This edited volume explores the role of arts and meditation within educational settings, and looks in particular at the preventive and developmental function of the arts in educational contexts through different theoretical perspectives. Encompassing research from an array of disciplines including theatre, psychology, neuroscience, music, psychiatry, and mindfulness, the book draws insights relevant to a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary fields. Chapters are divided into thematic sections, each outlining praxes and emphasising how educating within and through the arts can provide tools for critical thinking, creativity and a sense of agency, consequently fulfilling the need of well-being and contributing towards human flourishing. Ultimately, the book focuses on the role the arts have played in our understanding of physical and mental health, and demonstrates the new-found significance of the discipline in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. With its interdisciplinary and timely nature, this book will be essential reading for scholars, academics, and post-graduate researchers in the field of arts education, creative therapies, neuroscience, psychology, and mindfulness.

This book provides perspectives and insights across the educational system for how we might move toward living out this wish in all schools. The chapters provide perspectives on fundamental questions that have been guiding recent research on wellbeing in schools: How do school communities flourish together? How does supporting educator wellbeing connect to teaching, learning, leading in schools? What characteristics, qualities and strategies support the wellbeing of the whole school community? This book is unique in that it answers these questions from the perspectives of teachers, students, administrators in K-12 schools, as well as from university and the wider community. Importantly, these chapters provide a repertoire of varied answers to the question that underpins this shift in research toward a positive organizational perspective: How can we leverage what works well to grow more, to instill in each community member a sense of their value and capacity to contribute? These chapters serve as examples, invitations, and inspiration for readers to notice in their own contexts ways they can grow wellbeing through a focused attention on building appreciative, strengths-based, positive approaches to teaching, learning, and leading in all schools.

Mindful Alignment: Foundations of Educator Flourishing develops a foundation for educators to flourish by promoting self-awareness as a mindful approach to ongoing professional inquiry. It presents three mindful arts—the art of well-being; the art of positive relationships; and the art of living from strengths, passions, and purposes—detailing several practices that, when executed over time, can provide a focus for developing mindful alignment. The authors present an approach to personal, professional learning that encourages educators to slow down, create space to notice, and then nurture their intentions and actions toward fulfilling their purposes and passions, in order to grow a sense of flourishing at work and overcome the challenges presented by teaching in ever increasingly fast-paced, rapidly-changing, accountability-driven professional environments.

Researcher and educator of the arts Dr. Valerie Flamini is your expert guide for meaningful conscious experiences. Her research in the areas of flow theory and mindfulness revealed ways to foster elevated conscious experiences with the arts. This book may be useful to the typical person who appreciates the arts as well as those who are creators and performers of art. The chapters in this book progress from a novice approach of mindfulness during artistic engagement to activities which require more conscious control and creative output. A variety of activities are included such as sound meditation, crafting, and even cloud gazing! Chapters are rich with examples and context. Da Vinci to the Grateful Dead will inspire meaningful experiences with personalized intention. The idea is for the reader to build skills of conscious control necessary for optimum experiences as they progress through the guide. As a result, the reader may be able to foster flow in everyday activities by exercising the necessary skills in a pleasurable way, through art! Acquiring these skills may bring more enjoyment and general happiness to your everyday experiences. Inside you will discover: + Researched skills for bringing more flow to your daily experiences. + Engaging narrative about art, architecture, and music including context for indigenous, ancient, and modern artistic practices. + Encouraging ways to bring more self-awareness, compassion, conscious control, and mindfulness to any creative endeavor.

Today more than ever, our world needs creativity and innovation as key pillars to drive growth, face challenges, and stand out in a competitive and demanding world. It has become pressing to reflect on how creativity and innovation can be fostered in society, especially among the younger generation who will be the protagonists of inevitable changes in the future. This book focuses on the intrinsic and fruitful link between creativity and innovation. It encompasses a set of reflections, experiences, and insights on how these two concepts become effective levers of each other. It also focuses on how to foster creativity and innovation in people, organizations, and communities, as well as how creativity and innovation can effectively make a difference for the better in a world that increasingly needs new and innovative solutions to increasingly complex problems. From diverse cultures and scientific fields and dissimilar research methodologies, the contributions that make up this book present an integrated approach to creativity and innovation as central concepts to contribute to a better society and better world. We believe that creativity and innovation are indeed the forces that drive progress, expression, and discovery. Investing in them is investing in a better, more balanced, and sustainable world.

The Collaborative Body in Qualitative Research challenges normative philosophies that have frequently neglected the body’s place in research and then illustrates how the body is essential for all meaning making. By ‘voicing the body’, the first part of this rebellious book problematizes how the body is used/assessed, yet often silenced in academic writing. This book then fluidly moves to celebrating the body through discussing taboo topics like sex/sexuality in friendship, underwear (knickers), ageing, and death, as well as how a non-binary body moves in a heteronormative world. Through the lens of Bodyography, this book does research differently – illuminating how the body flourishes, excites knowledge, and is complicated when placed on a ‘screen’. This book celebrates a collaborative and arts-based approach. This book is a dialogue between The Bodies Collective, with dialogic resonance sections between each chapter and art pieces throughout. This book will encourage all scholars to do research differently. Anyone with a thirst to challenge normative practices in academia and who wants research to be inspiring and playful will fall in love with this book.

Sounds of the Pandemic offers one of the first critical analyses of the changes in sonic environments, artistic practice, and listening behaviour caused by the Coronavirus outbreak. This multifaceted collection provides a detailed picture of a wide array of phenomena related to sound and music, including soundscapes, music production, music performance, and mediatisation processes in the context of COVID-19. It represents a first step to understanding how the pandemic and its by-products affected sound domains in terms of experiences and practices, representations, collective imaginaries, and socio-political manipulations. This book is essential reading for students, researchers, and practitioners working in the realms of music production and performance, musicology and ethnomusicology, sound studies, and media and cultural studies.