This interdisciplinary research is focused on the process of empowerment in relation to the facilitation of participatory flow during a school-community art & craft project. Its reliance on trust as a synergist is explored further. The research is concerned with the attributes of an involvement that is particular to an artisan-facilitator's role, with similarities to an artists-in-school role (Galloway et al., 2006; Daichendt, 2010), aiming to understand how an artisan-facilitator's creative flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) may maintain participatory flow (Lucas, 2018), and conclusively contribute to empowerment. Being practice-led (Smith & Dean, 2009) and self-reflective (McIntosh, 2010), the research draws on my own 18 years of practice as an artisan-facilitator. This is considered in the context of a literature review. An a/r/tographic framework (Springgay et al., 2008) is applied to comprehend this wider art & craft practice as a process of living inquiry. Video data of engagement is subject to a substantive review (Harris, 2016; Heath et al., 2010; Knoblauch, 2009) and processed by multimodal analyses (Kress, 2010; Jewitt, 2011) to analyse the a/r/tographer's role in the maintenance of participatory flow. Interview data, in respect of the impressions of empowerment by the facilitated project, is transcribed and analysed. Contributing to the interdisciplinary fields of art & craft, education and psychology, the research questions and challenges the process of empowerment in connection with the role of an artisan-facilitator in education. The research has concluded that the largely understated role of an artisan- facilitator requires profession-specific knowledge and skills for maintaining participatory flow through creating trust in the group. The success of a participatory project depends more on the facilitator than it had previously been thought and this may require further acknowledgement of this role, which in turn, may necessitates expansion of the relevant training system.



Snapshot Presentation


This video offers a basic explanation of my research.

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