AVERT Seminar
Dr Meg Upton (Deakin University)
In 2013, wanting to move beyond a sports participation approach to developing community-engaged CVE activities, the Australian Federal Police brought young people together in an artistic collaboration with professional film maker Reuben Street. Central to the film making project were young people’s views on and solutions to dealing with issues that could potentially lead to radicalisation to violence. The project aimed to provide them with an opportunity in which to ‘talk back’ to representations about them by making their own representations of personal experiences and feelings. From this artistic collaboration The Dury’s Out was born, a film produced and co-written by the young people involved and members of the AFP. To accompany the film, a comprehensive education resource was created, one that addresses key learning areas in the Australian Curriculum, with emphasis throughout on arts-based approaches to learning, the capabilities of critical and creative thinking, and specific engagement for students and teachers in how to deal with sensitive or negative experiences – including radicalisation to violence. In 2018 the film and education resource were piloted in two secondary schools in Victoria. While several themes and critical questions emerged from the pilot study, this presentation will focus on ‘feelings’ and how they are represented in the data. This paper will consider how the integration of the arts with critical thinking and feeling may lead towards what Reber (2016) and Versemmay (2016) call “critical feeling” and address thinking and dispositions that may lead to radicalisation.
Bio
Dr Meg Upton is an educator and researcher who works in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University in Drama education and as a lecturer in Curriculum and Pedagogy in the Master of Teaching. She has an extensive background as a teaching artist in theatre arts companies including Melbourne Theatre Company, Malthouse Theatre, Arena Theatre Company, Polyglot Theatre, and Arts Centre Melbourne, and is a specialist consultant in resource writing, having created over one hundred education resources for performing arts and educational organisations around Australia. Meg’s research interests lie in the aesthetic and social impact of the arts on young people, particularly in drama and theatre. She has participated in two major ARC research projects focusing on these impacts, presenting research papers at numerous conferences in Australia and internationally. Meg is also the author of the Currency House Platform Paper: Education and the Arts – Creativity in the promised new order (with Naomi Edwards, 2014).