This volume focuses on new trends in art and education in Japan. It will inspire and provoke discussion among researchers and practitioners in various educational settings about the future direction of art education in Japan and around the world.

Arts-Based Methods in Education Around the World aims to investigate arts-based encounters in educational settings in response to a global need for studies that connect the cultural, inter-cultural, cross-cultural, and global elements of arts-based methods in education. In this extraordinary collection, contributions are collected from experts all over the world and involve a multiplicity of arts genres and traditions. These contributions bring together diverse cultural and educational perspectives and include a large variety of artistic genres and research methodologies.The topics covered in the book range from policies to pedagogies, from social impact to philosophical conceptualisations. They are informative on specific topics, but also offer a clear monitoring of the ways in which the general attention to the arts in education evolves through time.

In an effort to challenge the ways in which colonial power relations and Eurocentric knowledges are reproduced in participatory research, this book explores whether and how it is possible to use arts-based methods for creating more horizontal and democratic research practices. In discussing both the transformative potential and limitations of arts-based methods, the book asks: What can arts-based methods contribute to decolonising participatory research and its processes and practices? The book takes part in ongoing debates related to the need to decolonise research, and investigates practical contributions of arts-based methods in the practice-led research domain. Further, it discusses the role of artistic research in depth, locating it in a decolonising context. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, design, fine arts, service design, social sciences and development studies.

In Creativities in Arts Education, Research and Practice: International Perspectives for the Future of Learning and Teaching, Leon de Bruin, Pamela Burnard and Susan Davis highlight innovative arts practices and practices of enquiry that activate diverse creativities and transform learning and teaching across a variety of places, spaces and settings.

This book presents the first comprehensive introduction to arts-based research (ABR) practices, which scholars in multiple disciplines are fruitfully using to reveal information and represent experiences that traditional methods cannot capture. Each of the six major ABR genres--narrative inquiry, poetry, music, performance, dance, and visual art--is covered in chapters that introduce key concepts and tools and present an exemplary research article by a leading ABR practitioner. Patricia Leavy discusses the kinds of research questions these innovative approaches can address and offers practical guidance for applying them in all phases of a research project, from design and data collection to analysis, interpretation, representation, and evaluation. Chapters include checklists to guide methodological decision making, discussion questions, and recommended print and online resources.

Arts-Based Research, Autoethnography, and Music Education: Singing Through a Culture of Marginalization invites readers into miroslav pavle manovski’s journey into quest of how he found his voice—literally and figuratively—by reflecting and storying from his fluid identity and roles as an artist, singer, learner, music teacher, researcher... while empowering others to find their own voice. This book is also an arts-based autoethnographic rendering of the author’s experience being tormented, harassed, and called “gay” as a means to negatively target and marginalize him. Further, this work contributes to the literature of those mercilessly harassed for perceived effeminate characteristics and to the canon of ways we may be able to rescue ourselves—to positively transform—from prior wreckage a part of our lives. It makes significant contributions to the literature on qualitative inquiry, arts-based research, autoethnography, music education, and vocal pedagogy as a means of re-presenting a rich tapestry of life experience. While this text can be read entirely for pleasure or personal growth, it will make an outstanding springboard for conversation in courses across the disciplines that deal with teacher education, music education, gender and sexual identity/orientation, intimacy, relationships and relational communication, prejudice, bullying and more. This award-wining book will additionally be of great value in courses on autoethnography, life writing, narrative inquiry, arts-based research, and music education. “Of all the recent examples of textual experiments in the social sciences that aim to create a dialectical intertwining of the autobiographical and the theoretical, this book is among the very best. Manovski’s work is at once artful, poignant, bravely self-revelatory, while simultaneously informed by the scholarship of an impressive array of academics from diverse academic fields. What awaits the reader is nothing less than a full-fledged educational experience that dazzles the mind and stirs the heart as it opens up the future.” – Tom Barone, Emeritus Professor, Arizona State University.

No one is born fully-formed: it is through self-experience in the world that we become what we are. – Paulo Freire Diversity in Japanese Education explores ‘self-experience’ of individual learners and educators in Japan. The word ‘diversity’ is not limited to one’s ethnic background. Here, diversity refers to one’s pedagogical experiences and life experiences; to the norms, beliefs and values that impact such relations. These experiences and relations are fluid as they are shaped and reshaped in global and glocal settings. They are also reflected in praxis of English language learning and teaching in Japan. The authors’ educational backgrounds vary but they all share the common ground of being educators in Japan. Through being involved in learning and/or teaching English language in Japan, they have witnessed and experienced ‘diversity’ in their own pedagogical context. The book focuses on shifting critical and reflexive eyes on qualitative studies of pedagogical experiences rather than presenting one ‘fixed’ view of Japanese education.