Creative Approaches to Health Education

New Ways of Thinking, Making, Doing, Teaching and Learning

Deborah Lupton, Deana Leahy, Deborah Lupton, Deana Leahy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000476361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This book shows how creative methods, drawing on innovative arts-based and design-based approaches, can be employed in health education contexts. It takes a very broad view of 'health education', considering it as applying not only in school settings but across the lifespan, and as including physical education and sexuality education as well as public health campaigns, health activist initiatives and programmes designed for training educators and health professionals.

The chapters outline a series of case studies contributed by leaders in the field, describing projects using a wide variety of creative methods conducted in a variety of global contexts. These include a rich constellation of arts-based and design-based methods and artefacts: sculptures, dance, walking and other somatic movement, diaries, paintings, drawings, zines, poems and other creative writing, body maps, collages, stories, films, photographs, theatre performances, soundscapes, potions, rock gardens, brainstorming, debates, secret ballots, murals and graffiti walls. There are no rules or guidelines outlined in these contributions about 'how to do' creative approaches to health education. However, the methods in the case studies the authors describe are explained in detail so that they can be adopted or re-invented in other contexts. More importantly, these contributions provide inspiration. They demonstrate what can be done in the field of health education (however it is defined) to go beyond the often stultifying and conventional boundaries it has set for itself.

Creative Approaches to Health Education demonstrates that creative approaches can be used to inspire those working and teaching in health education and their publics to think and do otherwise as well as advance health education research and pedagogies into new, exciting and provocative directions. It will be of interest to postgraduate students and researchers in education and health-related fields who want to explore and experiment with creative methods and craftivism in applied inquiry.

1

Thinking, making, doing, teaching and learning

Bringing creative methods into health education

Deborah Lupton and Deana Leahy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003126508-1

Introduction

Arts-based and other creative approaches to social research, such as design research and crafting, have begun to gather interest and momentum in recent times. Several useful introductory books on creative methods for researchers have been published over the past decade. These include Betsy Greer’s Craftivism (2014), Bella Martin and Bruce Hanington’s Universal Methods of Design (2012), Gillian Rose’s Visual Methodologies (2016), Doing Visual Ethnography by Sarah Pink (2021), The Creative Qualitative Researcher (2019) by Ronald Pelias and The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods (Pauwels & Mannay, 2019). Patricia Leavy has made several key contributions, including her book Fiction as Research Practice (2016) and her edited volumes Method Meets Art (2020) and Handbook of Arts-based Research (2018). Helen Kara and her colleagues are also prominent in this body of literature, with Creative Research Methods (Kara, 2020), Creative Writing for Social Research (Phillips & Kara, 2021) and Creative Research Methods in Education (Kara, Lemon, Mannay, & McPherson, 2021). The Routledge Handbook of Disability Arts, Culture and Media (Hadley & McDonald, 2018) provides many examples of arts-based research focuses on disability topics. Another important work is Wayfinding and Critical Autoethnography (Iosefo, Jones, & Harris, 2021), an edited collection with contributions from people in the Global South, Indigenous people and people of colour.

As these volumes demonstrate, creative approaches encompass a wide variety of methods: photography, film making, drama, music, dance, autoethnography, poetic inquiry, fiction, sewing, knitting, zine making, painting, body mapping, drawing, collaging, modelling, speculative design and many more. Many of these books focus on the use of creative methods for social research. We argue, however, that creative approaches can also offer playful, imaginative and exciting ways for pedagogies as well as for research: inspiring new ways of thinking, making, doing, teaching and learning. More specifically, we make the case for why creative methods are important for health education. In this book, we want to demonstrate that arts-based and design-based approaches can be used to inspire those working and teaching in health education and their publics to think and do otherwise as well as advance health education research and pedagogies into new and exciting directions. As we argue, arts-based and design-based methods can operate to generate research-creations that are multisensory and more-than-representational, bringing together imaginative and affective forces in lively and provocative ways.

A primary aim of this book is to contribute to what might be described as ‘the creative turn’ (Byrne, Elliott, Saltus, & Angharad, 2018) in health-related social research by showing how creative methods can be employed in health education contexts. We take a very broad view of ‘health education’, considering it as applying not only in school settings but across the lifespan, and as including physical education and sexuality education as well as public health campaigns, health activist initiatives and programmes designed for training educators and health professionals. The chapters outline a series of case studies describing projects that have already been successfully undertaken. There are no rules or guidelines outlined in these contributions about ‘how to do’ creative approaches to health education. However, the methods in the case studies the authors describe are explained in enough detail that they can be adopted or re-invented in other contexts. More importantly, these contributions provide inspiration. They demonstrate what can be done in the field of health education (however it is defined) to go beyond the often stultifying and conventional boundaries it has set for itself.

Towards creative methods in health education

A range of health-related pedagogies, including health promotion, health education, sex and relationship education and physical education, are endeavours that are ripe for expansion of their methods and visions. For some time now, each field has been subject to significant critique, with calls to transform practice following close behind (see, e.g., Alfrey, Burke, O’Connor, & Hall, 2020; Leahy, McCuaig, Burrows, Wright, & Penney, 2016). Given these various calls, we want to suggest that these fields should and could benefit from developing imaginative ways forward and acknowledging the intensely affective, sensory and political dimensions of efforts to encourage people to learn about their bodies and how to achieve and sustain good health, wellbeing and positive sexualities.

Health-related pedagogies are founded in scientistic disciplines such as anatomy, nutrition, physiology, psychology and epidemiology. For too long, health pedagogies have been mired in conventional, risk-averse, victim-blaming and (to be frank) boring approaches that tend to lecture people rather than excite their interest in their health and wellbeing. Welch and Leahy (2018) refer to these approaches collectively as ‘death education’ – where publics are schooled in the many ways they might die and how they can avoid it. Health education across the lifespan has tended to embrace conventional norms of embodiment rather than challenge them. It has often operated to body shame and excludes those across age groups who do not conform to narrow ideals and standards of health status, body weight, food intake, sexuality, physical abilities and fitness levels. Health and physical education have continually reinforced gender norms, marginalised and stigmatised queerness, shamed people for their sexual expression or drug-using practices and relentlessly parroted neoliberal exhortations to ‘look after yourself’ and ‘avoid risk’ (Fitzpatrick & Tinning, 2013; Leahy, 2014; Wright, O’Flynn, & Welch, 2018). In these fields, good health and physical fitness are represented as imperatives that should be achieved above other interests or needs (Lupton, 1995): even for people who live in desperate conditions of poor housing and poverty, or who are routinely faced with violence, racism, misogyny, homophobia or other forms of socioeconomic disadvantage and abuse (Fitzpatrick & Tinning, 2013; Martinson & Elia, 2018).

In response to these deficiencies and blindsides, a move towards critical health pedagogies has developed in academic research and teaching: including overtly activist initiatives and considering novel ways of encouraging publics, policymakers and those entering both health education and physical education professions to examine and challenge their precepts (Leahy & Simovska, 2017; Lupton & Leahy, 2019; Wright et al., 2018; Alfrey et al., 2020). Thus far, however, despite growing awareness and acknowledgement of the importance of using and promoting creativity as part of successful and engaging pedagogies, creative approaches in school-based curricula or health education initiatives for broader publics have been thin on the ground (Welch, Alfrey, & Harris, 2021). A gradual and tentative taking up of creative approaches in health and physical education training, policy development and research is beginning to become evident (Alfrey et al., 2020; Byrne et al., 2018; Lupton & Leahy, 2019; Welch et al., 2021), but these are early days and there is still much to explore.

There are several other fields of inquiry towards which health education could draw inspiration in developing its creativity. The field of medical humanities has incorporated arts-based methods for a long time and health-related social research, in general, is beginning to embrace them (Boydell et al., 2016; Lupton, 2021a, 2021b). Craftivism (a combination of crafting and activism) was a popular response to the injustices of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, with the renowned AIDS Memorial Quilt a standout example (Capozzola, 2002). Craftivism has since inspired researchers to apply it to topics as diverse as the experience of living in an aged care home (Pappne Demecs & Miller, 2019), food insecurity (Reagan, 2019) and the COVID-19 crisis (Sullivan, 2020). Design researchers have also frequently used creative methods in their inquiries into how people engage with health-related objects and services and imagine future developments (Kenning, 2019; Peçaibes, Cardoso, & Giesteira, 2018). These approaches often incorporate sensory methods, in which participants are inspired by touching, smelling, tasting or hearing elements as well as viewing objects, thus engendering rich responses (Khot, Lupton, Dolejšová, & Mueller, 2017).

In another field of inquiry, critical feminist and health psychologists and sociologists have used the technique of body mapping in their research as a way of inviting people to consider the sensory dimensions of their bodies and how it feels experience sexuality or states of health or ill health (Gastaldo, Rivas-Quarneti, & Magalhães, 2018). The narrative-based story completion approach has recently gathered momentum in feminist psychology: particularly for researching sensitive or embarrassing topics (Clarke & Braun, 2019). In the sociology of sport and physical cultural studies, adjacent to but not always intersecting with health and physical education, researchers have led the way in incorporating creative methods. For example, poetic inquiry has been applied to a range of topics concerning sport and exercise for some years now (Borovica, 2019; Lupton, 2021b). Sexualities scholars too have embraced creative methods to engage better with everyday stories of sexualities in schools (Allen, 2011; Gilbert, Fields, Mamo, & Lesko, 2018). Other forms of creative writing are also becoming increasingly common (Brice, Clark, & Thorpe, 2020) and methods such as scrapbooking (Safron, 2020), creative non-fiction (Orr, Smith, Arbour-Nicitopoulos, & Wright, 2020) and autoethnography (Laurendeau, 2019) have also been taken up.

Theoretical approaches

Creative social research is also imbued with social theory. At the heart of this book is the idea that teaching and learning – and indeed, soci...