Creative Adventures in Education and Human Services: Part 1

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

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

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