were socially impactful through informing the creation of relevant, meaningful work that responded to a complex issue in a careful, considered and ethical way. Sonke et al. (2018, 405) note that partnerships and collaborations are a common characteristic of impactful arts-based health communication programs. The involvement of health organisations enables arts organisations to reach the right audiences and for those audiences to view the arts intervention as credible (Sonke et al., 2018, 405). The significance of personal networks and individual connections for realising projects is reflected in much socially impactful creative work undertaken in regional and urban communities. There is a growing body of evidence for the complementary role of arts and culture in the field of health, and projects which employ arts practices to advance the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities are prevalent globally; yet, thus far in Australia such work is mostly ad-hoc, exhibited through one-off projects rather than sustained programs or cross-sector partnerships. Further, the arts and cultural component of projects is often an add-on or side feature, rather than the central and leading component in initiatives aiming to advance health and wellbeing. These ideas are supported by White (2016, 50), who observes that arts interventions in health have historically been undertaken with specific cohorts, individuals and at local community levels and finds that this work is essentially relationship-based. Arts Council England’s three-year Great Places Scheme also noted the centrality of personal relationships for enabling sustainable cross-sector collaborations between arts and health, finding that such collaborations were vulnerable to personnel changes (BOP Consulting, 2019, 15). As already mentioned, for Creative Regions, one key, well-positioned board member who straddled community development, the arts, and health and community services were critical for advocating for the role of arts and culture in public health communication and for igniting the relationship between the arts organisation and UCC.

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In regional communities such as Bundaberg and for organisations such as Creative Regions with small staff and lean budgets, relationship-based working is essential. Creative production is almost impossible without sharing resources such as knowledge, venues and contact lists, familiarity with community capacities and strengths and good working relationships with other organisations. Informal and formal networking are an inherent part of artistic processes and critical for achieving social impact within communities (Bartleet et al., 2019, 7; Mayes, 2010; Skippington, 2016, 139; Skippington & Davis, 2016, 224). Janamohanan’s (2020, 238) observations of the intersection between art and social engagement can be applied to the Bundaberg community: all art is necessarily socially engaged because creative practitioners are not separate from their surroundings, and they depend on organisations and individuals within their own communities for producing creative work. The development of It All Begins With Love can be described as “a cultural ecosystem in operation: a developing set of interconnections and interdependencies” (Gross & Wilson, 2020, 333) between organisations, individuals, local businesses and authorities within and beyond the arts and cultural ecology. In Creative Regions’ case, lines between personal and professional relationships with members of the community were blurred, with staff, board members and their family members contributing knowledge, skills and brokering webs of connection with service providers throughout the community. “[I]ntimate relationships, based on shared values and experiences, and navigated within personal and not professional boundaries”, are a vital factor in creative production and success (Janamohanan, 2020, 243). In addition to shared values, good timing was essential for the successful partnership between Creative Regions and UCC, and to the overall success of the production. The arts organisation was introduced to the community services organisation at a time when domestic and family violence was a dominant issue across regional communities in Australia and attracting significant resourcing. While it has always been Creative Regions’ mission to identify and respond to current and pressing community challenges, connecting with an organisation that was resourced and ready to trial a new, arts-led approach to addressing a high-priority issue simultaneously demonstrates good timing, good networking and a high level of responsiveness on the part of both organisations. It All Begins With Love responded to the need to raise community awareness of domestic and family violence, support constructive, community-wide conversations about its prevention and communicate key information. Developed from interviews and personal narratives, verbatim theatre represents the testimonies of real people (Anderson & Wilkinson, 2007, 154; Young, 2017, 22) and often includes a forum or talk-back component during which audience members can ask questions and engage deeply with the issues presented. The form was appropriate as a means of meeting the needs of UCC and the artistic visions of Creative Regions. Beyond its financial support for the project, UCC contributed to the development of the script through providing “access” to the personal narratives which informed it. Creative Regions worked with service providers and a local media professional to interview 12 current clients of providers including UCC, Relationships Australia and the Department of Justice. All interviewees self-nominated to be interviewed for the project and

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were either victims or perpetrators of domestic violence. As a further example of the personal and professional relationships which underpinned the project, the media professional who led interview facilitation was a relative of a Creative Regions board member and a White Ribbon Ambassador.

7.2.1 Ethical Complexities and the Effect of Authenticity From the outset, then, the processes which underpinned the development of It All Begins With Love differ somewhat from the processes of developing and delivering the two projects Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place and Elephant in the Room which were analysed in the previous chapter and which also involved service providing organisations as funders and stakeholders; however, as discussed in Chap. 6. the youth participants and non-arts organisations remained arms-length from some key decision-making processes. For instance, youth participants did not have input in the design or objectives of either project. The Indigenous Stories project was offered to youth as an opportunity or “gift” that would benefit them, whereas interviewees for It All Begins With Love were able to opt-in, choosing to share their experiences for inclusion in the theatre production. For the short play Elephant in the Room, the community care organisation Churches of Christ was a strategic stakeholder but not a co-creative partner in the way Lewandowska (2015, 37) describes, as they did not contribute to project processes or artistic decision-making. To develop It All Begins With Love, on the other hand, UCC was positioned as a full partner whose input shaped the project aims and processes from the outset, which was significant for managing the ethical complexities that arose and achieving maximum impact for all stakeholders. It needs to be noted that It All Begins With Love was a project with a much larger budget and significantly longer development period than Indigenous Stories, Stories of Place and Elephant in the Room, which meant the arts organisation could prioritise lengthy processes of relationship-building and co-creating with partnering organisations. The critical role that UCC played at all stages of It All Begins With Love—from idea generation through to development, script editing and then touring and production— further highlights the point made in Chap. 6: that impact is not an instant deliverable and funding bodies must allow time for the lengthy processes required to create and evaluate it. Based on the interview transcripts, Creative Regions Co-Director and playwright Rod Ainsworth developed a 35-min script representing the experiences of five female characters. The involvement of UCC and other service providers enabled Creative Regions to navigate the ethical and moral complexities of artistically representing stories based on the testimonies of vulnerable people. As an initial step, a Memorandum of Understanding detailing how Creative Regions would use interview material was developed, and a continuous dialogue between service providers and the arts organisation was maintained to keep abreast of potential and arising issues associated with the interviews. Having a regular check-in process, sharing drafts

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of the script with UCC, performing readings of developing scenes in front of interagency committee members and receiving their professional feedback were strategies Creative Regions used to ensure interviewees’ experiences were represented appropriately and with care. Young (2017, 27) notes “a tension between being faithful to … interviewees and making good drama”. For Creative Regions and the playwright, having artistic decision-making and personal assumptions cross-checked by professionals dedicated to the protection and care of the vulnerable interviewees helped manage ethical challenges the company had not previously encountered. There is some debate about the usefulness as well as problems associated with universalising individuals’ experiences in verbatim theatre, versus representing— as closely as possible—the individual, subjective experience through retaining the subject’s use of language, their inflections and mannerisms (see for example Anderson & Wilkinson, 2007; Duggan, 2013, 155; Halba & Young, 2014, 109). Halba and Young (2014, 109–111) suggest that when creating theatre from interviews with vulnerable subjects ethical complexities may be managed through imitation of the subject in order to respect the sufferer, their voice and the situated and specific nature of their experience. To some extent, this was a strategy Creative Regions employed in retaining the verbatim transcripts within the script. Characters were developed to reflect but not imitate interviewees and portions of transcripts were curated or massaged to form a narrative; however, the victims’ own words were retained. The verbatim script meant that the real, unedited words of victims comprised of the play, including local slang and expletives, which added to the experience of authenticity for the regional audience members.

7.3 The Production It All Begins With Love was first staged in Bundaberg in 2014 and toured to 17 communities across rural and regional Queensland throughout October and November 2015. In each community, the 35-min performance was introduced as a verbatim play, which meant that the stories and words performed were taken from real people who had experienced and survived domestic and family violence. The performance was followed by five minutes of reflection time, and then a 30-min question and answer session facilitated by a qualified counsellor from the local UCC office or from another domestic and family violence service provider such as Relationships Australia. Amongst the aims of the production and tour were the intention to demystify domestic and family violence in Queensland communities; challenge some commonly held false perceptions identified by UCC, such as the idea that violence is only physical; and create an environment for productive dialogue where audience members’ understanding of the issue could be deepened and their questions could be addressed by professionals. Across the 17 communities which hosted the production, audience numbers for each performance ranged from 30 to 300 (Madsen, 2016). The largest audience cohorts comprised of high school students attending the production with their teachers as part of their school day.

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UCC’s involvement throughout the tour influenced features of the production and its public reception. For instance, UCC had offices in many of the regional cities and towns on the tour list and was able to promote the production through their local networks of service providers and clients which likely enabled Creative Regions to reach new audiences, such as teachers and students from local senior schools. Creative Regions connected with arts and cultural organisations throughout the state for promotion of the production and contracted a PR company to facilitate promotion within specific localities around the state. However, reaching certain cohorts, including school students, service providers and members of the public who may not usually attend a theatre production, required a more targeted approach and reliance on personal and professional networks which UCC was able to support. Sonke et al. (2018, 405) note that the most effective arts-based health communication programs are highly structured. That is, the programs employ multichannel strategies for delivering key messages and involve multidisciplinary partnership and collaboration, and stakeholders from public health provide program oversight. In the evaluation report for It All Begins With Love, Madsen (2016, 11) noted the importance of the strong presence of service providers for influencing the production’s ability to raise social consciousness around domestic violence. They state that “[w]ays of opening up access to a broader audience may lie in the way socially engaged theatre works in conjunction with other community-based interventions and strategies … extensive work by local services supported the production prior to and at the time of the performance” (Madsen, 2016, 11). In the town of Maryborough, for instance, service providers including the Domestic and Family Violence and Sexual Assault Prevention program set up information tables with pamphlets. This sort of information sharing augmented the domestic violence awareness messaging embedded in the performance and ensuing question and answer session and, as Madsen (2016) suggests, likely enhanced the production’s success as an agent for change. It also demonstrates the multifaceted and influential role of intersectoral collaboration in social impact art, where the involvement of service providers at every stage of project development—from ideation to production—supports the way messaging is delivered and received. Creative Regions and UCC had quite different reasons for wanting to produce and tour a theatre production, since the former is an arts organisation and the latter a community care and service provider. However, a close and collaborative relationship involving each partner sharing from the outset their expectations about what the project wanted to achieve and maintaining this dialogue and collaborative working throughout all phases of the project were key to these organisations being able to build upon each other’s strengths and achieve shared impact. Timing significantly influenced the reception of the production as it toured throughout regional Queensland in 2015. In evaluating the impact of It All Begins With Love on raising social consciousness, Madsen (2016, 15) observes although not planned when the original interviews were undertaken, the timing of the production, coinciding with major national and state reports and political and media attention on domestic violence, meant the production was able to tap into an increasing social awareness of this issue. Again, this contributed to the sense of authenticity and credibility recognised by the audience.

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In this sense, promotion of It All Begins With Love was enabled in both planned and unplanned ways, attracting the attention of local media, educators, service providers and community members in the 17 tour locations and nationally. The recent domestic violence-related death of a community member meant that domestic and family violence was an especially raw topic during the Maryborough performance, and this influenced the production’s reception in that town. Numerous audience members became distressed during the performance and left the hall to speak with friends and qualified counsellors who were available at every production to support audience members during and after the performance. Early readings of the script had highlighted to Creative Regions that audience members were likely to be strongly impacted by the verbatim script and the physicality of the performance, and UCC’s presence at every production was critical for ensuring audience members’ safety. In addition to duty of care to audience members, the involvement of counsellors and other service providers in this way enabled UCC and other organisations to connect with their communities in new ways. Part of the value of arts programs for service providers is that they provide different, more accessible spaces for discussion of challenging issues. For instance, Sonke and Lee (2015, 106) find that the arts create a bridge between health service providers and service users while Fancourt and Finn (2019, 232) note “[a]rtists can act as mediators between public health professionals and members of the public”. In the case of It All Begins With Love, the process in which multiple service providers collaborated and co-created from the outset to respond to a shared community issue proved critical. By articulating the goals of each organisation, a creative arts production could serve as a common vehicle to support these service providers to increase their public presence in their own communities and contribute to residents’ awareness about what professional assistance and resources were available.

7.4 Evaluation: Creative Regions and CQUniversity CQUniversity is Australia’s largest non-metropolitan university, comprising campuses in seven regional Queensland cities and towns, including Bundaberg. In 2012, Creative Regions engaged Dr Wendy Madsen, a senior lecturer in health promotion at CQUniversity, to evaluate the impact their creative recovery program Afloat had on community resilience (see Madsen et al., 2015). For Creative Regions, evaluation of its major projects was becoming increasingly necessary as a means to demonstrate the outcomes and impacts of its programming to funding bodies and financial stakeholders such as UCC and thus secure funding for future projects. As noted in Hancox et al. (2020, 168), university-led evaluation would have enabled a level of rigour and objectivity that Creative Regions would not have otherwise achieved. Subsequently, in 2015, prior to the tour of It All Begins With Love, Creative Regions once again engaged Madsen as project evaluator. Madsen conducted a retrospective study of the 2014 production in Bundaberg, and the data collected were used

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to refine the objectives of the evaluation of the state-wide tour in 2015 (Madsen, 2016, 2). The evaluation sought “to investigate how the arts can be used to raise social consciousness around a difficult social issue, specifically the short-term impact of the production in raising social consciousness of DFV [domestic and family violence]” (Madsen, 2017, 181). It concluded that It All Begins With Love “evoked strong reactions within its audiences such that some members changed their perceptions and understanding of domestic violence and in some cases changed their behaviours and behavioural intentions” (Madsen, 2016, 15). The emotional engagement created through the credibility of the narrative and realistic characters along with creation of a “safe space” for audience members’ post-performance reflection and dialogue, were cited as the key ingredients to It All Begins With Love’s effectiveness (Madsen, 2017). These findings are supported by a growing body of evidence that supports the use of art, culture and creativity as a means to increase a community’s awareness of public health issues and influence behaviours and attitudes (see for example Fancourt, 2017; Fancourt & Finn, 2019; Heard et al., 2020; Sonke & Lee, 2015; Sonke et al., 2018). Sonke and Lee (2015, 108) state that arts and culture offer some of the most effective tools for communicating relevant health information and affecting social change. Arts and culture, including visual and performing arts, creative media, music and dance, can humanise and give meaning to abstract or complex social issues and health concerns; enable exploration of sensitive topics through reducing stigma, building solidarity and trust, and facilitating dialogue; and relay information in ways that are accessible and interpretable across cultural, linguistic or educational divides (AllParty Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing, 2017; Fancourt, 2017; Fancourt & Finn, 2019; Sonke & Lee, 2015; Sonke et al., 2018). Madsen travelled to regional Queensland communities with the production crew in order to attend performances and collect data. They describe the evaluation process as collaborative and dialogic: Throughout the evaluation, I worked in collaboration with a project team, consisting of the playwright/director, a representative from the funding agency and an actor from the production. All members contributed to the decision-making related to the design although I undertook the primary role in the data collection, analysis and writing the final report. (Madsen, 2017, 184)

In this sense, artists and stakeholders were involved to some degree in the conversation and could use the knowledge gained to inform ensuing performances and future projects (Badham, 2019, 211). An example of this is the decision to include five minutes of reflection time between the performance and the question and answer session—a decision made based on Madsen’s ethnographic observations and collection of audience feedback, in addition to the observations of the director and UCC facilitator (Madsen, 2016, 8). Madsen’s presence at multiple performances and the ongoing cycle of data gathering and feedback enhanced the usefulness of the evaluation for Creative Regions. Beyond merely a final report which the company could deliver to stakeholders at the end of the tour, the evaluation process enabled a productive conversation which actively shaped the theatre production and its impact on

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audiences. The nature of this relationship was dialogic and participatory, enabling a continuous cycle of improvement (Badham, 2019, 11; Gattenhof, 2017, 3; Hancox et al., 2020, 168). In addition to meeting stakeholder and funding reporting requirements for It All Begins With Love, it was important to Creative Regions to upskill and become more proficient in data collection and self-evaluation. Small organisations such as Creative Regions lack the resources for external evaluation of all projects. Post-project evaluation is rarely an inclusion in project budgets, and data collection is often ad hoc and inconsistent. Given the increased emphasis on impact assessment and the scarcity of arts funding, it was important to build team capacity in designing appropriate evaluation frames and efficient methods for capturing data to demonstrate organisational professionalism and impact. Hence, an evaluation partnership—rather than solely an evaluation of one project—was what the organisation sought from CQUniversity. Madsen’s evaluation of It All Begins With Love involved a level of mentorship, wherein Creative Regions staff were involved in the processes and guided to conceptualise and develop frames for impact assessment and tools for data collection that they could use themselves in projects without an external evaluator. In this way, the evaluation relationship had value to Creative Regions beyond the current project as learnings could be applied to future projects. As detailed in Hancox et al. (2020), in 2017, Creative Regions embedded evaluation centrally into its business plan and formalised a more consistent and sustained evaluation partnership with CQUniversity.

7.5 Conclusion The feature of It All Begins With Love that most critically influenced the production’s capacity for success was the cross-disciplinary nature of the project. It is an example of a genuine collaboration between various organisations which provide support services for victims of domestic and family violence, state and local government, arts funding bodies and an arts company. The success of the collaboration lies in how individual goals were shared from the outset, and a continual dialogue between partners was sustained throughout the life of the project. Leveraging important local relationships provided Creative Regions with “an opportunity to expand the social justice agenda” (Haviland, 2017, 111) within and beyond its own community. For instance, informal and formal networks, connections and relationships within the Bundaberg community supported the ideation and development of the production in a way that could not have been as productively possible across multiple communities by one or two organisations alone. Meanwhile, UCC’s network of providers across Queensland supported the production during the tour. Such networks and collaborative relationships were critical for delivering localised impact in place: UCC’s knowledge of their communities helped reach new audiences and also support these audiences as they engaged with subject matter and in post-performance conversations that they

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may have found confronting. By developing an evaluation partnership with CQUniversity rather than commissioning a project evaluation, the process supported an ongoing cycle of improvement for the duration of the production tour. This approach positioned Creative Regions staff and project stakeholders as co-researchers who could help define what success and impact “looked” like in this project and in these communities. The value of such an approach for arts organisations is further demonstrated in the next chapter which discusses the development of a learning community through impact assessment in order to activate organisational change. Acknowledgements Mackay was a staff member of Creative Regions from 2015–2017. The authors would like to acknowledge Creative Regions staff, and particularly former Co-Director Rod Ainsworth, for their time and our conversations which valuably informed the discussions in this chapter.

References All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing. (2017). Creative health: The arts for health and wellbeing. https://www.culturehealthandwellbeing.org.uk/appg-inquiry/. Accessed February 11, 2021 Anderson, M., & Wilkinson, L. (2007). A resurgence of Verbatim theatre: Authenticity, empathy and transformation. Australasian Drama Studies, 50, 153–169. Badham, M. (2010). Legitimation: The case for ‘socially engaged arts’: Navigating art history, cultural development and arts funding narratives. Local-Global: Identity Security Community, 7, 84–99. Badham, M. (2013). The turn to community: Exploring the political and relational in the arts. Journal of Arts & Communities, 5, 2–3. Badham, M. (2019). Spectres of evaluation: Indeterminacy and the negotiation of value(s) in socially engaged art. In C. Poulin, M. Preston, & S. Airaud (Eds.), Co-creation practices (pp. 205–217). CAC Brétigny. Bartleet, B., Sunderland, N., O’Sullivan, S., & Woodland, S. (2019). Creative Barkly: Sustaining the arts and creative sector in remote Australia. Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre, Griffith University. BOP Consulting. (2018). Arts Council England and Heritage Lottery Fund great place programme evaluation (England): Year one report. https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding-finder/greatplace-scheme. Accessed February 11, 2021 BOP Consulting. (2019). Arts Council England and Heritage Lottery Fund great place programme evaluation. https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding-finder/great-place-scheme. Accessed February 11, 2021 Correa, L. (2007). Community cultural development in the Australian context. Global Media Journal, 1. https://www.hca.westernsydney.edu.au/gmjau/archive/iss1_2007/pdf/HC_FINAL_ Correia%20edited_non-peer.pdf. Creative Regions. (2020). About us. https://www.creativeregions.com.au/about. Accessed February 11, 2021 Duggan, P. (2013). Others, spectatorship, and the ethics of verbatim theatre. New Theatre Quarterly, 29, 146–158. Duxbury, N. (2020). Cultural and creative work in rural and remote areas: An emerging international conversation. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632. 2020.1837788.

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Fancourt, D. (2017). Arts in health: Designing and researching interventions. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198792079.001.001. Fancourt, D., & Finn, S. (2019). What is the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being? A scoping review. World Health Organisation. http://www.euro.who.int/en/pub lications/abstracts/what-is-the-evidence-on-the-role-of-the-arts-in-improving-health-and-wellbeing-a-scoping-review-2019. Gattenhof, S. (2017). Measuring impact models for evaluation in the Australian arts and culture landscape. Palgrave Macmillan. Gross, J., & Wilson, N. (2020). Cultural democracy: An ecological and capabilities approach. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 26, 328–343. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2018. 1538363 Halba, H., & Young, S. (2014). Theatre as an artistic intervention in post-trauma situations: Hush: A verbatim play about family violence. In H. Barnes & M.-H. Coetzee (Eds.), Applied drama/theatre as social intervention in conflict and post-conflict contexts (pp. 103–154). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Hancox, D., Flew, T., Mackay, S., & Wang, Y. (2020). Universities and regional creative economies. In A. Van Luyn & E. de la Fuente (Eds.), Regional cultures, economies, and creativity: Innovating through place in Australia and beyond (pp. 159–172). Routledge. Haviland, M. (2017). Side by side? Community art and the challenge of co-creativity. Routledge. Heard, E., Mutch, A., & Fitzgerald, L. (2020). Using applied theater in primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention of intimate partner violence: A systematic review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 21, 138–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524838017750157 Janamohanan, S. (2020). Managing cultural activism: A case study of Buku Jalanan of Malaysia. In W. J. Byrnes & A. Brki´c (Eds.), The Routledge companion to art management (pp. 234–248). Routledge. Laaksonen, A. (2012). Creative intersections: Partnerships between the arts, cultural and other sectors. http://www.ifacca.org/topic/creative-intersections/. Accessed February 11, 2021 Lewandowska, K. (2015). From sponsorship to partnership in arts and business relations. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 45, 33–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/10632921. 2014.964818 Madsen, W. (2016). It All Begins With Love: Evaluation report. http://www.creativeregions.com. au/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IABWL-evaluation-report.pdf. Accessed February 11, 2021 Madsen, W. (2017). Raising social consciousness through verbatim theatre: A realist evaluation. Arts & Health, 10, 181–194. https://doi.org/10.1080/17533015.2017.1354898 Madsen, W., Chesham, M., & Pisani, S. (2015). Keeping afloat after the floods: Engaged evaluation of a school-based arts project to promote recovery. In W. Madsen, L. Costigan, & S. McNicol (Eds.), Community resilience, universities and engaged research for today’s world (pp. 44–54). Palgrave Pivot. Mayes, R. (2010). Doing cultural work: Local postcard production and place identity in a rural shire. Journal of Rural Studies, 26, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2009.06.002 Skippington, P. (2016). Harnessing the bohemian: Artists as innovation partners in rural & remote communities. Australian National University Press. Skippington, P. A., & Davis, D. F. (2016). Arts-based community development: Rural remote realities and challenges. Rural Society, 25, 222–239. https://doi.org/10.1080/10371656.2016.125 5477 Sonke, J., & Lee, J. B. (2015). Arts for health in community settings: Promising practices for using the arts to enhance wellness, access to healthcare, and health literacy. In S. Clift & P. M. Camic (Eds.), Oxford textbook of creative arts, health, and wellbeing: International perspectives on practice, policy and research (pp. 103–111). Oxford University Press. Sonke, J., Pesata, V., Nakazibwe, V., Ssenyonjo, J., Lloyd, R., Espino, D., Nieves, M., Khandakji, S., Hahn, P., & Kerrigan, M. (2018). The arts and health communication in Uganda: A light under the table. Health Communication, 33, 401–408. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2016.1266743 UnitingCare Community. (2020). Advocacy. https://unitingcare.org.au/. Accessed April 26, 2021

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White, M. (2016). The means to flourish: Arts in community health and education. In S. Clift & P. M. Camic (Eds.), Oxford textbook of creative arts, health, and wellbeing: International perspectives on practice, policy and research (pp. 41–48). Oxford University Press. Wreford, G. (2016). Arts and health in Australia. In S. Clift & P. M. Camic (Eds.), Oxford textbook of creative arts, health, and wellbeing: International perspectives on practice, policy and research (pp. 135–143). Oxford University Press. Young, S. (2017). The ethics of the representation of the real people and their stories in verbatim theatre. In E. O’Toole, A. P. Kristic, & S. Young (Eds.), Ethical exchanges in translation, adaptation and dramaturgy (pp. 21–42). Brill Rodopi.

Chapter 8

Kindy Moves: Using Impact Narratives to Position Children as Stakeholders in Evaluation

Abstract This chapter demonstrates the value in the collection and inclusion of non-text-based data as part of an evaluation process to develop “impact narratives” resulting from engagement with a dance and movement program. An aim of the evaluation was to empower the voices of all stakeholders, including children, to better articulate program benefits. This chapter traces the outcomes of Queensland Ballet’s Kindy Moves project (2018) through four impact narratives centred on outcomes for participants—kindergarten children, kindergarten teachers and the teaching artists employed to deliver the project—as well as situating outcomes from a whole of organisation standpoint. The voices of children have been centred in the evaluation of Kindy Moves, giving meaningful and authentic perspectives through storytelling and drawings. We believe the impact of this program could be articulated more clearly to funders by using an impact narrative approach in the evaluation process.

8.1 Introduction This chapter documents outcomes from Queensland Ballet’s Kindy Moves project (2018) by reporting four impact narratives from the perspective of the project participants—kindergarten children, kindergarten teachers and the teaching artists employed to deliver the project—as well as situating outcomes from a whole of organisation standpoint. Framed within the arts education and teaching artist discourses, this project aimed to investigate the experience of kindergarten children and their teachers who participated in the program developed by Queensland Ballet. Data were collected from observing the program delivery, interviews with the adult participants and children’s drawing and storytelling. Outcomes from the program are framed through impact narratives. Carnwath and Brown note that impact “implies that something changes as a result of a cultural experience” (2014, 9). Landry et al. extend this definition by saying that impacts are seen through “the effects that go beyond the artefacts and the enactments of the event or performance itself and have a continuing influence upon and directly touch people’s lives” (1995, 23). This positioning allows for data collection tools and approaches to be responsive, people-centred and flexible. Taking this approach requires co-design of success factors with end-users © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Gattenhof et al., The Social Impact of Creative Arts in Australian Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7357-3_8

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in order to build a more comprehensive picture of the transformative potentials of arts and culture for individuals and communities. The project outcomes provided insights for artists, educators and arts companies working in formal early learning education contexts and show how stories can be used as valid forms of reporting and measurement.

8.2 About the Project Since 2015 Queensland Ballet, the state’s professional ballet company has been running early childhood classes at its home in West End (a suburb close to the city centre in Brisbane, Australia). Beginning as an extension to the community dance class schedule, Queensland Ballet’s decision to serve this segment of the population was in response to strategic priorities centred around enriching all lives, regardless of age, background, socio-economic status and geographic location. Lady Gowrie Caboolture East Community Kindergarten (LGCECK), part of The Gowrie (Qld) Inc. education network, provides a play-based kindergarten program for fifty children run by a qualified early childhood teacher, educators and support staff. With funding from an Arts Queensland Artist in Residence Grant, The Gowrie (Qld) Inc. engaged Queensland Ballet to present the Kindy Moves program: a ten-week creative movement syllabus, using ballet as a base, specifically designed for early years learners. The program was delivered in term three of the school year (2018) through two 45-min lessons (one lesson per group each week). The children who participated in Kindy Moves were four and five years of age. The grant program requires that those employed are practicing artists rather than educators. For this reason, trained dance educators were not employed in the delivery of the project; rather, the teaching artists engaged had a background as professional ballet dancers. The program supports the kindergarten teachers with their ongoing reflective practice, professional development and demonstrating the professional engagement domains of teaching of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. The kindergarten teachers noted in their interviews that to date they had very little opportunity to engage with professional development in dance education. Queensland Ballet’s teaching artists worked in a pair (one male and one female) to deliver the same content to each group of children (group A and group B as dictated by the kindergarten schedule), thereby providing consistency and familiarity for all. For children at LGCECK, this is a central consideration for their ongoing wellbeing, as most continue to experience difficult personal situations, where kindergarten is often the only safe and secure environment they know. The teaching artists developed a safe environment to learn and explore through dance. Each week, children were guided through a variety of group and small group ballet-based activities to promote collaboration and self-management. Each session was developed in response to a children’s picture book. Books chosen for use demonstrated transformative potential from words and images into ballet and movement, and the picture books were read with the children by the teaching artists at the commencement of each session

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to provide the focus of the session. This approach was adopted from Queensland Ballet’s successful Book Week1 activities undertaken with early years learners using books listed in the Queensland Premier’s Reading Challenge, a program that aims to improve literacy and encourage children to read for pleasure and learning. While the children explored their imagination and natural movement, they honed their coordination, strength, listening, language and vocabulary development. Over the course of the ten-week program, the content progressed in difficulty, providing a space for students to find their own sense of agency and pride. At the conclusion of the ten-week program, all learners were presented with a Queensland Ballet Junior Friends membership to assist in maintaining a connection to Queensland Ballet, thus extending the life of the project’s impact. Parents and carers were invited to participate in the last session with their child. The research timeframe was thirteen weeks in length. This timeframe included ten weeks for the delivery of Kindy Moves as well as a further three weeks post-delivery for data collection. To maintain the confidentiality of the research participants (in accordance with research ethics), within this chapter names have been replaced with title (teaching artist or kindergarten teacher) and an alphabetical letter.

8.3 Key Concepts Used to Frame the Impact Assessment To understand the impact of the project, it is important to discuss three key concepts that were used to frame the project’s impact assessment. These concepts are anchored around intrinsic and instrumental benefits of arts engagement, teaching artistry and impact narratives. The exploration of these three ideas in this chapter is not definitive but rather provides a lens through which to view impact outcomes.

8.3.1 Intrinsic and Instrumental Benefits of Arts Engagement More than a quarter of a century of research around the engagement of the arts in learning contexts has shown that significant gains are made in social impact outcomes centred on children’s cognitive, social, emotional and academic development (see Caldwell & Vaughan, 2012; Catterall et al., 1999; Deasy, 2002; Ewing, 2010; Fiske, 1999; Hetland & Winner, 2001; Martin et al., 2013). McCarthy et al. (2004) conducted a comprehensive review of the benefits associated with the arts, including cognitive, behavioural, health, social and economic benefits and various forms of intrinsic benefits. McCarthy et al. use the term “instrumental benefits”, when “the arts experience is only a means to achieving benefits in non-arts areas” (2004, 3), which may also be 1

The Children’s Book Council of Australia celebrate Book Week each year. During this time, schools, libraries, booksellers, authors, illustrators and children celebrate Australian children’s literature.

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achieved by other (non-arts) means. In contrast, “intrinsic benefits” are used when referring “to effects in the arts experience that add value to people’s lives” (ibid., 37). What has proven most valuable in the study by McCarthy et al. was the explicit recognition “that arts benefits—both instrumental and intrinsic—can have both private and public value” (2004, 4). Like McCarthy et al.’s (2004) study, research conducted by Caldwell and Vaughan (2012) around Australian arts engagement programs found: “The confidence gained from arts programs … spilled over to other areas such as academic studies and the behaviour of students showed improvement through their participation in the arts program” (16). Hetland and Winner (2001) also point to an increase in verbal skills through student engagement in the arts. Across the literature, two instrumental benefits consistently emerge that can be attributed to arts engagement: a rise in student academic achievement in non-arts subjects and increased attainment of social competencies. The findings clustered around academic and social competencies could be seen as separate outcomes, but they should be seen as interrelated.

8.3.2 Teaching Artistry Booth (2010, n.p.) defines “[a] teaching artist [as] a practicing professional artist who develops the complementary skills, curiosities and habits of mind of an educator, in order to achieve a wide variety of learning goals in, through and about the arts, with a wide variety of learners”. Maxine Greene, philosopher and arts educator, speaks of how engagement through the arts and with artists in education contexts releases the imagination that “opens windows in the actual, discloses new perspectives, sheds new light” (1995, 36). Greene acknowledges that the overall emphasis on an aesthetic, experiential approach to learning has a far greater significance not only in student ability to inform their own making, but also in locating themselves sensuously and consciously within their world. The tradition of actors, dancers, musicians, writers and other artists working in schools is an established tradition, and practising artists have always influenced teachers of the arts. However, it is only in relatively recent times that the relationship has become more direct and formalised. Artists working in schools have become a feature of the wider educational landscape. A research project carried out in 1997 by the University of Exeter School of Education asked teachers to prioritise major influences on their classroom arts practice. Heading the list came “visiting artists” (Oddie & Allen, 1998, 5). Indeed, this may reflect an affirmation and enhanced understanding of the positive benefits arising from working with artists in school settings.

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8.3.3 Dance in Australian Early Childhood Learning Contexts Hanna (1970) states “to dance is human”. Expressive movement can be viewed as a universal language of children who use it to discover and learn about their world, make meaning of experience, and to express reactions and ideas to others and situations. Dance is “meaningful to young children when they think through what their body can do, and how body actions feel ‘on the inside’” (Schiller & Meiners, 2011, 88). Previous studies in the field of arts engagement with children and young people suggest that “students participating in the arts increasingly saw themselves as part of a larger local community, felt they had contributed to that community, and had a greater sense of meaning and purpose … participation in the arts has been linked to greater civic engagement” (Martin et al., 2013, 711). Australian government policy notes that “the arts have a big role to play in contributing … to the development of individuals able to communicate well, think originally and critically, adapt to change, work cooperatively, connect with both people and ideas, and find solutions to problems as they occur” (Australia Council for the Arts, 2006, 3). For teachers, the arts can be “a vehicle for reinforcing academic knowledge or reaching children who may struggle with more conventional classroom approaches to education” (Wells in Hughes, 2011, 45). Engaging early years learners in dance supports the development of early coordination skills that lead to the precision required for writing, through to fostering empathy, relationships and social interactions (Miller et al., 2018). Schiller and Meiners (2011, 86) note that “[y]oung children find satisfaction in demonstrating control over moving and stopping with sensitivity to timing, learning to maintain their own personal space while becoming increasingly conscious of others’ personal space”. Thus, the inclusion of dance and movement experiences in kindergarten programs is crucial to support cognitive, physical and social development in young children. In Australian education contexts, the inclusion of dance “can also be seen as a language, created with intention to communicate” (Schiller & Meiners, 2011, 87) and is further extended to physical development and wellbeing. Government policy documents such as Belonging, Being & Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (n.d.) acknowledge the important role that the arts play in supporting holistic learning for early years learners. This speaks to the importance of including arts-based and narrative responses from children in an evaluation framework, in order to make room for their experiences of the program to be meaningfully captured and communicated.

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8.3.4 Shaping the Impact Narrative for Participants and Queensland Ballet Within the increasingly neo-liberalist world, there is an obsession with numerical data to enable governments, businesses, NGOs and learning institutions to tell a story about value and impact of spending monies, both public and private. Such data are converted into easily communicated percentages, budget lines or graphs to demonstrate return on investment (ROI). Goldbard (2015) argues that within the arts and culture there is a need to capture a more fulsome picture of arts participation and engagement by individuals and communities that moves beyond numbers on a page. As discussed in Chap. 2, Goldbard says this overemphasis on numeric records that try to capture value and impact of arts engagement has placed us into “Datastan—the empire of scientism” (2015, 214). As argued throughout this book, non-text-based approaches are one way that researchers and evaluators can address the creeping tropes associated with a scientific or economic framing of impact for individuals and communities. A story-led approach allows for the attribution of value of aesthetic encounters to move beyond “the metrics effect” (Goldbard, 2015) or, “economic doxa” (Belfiore, 2014, 95). Bruce Wydick (2015, para. 2) from The World Bank notes, “[i]n the battle for hearts and minds of human beings, narrative will consistently outperform data in its ability to influence human thinking and motivate human action”. Taking this frame into account, the following discussion is shaped as three impact narratives that are supported with visual data from the child participants in the Kindy Moves project.

8.4 Discussion The outcomes from this project should be read as indicative rather than encompassing or definitive in relation to the outcomes for the children, kindergarten teachers, teaching artists and Queensland Ballet as the arts organisation. This is due to the small data sample and the brevity of the Kindy Moves program as well the research timeframe. No pre-testing of the children was undertaken due to time limitations; therefore, this was not a comparative study. To be able to correlate direct causality of the research outcomes, the data sample would need to be larger and be longitudinal in nature so as to capture evidence of outcomes over time. This report draws data from the following four key sources: observation of learning experiences delivered by Queensland Ballet teaching artists; interviews with the two teaching artists delivering the Kindy Moves program; interviews with the lead teacher and teaching assistants from LGCECK and visual and written work samples for LGCECK children who engaged in the program. The primary data source derives from formal observation by the researcher and reported observations from the kindergarten teachers and teaching artists. The project’s outcomes are reported through three interrelated impact

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narratives encompassing the perspectives of kindergarten children who participated in the Kindy Moves program, kindergarten teachers and teaching artists.

8.5 Impact Narratives for the Kindergarten Children The children who participated in Kindy Moves are predominantly pre-literate, meaning that they are not yet fluent readers and writers. For this reason, the children’s responses to the program were gathered through stories represented visually (through drawing) and orally (in stories told to the kindergarten teacher and the researcher who then recorded the children’s stories in written words). This approach supports Langsted’s (1994) research approach, which views children as experts in their own lives, and as such, their perspectives should be included in studies that engage with them. Young children are drawn to recounting their life moments through dramatic play, oral retelling and image to share their experiences with others, to construct a sense of identity and to make meaning of the world. Storytelling was chosen as the non-text-based data collection tool because of its accessibility and familiarity for children of kindergarten age. Mallan describes storytelling as “using oral language in a social context to relate something heard, read, witnessed, dreamt or experienced” (Mallan, 1991, 5). For data collection in this project, the oral story is supported by child drawn images. The child response below demonstrates through storytelling how the child is able to understand her engagement between self, the activities and new language she has acquired in the program. The term “pizza feet” was a metaphor used by the teaching artists to denote the second position of the feet in ballet. In working with the children, it was important to ensure that the data collection was not intrusive or separate from daily activity in the kindergarten setting to ensure the comfort of both the children and the kindergarten teachers. For this reason, the data collection was included as one of a number of activities available to the kindergarten children in the free play session of the daily program. The inclusion of the data collection, set up as a storytelling table in the room, allowed children to participate by choice and mirrored similar activities that the children had undertaken with the kindergarten teachers when they were supported to recount picture books or life experiences. The children’s storytelling about their engagement in the Kindy Moves program was supported with open-ended questions that formed a call and response approach between the child and the adult, who was either the kindergarten teacher, teaching assistant or the researcher. The most striking evidence to emerge from the drawings and stories shared by the children is the lasting impact that the use of ballet specific terminology (plié, sauté, port de bras, révérence, first position, second position) had on the children. The majority of children could recall the words and use them in context with a clear understanding of what movement the words represented. Figure 8.1 demonstrates a child’s recall of a ballet position by engaging with the metaphor used by the teaching artists. 84% showed recall of ballet terminology through both image and oral language

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Fig. 8.1 Child’s response to the question “What did you enjoy most about the dance activities?”

three weeks after the conclusion of the program. The following two visual stories by children—depicted in Fig. 8.2a and b—demonstrate this evidence. Without prompting or overt demonstration, some children saw correlations between what they had learned in Kindy Moves and their engagement with dance in contexts outside of the program. One example of this transference came through in anecdotal evidence from the kindergarten teachers via discussions with parents or carers. Two female participants in the program shared what they had learned about first and second position with the imagery of “pizza feet” with their dance teacher in their weekly tap-dancing class. Through observation of the weekly sessions with the children and the teaching artists, it was clear that the children responded well to the use of metaphor to explain movements in warm up and warm down: happy back (posture); magic glue (controlling leg movement); butterfly legs (stretching for flexibility). Observational notes show that by week seven of the program the children recognised ballet words and metaphors without further explanation from the teaching artists and were able to initiate the movement. These child responses demonstrate the efficacy of “embodied learning” (Stolz, 2015) to support different learning styles of children and to aid engagement, memory and recall. In the delivery of the Kindy Moves program, the teaching artists used children’s picture books to anchor the movement activities. This allowed the children to generate movement responses with the teaching artists through visual identification with a character from the book. Using this supported engagement, rather than what Teaching Artist A named as “a call and response or mirroring movement” approach used in most

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Fig. 8.2 a Child’s response to the question “What words and actions do you remember?” b Child’s response to the question “What words and actions do you remember?”

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formal dance education environments, distinguishes Kindy Moves from traditional approaches to learning in ballet. Teaching artist A noted that, “sometimes it is a little bit scary to create movement from nothing. The book characters give the children something to base their movement on”. Coupled with the children’s recall of ballet specific language and associated movements, the data from the children also show that the recall of the characters and the sequence of events or narrative in the picture books was strong. Teaching Artist B stated that, in the kindergarten context, “storytelling is more important than the steps and techniques”. Observation of the activities and the post-engagement follow-up with the children demonstrated active recall of the stories and story structure as well as how the children innovated on the text by adding their own possible events that were not in the picture book. Notably, when recalling stories and characters, the children did so not only through words and images but also through physical demonstration, thus activating an example of embodied learning. This approach was inclusive of an array of arts and non-text-based responses from the children and is an overt example of engagement of learner agency and possibility thinking. Creativity theorist Anna Craft developed “possibility thinking”: a way of approaching everyday challenges in life with a “what if” mindset, transforming “what is” to “what might be” (2000). Craft identifies a set of capabilities in possibility thinking that are the driving force behind building personal agency. These capabilities include attributes such as imagination, posing questions, play and engaging in risk taking. Craft (Craft et al., 2001, 2008; 2000) views play as an essential element of both problem-solving and developing social interaction skills such as empathy. This sense of “being in the moment” (Craft, 2000), engaging the individual’s body, imagination and sensory faculties was able to be productively captured in the evaluation process.

8.6 Impact Narratives for Kindergarten Educators The kindergarten teachers2 at LGCECK reported that Kindy Moves provides a strong exemplar of how early years educators could incorporate dance and movement into their learning program. Kindergarten Teacher A noted that “the program allows for individual engagement from the children rather than regimentation”. The teacher went on to say that “teaching steps and choreography for this age group would not be appropriate or in keeping with the play-based learning approach used in early learning settings”. One of the stated goals for the Kindy Moves program was to enable children to feel an enhanced sense of belonging and enjoyment in going to kindergarten. During interviews, the kindergarten teachers were asked the question: “Has the program enabled learners to develop greater confidence and sense of wellbeing? If so, can you provide an example from your observation of the children’s engagement?” The kindergarten teachers reported seeing changes in children’s physical engagement and social engagement with the world as a result of the program. 2

Lady Gowrie Caboolture East Community Kindergarten has three kindergarten teachers on staff supporting 25 children in each of its two program groups.

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The following three short vignettes developed from the discussion in response to the question above, visual drawings from the children, as well as formal observations undertaken by the researcher, provide an insight into changes in early learners’ confidence and sense of wellbeing.

8.6.1 Child One Kindergarten Teacher A described this child (Child One) as being reticent to initiate movement or participate in movement-based activities. The child has cerebral palsy but has the capacity to move independently. When the kindergarten teacher reminded the children that the teaching artists3 would be coming to dance the following day, the child said that he would watch as he did not know how to dance. With oneon-one support from the kindergarten teacher to stand up and move his body in sessions one and two, and by using imagery that he was familiar with to encourage movement, the teacher encouraged the child to engage. The child readily identifies with the action characters from the Transformers story universe. The teacher used this narrative prompt as a base to translate the movement from the teaching artists such as proud back and sad back (used to denote dance posture) into power up and power down (language used by the Transformers). Translating the movement into language and imagery familiar to the child helped with both engagement and initiation of movement. The kindergarten teacher witnessed a slow change in attitude to movement during the Kindy Moves sessions and also saw this new-found confidence with movement translate into everyday kindergarten activities. For example, typically during group time (where children have a choice of a variety of activities including outdoor play), the child would sit to the side and play alone. Over the ten weeks of the program, the kindergarten teacher watched the child’s confidence with his body grow, resulting in an increase in physical engagement with his environment and peers.

8.6.2 Child Two Kindergarten Teacher C described the child (Child Two) as having social-emotional difficulties related to working with peers, emotional attachment and self-isolation. Like Child One described above, Child Two struggled in the early part of the Kindy Moves program to engage in the activities or initiate movement. Kindergarten Teacher C noted that the child’s visible lack of confidence prevented the child from participating in most kindergarten activities and as such this disengagement was not particular to Kindy Moves. With the support from the kindergarten teacher, who would often recount moments from the picture books used in the Kindy Moves program as 3

The teacher used names, but for this research, names are anonymised.

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prompts for participation, the child slowly moved from complete non-engagement to intermittent engagement. Over the ten weeks of the program, the kindergarten teacher observed in week seven that the child was gaining trust of herself and of those around her. Kindergarten Teacher C witnessed enjoyment that was seen with visible smiling from the child that according to the teacher was spontaneous and rare. While the child was not able to fully participate in all the activities for a full 45-min session, there was a small movement towards independent engagement.

8.6.3 Child Three Kindergarten Teacher C described the child (Child Three) as being shy and one that plays predominantly alone. During one of the morning check-ins with parents as they dropped the child at the kindergarten, the parents relayed to the kindergarten teacher that the child was coming home after the day in which Kindy Moves delivered a workshop and sharing some of the movements with their parents. The sharing took the form of oral storytelling to parents and siblings augmented with physical demonstrations of movement that the child encouraged members of his family to participate in. The parents noted to Kindergarten Teacher C that this sharing was not usually what the child chose to do. This outcome links in with development of personal and social competences and demonstrates the child’s enhanced sense of belonging and enjoyment in attending kindergarten that was not previously evident. Reflecting across the commonalities of the three vignettes, including the observations of play behaviour and engagement with stories, the data evaluation process was able to show that Kindy Moves increased the children’s self-confidence and enabled greater use of social competencies. Williams (2018) notes that to date there has been a paucity of evidence that demonstrates how engagement in movement-based programs in early childhood assists in self-regulatory development, and as corollary of such engagement, outcomes in pro-social behaviours may be “a means to preventing later widening gaps in achievement, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds” (86). While acknowledging that the data sample for this study is small, the outcomes show evidence to support Williams’ position. As Teaching Artist B said, “having such a program in a state ballet company contributes to children’s general awareness of culture, of ballet and the arts”. As a program, Kindy Moves allows young children to understand that ballet is for everyone and to develop confidence in moving and dancing for enjoyment regardless of whatever they choose to do in life.

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8.7 Impact Narratives for Queensland Ballet Teaching Artists The data shows that co-artistry (Greene 1995) is central to the teaching artists’ engagement with learners. For the two teaching artists in Kindy Moves, the engagement of co-artistry with the children was the greatest point of new learning that was able to be captured in the evaluation. Teaching Artist B noted that, “Kindy Moves taught me to listen and work from the children’s level”, while Teaching Artist A said that working in the program “forced me to think about how I can use imagery in my teaching rather than merely focusing on technique and how we need to take this into all the work we do”. Responses from the teaching artists show how the program has provided a point of reflection around how to embed child-centred and story-based approaches in the delivery of activities. This positionality is mirrored in the nontext-based approach to data collection to evaluate the efficacy of the Kindy Moves program, and thus, program delivery and evaluation are in alignment. This type of through line from engagement to evaluation created a seamless cycle of activity in which the assessment of impact was ongoing and incremental rather than seen as a separate stage in the delivery. Both Teaching Artist A and Teaching Artist B believe that the success of the program was partly due to the fact that there were two Queensland Ballet staff delivering the program which provided balance in terms of experience and delivery. Teaching Artist A stated that, “working collaboratively [with another teaching artist] provided immediate feedback on activities that could be modified instantly if needed”. For both teaching artists, Kindy Moves was a learning experience.

8.8 Impact Narrative for Queensland Ballet The engagement with Queensland Ballet (QB) through research and consultancies since 2015 has enabled the company to develop a reflective learning community to enhance impact of programs targeted to early years learners. The Kindy Moves program was an artist-in-residence program for kindergarten students in low socioeconomic areas. The research focused on evaluating the delivery model and outcomes for educators, parents and importantly participants—despite their young age and undeveloped written text expertise. Kindy Moves was QB’s first engagement in a formal learning context. The research made apparent that the QB teaching artists, who had predominantly come from a professional career in dance and were transitioning into a post-dance-related career, were struggling to understand how they could use their dance skills and aesthetic knowledge in a teaching and learning context. While the researcher has deep experience in curriculum design for arts learning, a challenge in the project was how to reshape the research for non-cognate “teachers”, who had little understanding of appropriate pedagogy for young children. To address this issue,

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the researcher implemented a research learning community within QB. The researchled learning community was an opportunity to take a whole of organisation value reset about the nature of learning within the company. The importance of developing a learning community with attention to organisational change while engaging all participants as co-investigators resulted in an instructional partnership informed by research.

8.9 Conclusion This chapter provides an example of how using non-text-based forms of communication can inform evaluation by empowering minor stakeholders. In this case, engagement in dance such as ballet and movement-based education experiences had positive outcomes for kindergarten students, kindergarten teachers and teaching artists. Further, this chapter shows how an arts organisation can use impact assessment across the whole of organisation learning and development. Building on previous projects and publications in cultural evaluation articulating a learning community approach to activate organisational change, this research allowed multiple departments at Queensland Ballet to work closely together from the outset to achieve a singular goal around the provision of quality arts experiences for children for the first time. As a result of this research approach, Queensland Ballet now do not rely solely on traditional quantitative and qualitative (such as surveys or written feedback forms distributed immediately after an event or engagement) measures to determine impact. This approach has made Queensland Ballet more aware of how impact narratives can provide evidence for continuous improvement and growth for individuals within the organisation. In the case of Kindy Moves, non-text-based approaches (including storytelling and drawing) enabled the researcher to centre the voices and experiences of children in the evaluation, leading to richer insights about the impact of the program for all stakeholders. The value of arts-led—and in particular narrative-based—approaches to data collection and engagement is discussed in depth in the next chapter which explores principles for engaging geographically dispersed communities through participatory media platforms and tools. Acknowledgements This research was undertaken by Sandra Gattenhof, supported by Queensland Ballet and Arts Queensland’s Artist in Residence Fund.

References Australia Council for the Arts. (2006). Australia council for the arts creative innovation strategy. Australia Council for the Arts.

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Belfiore, E. (2014). ‘Impact’, ‘value’ and ‘bad economics’: Making sense of the problem of value in the arts and humanities. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 14, 95–110. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/14740222 Booth, E. (2010). The history of teaching artistry. http://ericbooth.net/the-history-of-teaching-art istry/. Accessed August 1, 2019 Caldwell, B., & Vaughan, T. (2012). Transforming education through the arts. Routledge. Carnwath, J. D., & Brown, A. S. (2014). Understanding the value and impacts of cultural experiences. https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/publication/understanding-value-and-impacts-culturalexperiences. Accessed June 15, 2019 Catterall, J. S., Chapleau, R., & Iwanaga, J. (1999). Involvement in the arts and human development: General involvement and intensive involvement in music and theater arts. In E. B. Fiske (Ed.), Champions of change: Impact of the arts on learning (pp. 1–18). The Arts Education Partnership and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Craft, A. (2000). Creativity across the primary curriculum. Routledge. Craft, A., Jeffery, B., & Leibling, M. (2001). Creativity in education. Continuum. Craft, A., Cremin, T., Burnard, P., & Chappell, K. (2008). Possibility thinking with children in England aged 3–7. In A. Craft, T. Cremin, & P. Burnard (Eds.), Creative learning 3–11 and how we document it (pp. 65–74). Trentham. Deasy, R. (2002). Critical links: Learning in the arts and student academic and social development. Arts Education Partnership. Ewing, R. (2010). The arts and Australian education: Realising potential. ACER Press. Fiske, E. B. (1999). Champions of change: The impact of arts on learning. The Arts Education Partnership and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Goldbard, A. (2015). The metrics syndrome: Cultural scientism and its discontents. In L. MacDowall, M. Badham, E. Blomkamp, & K. Dunphy (Eds.), Making culture count: The politics of cultural measurement (pp. 214–227). Palgrave Macmillan. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts and social change. Jossey Bass. Hanna, J. L. (1970). To dance is human: A theory of non-verbal communication. University of Chicago Press. Hetland, L., & Winner, E. (2001). The arts and academic achievement: What the evidence shows. Arts Education Policy Review, 102, 3–6. Hughes, K. (2011). Collaboration paints a bright future for arts education. Wallace Foundation. https://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/pages/collaboration-paints-a-brightfuture-for-arts-education.aspx. Accessed August 11, 2019 Landry, C., Bianchini, F., & Maguire, M. (1995). The social impact of the arts: A discussion document. Comedia. Langsted, O. (1994). Looking at quality from the child’s perspective. In P. Moss & A. Pence (Eds.), Valuing quality in early childhood services: New approaches to defining quality (pp. 28–42). Paul Chapman Publishing. Mallan, K. (1991). Children as storytellers. Primary English Teaching Association. Martin, A. J., Mansour, M., Anderson, M., Gibson, R., Liem, G. A. D., & Sudmalis, D. (2013). The role of arts participation in students’ academic and nonacademic outcomes: A longitudinal study of school, home, and community factors. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105, 709–727. McCarthy, K., Ondaatje, E. H., Zakaras, L., & Brooks, A. (2004). Gifts of the muse: Reframing the debate about the benefits of the arts. RAND. Miller, J., Wilson-Gahan, S., & Garrett, R. (2018). Health and physical education: Preparing educators for the future. Cambridge University Press. Oddie, D., & Allen, G. (1998). Artists in schools: A review. OFSTED. O’Neill, C. (1985). Imagined worlds in theatre and drama. Theory into Practice, 24, 158–165. Schiller, W., & Meiners, J. (2011). Dance: Moving beyond steps to ideas. In S. Wright (Ed.), Children, meaning-making and the arts (pp. 100–129). Pearson Education Australia.

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Chapter 9

Community Consultation Using Digital Engagement in the Time of COVID-19

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic introduced the idea of the “pivot” as a rapid response by all sectors of the economy, personal relations and arts to almost daily changing circumstances and rules. The pandemic impacted research projects, researchers and study participants, and for those sites and communities already experiencing disconnection due to geographic locality, the isolation brought by the virus was compounded. This chapter reports on how an Australian research project, investigating the social impact of arts and cultural engagement in regional Australian communities, used the necessary social distancing and travel restrictions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to trial digital community engagement tools. Not so much a “pivot” but an opportunity to rapidly prototype and deploy a digital platform for community consultation, the research team explores how applying non-text-based tools enabled them to remain connected with research sites and participants. The chapter outlines the development of the digital platform, participant response and the emergent principles for undertaking creative community consultation at a distance.

9.1 Introduction The global shifts which affect all aspects of our lives that have resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic have also brought profound change and reflection about the ways we address challenges, crises and our futures as communities rather than as individuals. The COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the ongoing consequences of drought, bushfires and climate change on communities around the world, has exposed a range of deficits in our current approaches to community connection and social wellbeing. Yet these deficits are also opportunities to re-imagine how we might creatively shape our shared futures. The pandemic has made it clear just how interconnected we are— how much our survival and recovery rests on our willingness to care for each other and build community. These challenges have also raised new questions about how we define or assess community wellbeing or social impact, and the role of creativity and place in our collective social health. What researchers, arts organisations, artists and public health workers have known for decades has in recent months been writ © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Gattenhof et al., The Social Impact of Creative Arts in Australian Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7357-3_9

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large: arts, culture and belonging are crucial to building healthy and resilient communities. Another consequence of COVID-19 has been the compounded isolation for regional, rural and remote communities, and research teams such as ours developed creative ways to work collaboratively with these types of communities to continue engagements remotely. This chapter examines the consequences of COVID-19 on an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project, The Role of the Creative Arts in Regional Australia: A Social Impact Model, and, in particular, the community development workshops for this project that had been scheduled throughout 2020. In 2020, as part of a three-year research project investigating the social impact of the creative arts in Australia, we had planned our first round of data collection as a series of in-person workshops across communities in Central Western Queensland and North West Tasmania. When COVID-19 hit, we had to cancel our travel and needed to decide how to proceed with the data collection. We considered simply postponing but realised that we had no guarantee when we would be able to freely travel around the country and we did not want to pause our relationships with the communities. We considered designing a set of online surveys, but as a team who had either written or spoken in public numerous times about the problematic nature of surveys as data collection with communities who are marginalised and already feel misunderstood or overly policed by official agencies, we knew this was not a viable option for us. This challenge also presented an opportunity to design and test digital tools and approaches that were already part of the intended outcomes from the research project. The project team had initially imagined these as a digital toolkit for community engagement and that they would be a set of straightforward practical tools, but with communities locked down for COVID-19, these would not be appropriate for the engagement workshops we had planned for. In the end, we chose the most challenging and untested option: we developed a series of online creative activities that allowed the space for participants to respond in ways that felt relevant and meaningful for them, in the hope they would engage with the research project, and that the responses would give us the data required.

9.2 Overview of the Role of the Creative Arts in Regional Australia: A Social Impact Model Project The Role of the Creative Arts in Regional Australia: A Social Impact Model is an ARC Linkage Project spanning three years (2019–2022). The project presents an opportunity to address the long-standing problem facing regional and remote communities in Australia of how to strategically communicate and effectively evaluate the social impact of the creative arts in their communities. The consequence of this ongoing issue is the lack of policy for regional arts funding that responds to community capacity and need, which is potentially failing regional communities. The current “one-size-fits-all” approach to regional arts funding leaves communities on the margins of decision-making and, as described in Chap. 4, often dealing with

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unwanted arts programs, such as expensive (and largely short-term or temporary) fly-in-fly-out arts projects. The purpose of the project is to enable regional communities to use evidencebased research on arts engagement to develop future investments by government and philanthropic funders to enhance jobs growth, liveability factors and visibility of arts and culture in regional Australia. The positive impacts and benefits of arts and culture are well documented in the areas of health, civic pride, crime reduction, economic opportunities and development; however, arts policy and funding remain outside the otherwise whole of government approach to regional policy. The overarching goal of this project is to develop avenues and methods to include end-users, through the voices of communities, in the decision-making on how regional arts funding is dispensed and allocated. While social impact is an increasing field of research and investigation, as we have already discussed throughout this book, its application to the creative arts has not yet been significantly understood or examined from an enduser perspective. The definition of social impact outlined earlier in this book has been adopted by our project with a view to build impact assessment frameworks and tools that allow communities to convey a more comprehensive picture of the “alterations in the quality of life” (Brown & Trimboli, 2011, 617) that engagement in arts and culture enable. The project is led by the authors of this book (Gattenhof, Hancox and Klaebe) with the fourth author (Mackay) taking the role of the research project manager. The project partners include Regional Arts Australia, Central Western Queensland Remote Area Planning and Development Board (RAPAD), Red Ridge (Interior Queensland) Ltd, Burnie City Council, the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications, Performing Arts Connections Australia (PAC) and the Regional Australia Institute (RAI). The project partners take on the role of key conduits to assist the project team to enter a community through introductions, dissemination of project information and venue support for community consultations. The partners act as key informants for emergent research findings and provide practical advice about research dissemination within their organisations and into regional, rural and remote communities. The project team and the partner organisations work to ensure the outcomes of the project are achievable, end-user friendly and reliable to the communities in which the research is undertaken. The fieldwork is undertaken in the remote and geographically dispersed regions of Central Western Queensland on the lands of the Iningai, Malintji and Kuunkari people in the town of Longreach and the northwest corridor of Tasmania, namely the city of Burnie which lies on Palawa country. The research sites have been chosen in consultation with our partners and are deemed communities in most immediate need and whose capacity and challenges are reflected throughout much of regional, rural and remote Australia. Both communities have existing active arts ecosystems while also experiencing significant economic disadvantage and rates of social exclusion. Two of the aims of the project are to (1) develop comprehensive, contemporary, rigorous consultative and evaluative frameworks to account for a multiplicity of understandings related to the impact of arts and culture across diverse communities and (2) to deploy the framework with end-users to account for possible success

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factors for sustainable arts and cultural engagement in their community. As already mentioned, the original intention was to activate a process of face-to-face community consultation workshops across the two sites for the research project to co-create the language framework. Overall, the project responds to a need to tell the complex story of the impact of arts and cultural engagement on individuals and communities in Australian regional, rural and remote places by not limiting the story to numbers that dominate the reporting landscape. The project embraces the challenge to move beyond propositional language and takes the position that numbers and discursive text are not the only avenues that one can employ to understand the world.

9.3 Designing Online Community Consultation Using Arts-Based Approaches Research outcomes from the project to date told us that creating a generic set of cultural impact markers is not the preferred way in which regional, rural and remote communities would like to develop qualitative understandings regarding the value and impact of arts and cultural engagement for their communities. Equally, the research shows one set of defined markers will not suit all communities—even those of similar population sizes—as differences in geography, infrastructure, engagement and equity of access to arts and culture need to be taken into consideration. Part of the challenge of the project that can be equally applied to both face-to-face consultation and the pivot to digital engagement is to develop a set of flexible impact markers and tools to communicate impact and to articulate and define value and success indicators that include intrinsic (aesthetic) outcomes such as pleasure, beauty, connection and meaning. While text and numeric data are “dominant in academic research—vital for production, measurement and dissemination of research findings” (Durose et al., 2011, 8), there is equally an interest in “beyond text tools” (Goldbard, 2015) or “nontext-based tools” (Gattenhof, 2017). As we have discussed throughout this book, such tools include storytelling, yarning, performance, visual response and imagery and may assist “… artists and cultural policy-makers [and researchers/evaluators] to convey cultural value and meaning with the tools best suited for that purpose” (Goldbard, 2015, 226). The ways in which we understand and assess the tools best suited for a particular purpose depend not only on the what or why but also the how. The approach taken in this project to uncover and present diverse methods for participants to tell stories of culture, place and their own experience of these falls within the contemporary approach to situated or place-based transmedia storytelling. The practice and processes of transmedia storytelling have continued to evolve both with the accessibility of digital media and also with the increasingly diverse voices and communities using these tools to share their stories. Contemporary transmedia storytelling tends to occur on a single digital platform and incorporate a wide range of storytelling

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languages (visual, textual, ambient, immersive, aural and oral). A Place in Our Art,1 an activity part of our ARC Linkage project, provides a useful example of communityled transmedia storytelling centred around place and will be discussed further on in the chapter. Transmedia as a general term is multi-functional, but it might simply be understood as deconstructing a narrative to present segments of it across a selection of media platforms, and the term is used successfully across a range of fields such as television, film and advertising. Transmedia storytelling on the other hand is an explicit description for stories that are developed and created intentionally “as a story that unfolds across multiple media platforms with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole... and each media does what it does best and adds something to the story” (Jenkins, 2006, 95). Henry Jenkins has consistently presented a logic or an approach for transmedia storytelling rather than a fixed definition prescribing a set of features or elements. This framework has the capacity to include a multiplicity of approaches and foregrounds the consideration of the intentions of the creators for their specific project instead of focusing on a rigid set of boundaries to define a transmedia story, and this also includes our understanding of media platforms as ways of telling stories rather than only as locations from which stories are shared. It continues to become clear that transmedia storytelling is more than a practice or a process centred around digital technology but a holistic way of thinking about the intersection of people, place and story-making through interdisciplinary methods and digital technology. Along with these considerations, transmedia storytelling also has a commitment to a decentralised concept of authorship that does not privilege one voice, one part of the story or one platform over another. This bricolage approach to transmedia has the potential to contribute profoundly to social impact projects, particularly those that use personal or community narratives. Creative digital and transmedia storytelling projects, particularly those that rely on retaining audiences over multiple episodes or tasks, have traditionally been defined around notions of design and user experience and as such have been framed as needing to be interactive and encouraging participation (as opposed to participatory). Ad hoc definitions of interaction and participation and directions on how to achieve them, as though it were a destination, abound. These may be useful in a commercial sense but not so much in relation to socially engaged projects where participation is not a destination, but a reflection of relationships built within the project. These definitions and directives do not reflect the plurality of approaches to participation which can change community to community and project to project. They also fail to add to the discourse around participation in arts-based social impact projects that might help practitioners and academics to better understand the role of participation as part of community engagement and importantly how to approach it as part of an online activity that is simultaneously rooted in a sense of place. However, more contemporary and complex approaches which incorporate meaningful collaboration, storytelling and social impact have increasingly

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To view A Place in Our Art, visit the link provided in the references.

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centred engagement, rather than interaction or participation, as the measure of “success”. Engagement is a contested and multi-faceted term which encompasses much more than numbers. It necessarily also understands that interaction and participation are precursors to engagement but elevates these actions and choices to support a meaningful creative digital collaboration.

9.4 Digital Liveness as a Model for Engagement Philip Auslander’s concept of “digital liveness” (2012) is a useful frame to understand the design, implementation and reception of the online community consultation tools that were trialled in The Role of the Creative Arts in Regional Australia. Auslander’s definition of digital liveness refers to “the creation of the effect of liveness in our interaction with computers and virtual entities” (2012, 7). Digital liveness is concerned with the way attributes of liveness can enhance and deepen the user experience when online and how real-time presence is mediated through the engagement with the digital more generally. The concept of digital liveness emerged from Auslander’s early work (1997, 2008) where he argued that the dichotomy between live and digital, or what he called mediatized, engagement is not an opposition but a relational continuum of practice. Auslander noted that digital liveness is not caused by intrinsic properties of technology or the particular construction of an audience (Auslander, 2012, 10). Thus, by using the frame of digital liveness, our project developed a model of engagement rather than a definition for the process considering that the engagement is a set of choices and a continuum of practices rather than a fixed and homogenous activity. This way of thinking is especially useful for projects seeking to affect social change through a lens of place. Projects that set out to inform and/or affect change are as distinct from one another as any other creative works, and the ways in which they seek to connect with audiences are, ideally, distinct from project to project. Such a model also accounts that participation in activities occurred in shared time and space, thereby activating the two core attributes to characterise the experience of digital liveness: presence and immediacy. Using the affordances of digital liveness, the project team established the digital platform mentioned earlier in the chapter: A Place in Our Art. The site rolled out a sequence of four provocations on a weekly basis that allowed individuals to “show and tell” us about what arts and culture meant to them and their community. Invitations to participants to interact with A Place in Our Art were distributed through our research project partners via email, newsletters and social media. The site was open to any interested party. Individuals from outside the project’s target communities in Central Western Queensland and North West Tasmania were able to subscribe to the digital platform. Invitations to participate were supported through a social media campaign on The Role of the Creative Arts in Regional Australia project webpage, Facebook site and Instagram page. Each week in July 2020 a different activity was made available that invited participants to share their experience of arts and culture in creative ways. As the new provocation was released each week, a compilation of the

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responses from the previous week was available to participants on a carousel on the digital platform. The decision to share the response in this way further develops both presence and immediacy for participants by positioning response in a community or shared context that sought to mimic participant sharing in face-to-face workshops. The four provocations were framed as follows: Activity 1: All the Feels—In 50 words describe your last memorable experience of creativity. Which feelings do you associate with this experience? Responses could include being part of a creative event, attending an event, viewing something online and enjoying something made by a friend or family member. Activity 2: Show and Tell—Show us a place that represents the unique culture or heritage of your community. You could share a photo, link to a Website, link to a video or even an illustration of this place. Activity 3: Celebrity Head—Find a photo of a celebrity who looks like the people you see most frequently at local events. Consider which celebrities represent your community: who would fit right in at a regular event? Activity 4: Postcard from the Future—Using the box below, write a postcard from 2030 describing how your community solved a challenge it is currently facing. Your message could be detailed and realistic, or fanciful! Consider what a bright future for your community might look like in ten years’ time. Each of the provocations were supported with an example of a possible response delivered through a pre-recorded video available on the platform. The intention of the example was not to provide a template but rather to stimulate ideas for a possible response. In doing this, we were modelling how presence could be activated through a mediatised experience for others to engage with. This aligns with Gadamer’s idea of presence (2004), which is defined as being about more than just being there at the same time as someone else. Gadamer says “to be present is to participate” (2004, 121). The scholarship around participation, and digital media participation especially, has produced a range of positions that lead us towards a model of engagement. Previously discussed in Chap. 4, concepts of engagement and participation are important frameworks for understanding how we build relationships and facilitate creative equitable communication methods. The role of digital media in this process brings to mind Carpentier’s arguments that the two main approaches to participation can be distinguished as a sociological approach and a political approach (Carpentier, 2016, 71–73). The sociological approach considers taking part in a wide set of social and human activities as participation, including the consumption of goods or entertainment and any interactions with texts and technologies. As we did in Chap. 4, it is relevant here to highlight that one definition of participation in this approach is Melucci’s (1989, 174), where participation: “means both taking part, that is, acting so as to promote the interests and the needs of an individual as well as belonging to a system, identifying with the ‘general interests’ of the community”. In addition to this, Carpentier presents two modes of digital participation that are especially pertinent to this project: in and through the media. As A Place in Our Art demonstrates, these are not oppositional avenues of participation, but Carpentier’s definition, already introduced in Chap. 4, offers further insight into the multitude

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of ways individuals can participate and engage with digital media. Participation in the media can be clearly understood as the ability to make decisions about media products, such as which to consume or to be a member of. Participation through media opens another field of the participatory process which has more to do with how people can enter public spaces and use media to enter societal debates, dialogue and deliberations (Carpentier, 2016, 274). This way of considering participation exposes some of the deficits in the prevailing assumption that participation might be measured only by audience activity rather than by the level or intimacy of activity. A Place in Our Art represents a “situated” approach to engagement and not only locates the activities in a place but attempts to share the context and complexity of communities from inside those communities. For the purpose of the overarching project, The Role of the Creative Arts in Regional Australia, in which A Place in our Art is nested, the research team understands that place includes the people, the historical context and the social political context: it is never just geography or background. Place or situated community engagement and storytelling has shifted and developed to include a range of approaches for representing lived experience in ways that reflect and articulate the voices and agency of those whose experiences are being represented. In other words, situated community engagement seeks to tell stories from within rather than about. The concept of seeking to achieve a situated approach to community projects is not confined to the field of arts, culture and creativity; cognitive science, philosophy and design—all engage with situatedness. While from different perspectives, they all acknowledge the potential for this approach and foundation to illuminate the interplay of place and people that can challenge mainstream or hegemonic ways of seeing and understanding environments and their inhabitants. Situatedness also allows for and encompasses what is, what was and what may be present in a place to create an approach to collaboration which attempts to grapple with the difficulty and complexity of understanding the lives of others, our own lives and the relationship between individuals and their environment. Situated engagement and collaboration encourages us to ask: who gets to tell a story, where is the story being told from and what are the specific circumstances of that place that influence how the story is told and whose eyes we are viewing the people and place through? Situated engagement aligns with the ethos of creative placemaking—a policy concept, a distinct practice of fostering enduring social change in places, and an expanding field of scholarship—that recognises that arts and culture offer some of the most flexible and inclusive methods for advancing the understanding of the social impact attributed to arts and cultural engagement. As opposed to a distinct art form or process, creative placemaking is characterised by a distinct set of values and a specific approach to strengthening communities and enhancing collective wellbeing. These values include authentic and appropriate community engagement to support locally generated and community-led projects; meaningful collaboration between and across organisations, agencies and sectors, within and beyond the arts ecology and the intentional integration of arts and culture into efforts that advance comprehensive community development and whole of community wellbeing. Creative placemaking recognises that emerging social, health and environmental issues are global issues.

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Solutions that are responsive to the specificities of distinct places, and reflective of the needs and strengths of communities are the most impactful for those communities.

9.5 Outcomes and Understanding Emerging from Online Community Consultation A Place in Our Art participants were invited to share responses that were both individual and representative of a broader community and collective experience. Watching the real-time engagement with the digital platform and retrospective analysis demonstrates several key principles for success when employing a creative consultation strategy through the frame of digital liveness. The table below shows the number of single engagements identified by IP addresses across the four-week period of the roll out. The data show that some participants offered more than one response to a provocation. For the purpose of analysis, we have chosen to show engagements by source rather than by numbers of responses to the platform to allow us to replicate the same accountability as if we were delivering the community consultation in a face-to-face mode. The engagement statistics presented in Table 9.1 show that the provocations in weeks one and two received the most connection from participants across views and submissions. Rather than analysing the responses to each provocation separately, as a research team we have looked for what can be described as principles of practice across the responses.

9.5.1 Principle One—Generative Engagement While the roll out of the four provocations were in chronological order over the onemonth period of engagement, the response from participants was not. Engagement Table 9.1 Engagement statistics for A Place in Our Art Submissions at close

Submissions as of 11 Aug

Web hits week of delivery

Video views as of 11 Aug

Week 1 All the feels

53

55

329

56

Week 2 Show and tell

18

19

185

35

Week 3 Celebrity head

3

4

54

9

Week 4 Postcard from the future

1

2

125

9

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statistics show that the majority of responses were submitted in the same week the provocation was released. The data also demonstrate that by the end date of delivery on 11 August 2020, a small number of responses were submitted after the designated week. Apart from the week one provocation, the nonlinear structure allowed participants to respond in an order of their choosing. The flexibility of timed engagement allowed participants the choice about how they interacted with the tasks, ensuring that the site was user-responsive. Respondents on the site became both producer and audience or user simultaneously, moving them towards what Bruns and Schmidt (2011) call a “produser”. Bruns states that “[p]rodusage is the type of user-led content creation that takes place in a variety of online environments, open source software and the blogosphere” (Bruns, 2007, n.p.). The blurred boundary between passive consumption and active production activated in A Place in Our Art centres digital liveness through the disruption of linear time so that the site has dynamic immediacy, a hallmark of Auslander’s concept of digital liveness, thus unsettling the dichotomy of live and mediatised engagement. Furthermore, the A Place in Our Art digital platform embraced one of Bruns’ four defining features—open participation. The feature of open participation means “produsage environments are open to all comers” (Bruns, 2008, 24), ensuring that inclusivity is highly encouraged while exclusivity is highly discouraged. The in-built inclusivity of the platform encouraged unrestricted access by produsers by not limiting participants to the research project’s geographic sites in Queensland and Tasmania.

9.5.2 Principle Two—Openness of Provocation Prompts that allowed for both individual and collective experience to coexist organically (All the Feels and Show and Tell) were the provocations that both elicited the greatest number of responses. The two participant responses below—All the Feels in Fig. 9.1 and Show and Tell in Fig. 9.2—reveal how through a combination of images and words the submissions were imbued in a non-didactic response. The provocations used in week one (In 50 words describe your last memorable experience of creativity. Which feelings do you associate with this experience?) and in week two (Show us a place that represents the unique culture or heritage of your community) fall into Umberto Eco’s (1989) notion of “open works”. Eco’s concept was initially applied to performance but can be equally applied to digital works. Open works are described as having an “unfinished form so that the audience must collaborate to complete the artwork” (Gattenhof, 2004, 85). The concept of openness in an artwork is similar to Bruns’ idea of “unfinished artefacts” (2008, 27) in a digital produser space. Bruns’ concept is most usually applied to online sites such as Wikipedia where participants write and overwrite information so that the concept, idea or information is in a constant state of fluidity. While the week one and week two provocations shared on the A Place in Our Art platform did not embrace continually unfinished works as advocated by Bruns, they did allow for the participants to respond to the stimulus with multiple possibilities, both in their

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Fig. 9.1 Participant response to All the Feels—in 50 words describe your last memorable experience of creativity. Which feelings do you associate with this experience?

Fig. 9.2 Participant response to Show and Tell—show us a place that represents the unique culture or heritage of your community

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delivery and reception. By taking this position, the openness is extended not just to the participants who made submissions to the site but also to the reader as what is communicated by the work is determined by the audience. The responses shown in Figs. 9.1 and 9.2 encourage the reader of the text and image to dive into their experience to understand the response. For Australian readers of Fig. 9.2, there is the potential to make sense of the response by refracting the submission through a personal response as much of Australia was impacted by bushfires in the summer of 2019–2020. Openness was augmented with a sense of presence in the formatting of the submission. This is most prevalent in responses to provocation two in which participants were encouraged to share an image from their community that represented the unique culture or heritage for them. The first view of each response on the carousel of images displays only a photograph submitted. This prompts an act of the imagination on behalf of the viewer, posing the question: what does this image and text mean to me? In such a moment, the response cracks open an opportunity for shared experience and understanding by conjoining the individual who uploaded the submission and the recipient who encounters the text and image online, and thus, a micro-community is initiated. When the viewer scrolls over the photograph, the textual element of the response is revealed. This two-part reveal is demonstrated in Figs. 9.3 and 9.4. Prompts in weeks three and four were designed as more directive prompts around describing the community or community events. The responses to Celebrity Head

Fig. 9.3 Initial image from response to Show and Tell provocation

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Fig. 9.4 Text reveal on image from response to Show and Tell provocation

and Postcard from the Future were not embraced by the participants at the same rate as All the Feels and Show and Tell. The provocations in week three (Celebrity Head) and week four (Postcard from the Future) dictated the “how” of the response, and thus, openness was disengaged. In both provocations, the team mandated the form that the response was to be delivered in—an image of a celebrity in the public sphere in week three or a postcard in week four. The number of responses—three for Celebrity Head and one for Postcard from the Future—is a clear example of the modernist idea of a closed work. In opposition to Eco’s conception of an open work, a closed work ensures that, “the author presents a finished product with the intention that this particular composition should be appreciated and received in the same form as he devised it” (Eco, 1989, 3). By mandating the form of the response, the task closed off imaginative engagement and personal reflection by the participants. The approach to community engagement taken by the team in numerous research projects discussed throughout this book is generally undertaken in-person through a series of creative workshops during which we pose questions and provocations to a diverse group of participants. We then collectively discuss the responses and attempt to make sense of what the overarching ideas are. After this we conduct Vox Pop interviews to camera with the participants. This approach was articulated in Chap. 4, in our discussion of the Tim Fairfax Family Foundation Toolkit, trialled in the locations of Charters Towers and Roma. This approach has been an effective, though imperfect, means of collaborating with communities. Like the closed nature

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of responses in week three and week four seen in A Place in Our Art, the responses provided in workshops from previous projects using Vox Pops show that asking questions from behind the camera has affected the participants. Their responses are formal and are clearly responding in part to what they think is appropriate, either consciously or unconsciously. We had that sneaking suspicion after each project, but when we reviewed the first round of responses to the online creative engagement, it was obvious that by the researchers stepping entirely out of the picture and instead creating a space for engagement we were gifted with unexpected insights into the creativity and culture of communities. The principle of openness can be equally applied to both the in-person and digital community consultation actions. Researchers should endeavour to work from the position of writerly or open works that creates a “field of possibilities” (Pousseur in Eco, 1989, 3).

9.5.3 Principle Three—Centring Storytelling Through Place As the title of the digital platform A Place in Our Art indicates, the location of the story is important. As Australian philosopher Malpas states, “[t]he crucial point about the connection between place and experience is … that place is integral to the very structure and possibility of experience” (2018, 31). Malpas argues that all human experience and all storying of human experience is not merely informed by a sense of place but is an experience of place itself. The framing of the provocations in weeks one and two (All the Feels and Show and Tell) not only centred participants’ experience, allowed for imaginative and open responses, but also asked for participants to engage with place. Reviewing the framing of responses for weeks three and four (Celebrity Head and Postcard from the Future) reveals that responses were not only hampered by the didactic form for the delivery of the submission, but also an absence of place. An increased attention to place—that is, geography, environment, climate, culture, demographics—and the assets of communities—including creativity, knowledge, resilience and lived experience—may have enabled more participatory and inclusive approaches across all four provocations resulting in increased engagement in weeks three and four. The first two provocations evoked place, allowing participants to frame both their experience and response through the frame of place. The third and fourth provocation only evoked space. Place and space have similar connotations and are often used interchangeably, though they have distinguishing features. Hancox pulls the meaning apart by saying, “place suggests meaning and attachment, while space is more associated with abstraction and action” (Hancox, 2021, 15). Our hunch from reviewing the submission is that this tension was palpable for participants as they could not see themselves or their experience as part of the possibility of response. While provocation four (Postcard from the Future) asked participants to write a postcard from 2030 describing how their community solved a challenge it was currently facing, asking participants to respond from a deficit position may not have enabled a creative response. Hancox (2021) points out that, “the role of space, location and setting in transmedia storytelling is often functional” (17). The

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low responses to the provocations that, in retrospect, paid little attention to centring place as part of the response demonstrate that functionality of a digital site should be a secondary concern to the primary concern of place and experience of play for participants.

9.6 Conclusion Our combined experience and scholarship in the fields of creative community consultation and impact assessment of arts and cultural engagement have demonstrated that when individuals and communities are supported to respond to questions about themselves and their place rather than required to answer direct questions about obvious research questions, the responses are richer and more intimate. This approach also creates the space for participants to decide for themselves what to focus on as important rather than being told what is important, and this means that the responses are very different from traditional consultation, engagement and data collection. A move towards more collaborative approaches to research projects in communities will support participants to become research partners and guides rather than subjects. This would require also seeing communities as the experts and subsequently co-designing and co-creating the research and data collection methods with rather than for them. The distance and inability for researchers to access communities created by COVID19 have also provided us with some clarity around how we engage with communities and that the possibility that the presence of researchers in communities can, perhaps, be obstacles to the success of their own projects. The ways we frame participation, engagement or interaction can help us to seek more considered ways of discussing, making and sharing online community projects and to develop expanded ideas of what they are and how they inspire audiences, creators or communities. In allowing for place to be centred in all engagements, both live and digital, researchers can account for how a sense of place evoked through feelings and emotions can contribute to the value and impact of a project for participants and their communities. Alongside the foregrounding of place, digital platforms like A Place in Our Art should be framed through the principles of generative and nonlinear engagement, as well as openness of form. Potter (2018, 118) notes that participatory media have the potential to create a more nuanced, ethical, diverse and democratic media culture in which to share insights and stories of communities and place. A Place in Our Art has demonstrated that online community projects have a role to play in creating this culture, but that open, thoughtful and respectful design is crucial. Acknowledgements This work was supported by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project titled The Role of the Creative Arts in Regional Australia: A Social Impact Model (LP180100477). More details about the project can be found on the project’s three social media pages: Regional Arts and Social Impact—RAASI on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/RAA SIresearch); @regionalartandsocialimpact on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/regionalarts andsocialimpact/) and the Regional Arts and Social Impact webpage (https://research.qut.edu.au/ raasi/).

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References A Place in Our Art. (2020). Activities. https://www.aplaceinourart.com/. Accessed April 23, 2021 Auslander, P. (1997). Against ontology: Making distinctions between the live and the mediatized. Performance Research, 2, 50–55. Auslander, P. (2008). Liveness: Performance in a mediatized culture (2nd ed.). Routledge. Auslander, P. (2012). Digital liveness: A historico-philosophical perspective. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 34, 3–11. Brown, S., & Trimboli, D. (2011). The real ‘worth’ of festivals: Challenges for measuring sociocultural impacts. Asia Pacific Journal of Arts and Cultural Management, 8, 616–629. Bruns, A. (2007). Produsage: Towards a broader framework for user-led content creation. In B. Shneiderman (Ed.), Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition (pp. 99–105). Association for Computing Machinery. Bruns, A. (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, second life, and beyond: From production to produsage. Peter Lang. Bruns, A., & Schmidt, J.-H. (2011). Produsage: A closer look at continuing developments. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 17, 3–7. Carpentier, N. (2016). Beyond the ladder of participation: An analytical toolkit for the critical analysis of participatory media processes. Javnost: The Public, 23, 70–88. https://doi.org/10. 1080/13183222.2016.1149760. Durose, C., Beebeejaun, Y., Rees, J., Richardson, J., & Richardson, L. (2011). Towards coproduction in research with communities. Arts and Humanities Research Council. https://ahrc. ukri.org/documents/project-reports-and-reviews/connected-communities/towards-co-produc tion-in-research-with-communities/. Accessed February 1, 2021 Eco, U. (1962) 1989. The open work. Harvard University. Gadamer, H.-G. (2004). Truth and method. Continuum. Gattenhof, S. (2004). Young people and performance: The impact of deterritorialisation on contemporary theatre for young people (Ph.D. thesis). Queensland University of Technology. Gattenhof, S. (2017). Measuring impact: Models for evaluation in the Australian arts and culture landscape. Palgrave. Goldbard, A. (2015). The metrics syndrome: Cultural scientism and its discontents. In L. MacDowall, M. Badham, E. Blomkamp, & K. Dunphy (Eds.), Making culture count: The politics of cultural measurement (pp. 214–227). Palgrave Macmillan. Hancox, D. (2021). The revolution in transmedia storytelling through place: Pervasive, ambient and situated. Routledge. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture. Routledge. Malpas, J. (2018). Place and experience: A philosophical topography (2nd ed.). Routledge. Melucci, A. (1989). Nomads of the present: Social movements and individual needs in contemporary society. Temple University Press. Potter, J. W. (2018). Media literacy (9th ed.). SAGE.

Chapter 10

Conclusion

Abstract By telling stories of arts impact through a series of narrative case studies, this book sets out to develop a conceptual understanding and offer frameworks that we hope will stimulate productive conversations or may be used to dynamically assess the value and impact of arts engagement. We have provided Australian impact stories from arts projects within different indicators and sectors. These range from early years when we were trying to develop an understanding of value and impact, to the recent COVID-19 pandemic where it became even clearer that Notions of Place (whether physical or virtual) need to be intrinsically considered too, as they both need to be understood in unison to appreciate the importance and wellbeing associated with “belonging”.

10.1 Sharing Perceptions and Understandings Through Listening and Stories By telling stories of arts impact through a series of narrative case studies, this book sets out to develop a conceptual understanding and offer frameworks that we hope will stimulate productive conversations or may be used to dynamically assess the value and impact of arts engagement. We have provided Australian impact stories from arts projects within different indicators and sectors. These range from early years when we were trying to develop an understanding of value and impact, to the recent COVID-19 pandemic where it became even clearer that Notions of Place (whether physical or virtual) need to be intrinsically considered too, as they both need to be understood in unison to appreciate the importance and wellbeing associated with “belonging”. We unpacked our understanding of value and impact in arts and culture in Chap. 2 and acknowledged the multitude of social and economic definitions and frameworks for assessing this value and impact. We also recognised the complexities of culture, cultural policy and ethics for First Nations people and the need to be “practiced-and open-ended” (Paquette et al., 2017, 282) in our approach. We, like Durose et al. (2011) and Goldbard (2015), were also convinced of the need to look beyond traditional evaluation tools, and as researchers, we had each independently set out with curiosity © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Gattenhof et al., The Social Impact of Creative Arts in Australian Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7357-3_10

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to investigate and trial richer ways of articulating value and impact. Now that we often collaborate as researchers, we have come to design and use what we inclusively call non-text-based tools or data to help us better understand, evaluate and articulate social impact. These non-text-based tools or data are rich arts-based practices and language to express the intangible value of creativity, connection and belonging in our lives. In Chap. 3, we introduced embedded evaluation as a framework to be designed into a project or program from the outset and not “bolted on” at the end. While this can also be a helpful project management tool logistically for keeping stakeholders on track, we see it as an invaluable first step in ensuring there is a shared and inclusive language and understanding of stakeholder expectations—and acknowledging that each stakeholder will have a unique personal perception of what success “looks like”, to agree on how that would be “measured” or understood at the project’s conclusion. If there is no baseline established from the start, evaluation subsequently cannot be as effective or conclusive. Chapter 4 extended this need to understand what is important to stakeholders by providing an example of how Notions of Place must also be factored in from inception. We discussed place-based community engagement and the nuanced and expansive understanding of place that it requires. Using a rural community project based in Queensland as an example, we maintain the need to ensure that we put the people most affected by community programs at the heart of programs—especially in designing appropriate methods and engagement processes. It is important to first reflect on the needs and capacity of the people and place in question with the people of that place to really co-create productively. The usefulness of non-text-based tools and data for capturing and understanding intangible value was explored further in Chap. 5, this time in a Brisbane high school that specialises in educating newly arrived students from non-English-speaking migrant, refugee and asylum-seeker backgrounds. In this program, we successfully trialled new inclusive methods for sharing perspectives on participation and particularly “belonging” as it relates to Notions of Place. Chapters 6 and 7 demonstrated the embedded, deeply collaborative and inherently intersectoral nature of creative work in regional, rural and remote communities in Australia. These discussions of place also recognised the understanding of place as something abstract and interior for many people. Place is about belonging, and how that is understood by diverse communities. We also raised some challenges in, with even the best intentions, getting this right. We particularly explored the challenges of collaborating with multiple stakeholders and undertaking collaborative artmaking—and again ensuring all stakeholder perceptions and ideas are shared initially is a pivotal repeating theme. Some valuable first-hand lessons learned included the importance of networks and connections in making place-based stories and finding longer-term value in a portfolio of work, not just evaluating stand-alone projects individually. We have learnt a lot from listening to young people, who are often overlooked as stakeholders, despite the fact that many programs aim to “help” them in some way. We have listened to rural, Indigenous, migrant and refugee young people in

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Chaps. 4–6, but in Chap. 8, we used non-text-based tools to engage kindergartenaged children to garner their thoughts on in-class ballet and movement experiences. These children creatively left facilitators and stakeholders in no doubt that they can offer an important contribution to designing best practice programs that are for them—and in fact, impactful outcomes reverberated through and beyond the whole organisation in this case study, and again exemplify what change can be achieved by actively engaging with multiple stakeholders in unison. We have learned that COVID-19 did not stop the need nor desire for people to socially participate and engage within and about their lives and community. In fact, Notions of Place and a sense of belonging have been more acutely on our collective minds than ever as we start re-entering communities and researching face-to-face again. In Chap. 9, we outlined new approaches we designed and trialled during COVID-19 “lockdown” to experiment with participating online in creative placemaking activities. Defining adequately “sense of place” and creative “place-making” are tied to “belonging” are areas we will continue to explore with Notions of Place. Observing all stages of planning, development and delivery of programs of large scale through to small bespoke events has proven to foster continual improvement to create evaluation frameworks that richly inform all stakeholders. We have found that rigorous processes to support deep engagement between all stakeholders involved in the design and delivery of arts and cultural activities and experiences—including funding bodies, arts organisations and communities—can offer more inclusive and participatory avenues for determining the nature of success and impact in specific places and locales and for the people who live there. We recognise there are significant limitations in “one-size-fits-all” approaches to impact assessment and that greater sensitivity to place provides a means of unravelling diverse values ascribed to arts and culture and the situated and specific nature of impact. While quantitative methods can flatten the experiences and impacts that arts and culture have on people’s lives and communities, we would assert that non-textbased tools and methods offer profound avenues for revealing and communicating the contribution they make to education, health (and wellbeing) outcomes, a sense of belonging and the cohesion of whole communities. Our examples over the last decade demonstrate the move we have made as researchers away from relying solely on quantitative and qualitative research methods, to also ensure we incorporate an array of non-text-based tools (such as video, audio, images, Web-based data analytics, drawings, physical artefacts/artworks and arts-based activities) to more proficiently capture tangible and intangible value in our projects. Narrative and story-based tools and methods can provide critical avenues for including the voices of participants and community members in arts and culture. In this book, we have explored how including these voices—as genuine stakeholders— can allow a coherent expression of value and impact, and how they can also inform broader stakeholders in their design of programs that value Notions of Place, social inclusion and belonging for both individuals and communities.

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References Durose, C., Beebeejaun, Y., Rees, J., Richardson, J., & Richardson, L. (2011). Towards coproduction in research with communities. Arts and Humanities Research Council. https://ahrc. ukri.org/documents/project-reports-and-reviews/connected-communities/towards-co-produc tion-in-research-with-communities/. Accessed February 1, 2021 Goldbard, A. (2015). The metrics syndrome: Cultural scientism and its discontents. In L. MacDowall, M. Badham, E. Blomkamp, & K. Dunphy (Eds.), Making culture count: The politics of cultural measurement (pp. 214–227). Palgrave Macmillan. Paquette, J., Beauregard, D., & Gunter, C. (2017). Settler colonialism and cultural policy: The colonial foundations and refoundations of Canadian cultural policy. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 23, 269–284. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2015.1043294