Art therapy as communities of practice

To get out of the old binaries, it might be useful to think of art therapy not as a unified profession but perhaps more pragmatically as a complex social landscape that contains many, many communities of practice (Kapitan, 2014). A community of practice – yours and mine – is a group of people who share a common sense of purpose and who connect their practices, resources, and perspectives into a diverse knowledge base that informs their work (Wenger, 2008). Art therapy, I have recognised,

has wonderful richness in its practices, boundaries, peripheries, overlaps, connections, and encounters. We might imagine many encampments all along the river of knowledge, like art therapy villages having their own histories and local characters. The river itself [has] its currents and shallows, deeper pools and landings [...] Clearly, what you take as knowledge and how you think and practice is the product of many interactions in the terrain. (Kapitan, 2014, p.12)

A single art therapy practice within a community of practice is necessarily influenced by its surrounding contexts of culture, language, institutions, ethics, supervisory relationships, regulators and other public policy concerns, client outcomes, other professionals, and so on. We can complicate the practice reality even further by locating the art therapy landscape in the twenty-first century, in which art therapy also intersects with the fluid realities of the internet and social media, online networking and learning communities, online client communities, and myriad other complexities (Kapitan, 2014). As it continues to migrate around the globe and become intertwined with distinctly local cultures, moreover, we may come to understand that art therapy can no longer be conceived as a single profession. Rather than a professional role or identity, what may define art therapy in the future is a common sense of purpose, brought by people coming together in the dissolving boundaries of an increasingly globalised world.

Wenger (1998) identified three ways to identify with a community of practice: (a) through one’s own engagement, (b) by imagining the places and positions of others, and (c) by re-aligning or positioning oneself with particular discourses. Each mode calls attention to one’s standpoint or position in the landscape, one’s trajectory through it, and the ways in which one may hold multiple memberships or identities. For example, we can nurture professional identity by engaging more deeply in our daily work of art therapy or by committing to making a difference for clients in the local milieu. Via the second mode – imagining others – we can traverse geographic, theoretical, methodological, and other boundaries and push beyond current limitations by entertaining new or different perspectives. With the third mode, of realignment, art therapists can build a career trajectory through the art therapy landscape by relocating or reinventing themselves as the situation requires. In this way,

professional knowledge is not a thing but a dynamic that arises from how people live in their landscape of practice. How we inhabit art therapy is material to the sort of professional we become and the identities we have. Whenever we get together to discuss theory, practice, or research, what we are doing is negotiating and presenting different parts of the landscape to each other and persuading one another of its importance. (Kapitan, 2014, p.16)

A dynamic art therapy research paradigm

Thinking of research, then, how might we as art therapists open our minds to this incredible twenty-first century world of flux and change? What if we conceived a new paradigm for art therapy research? Such an invention would have to be sufficiently flexible, permeable, and multi-layered for these times, as well as being able to accommodate the inevitable variations and inconsistencies in art therapy ideas and practices throughout the world. Back in 1965 when Kuhn coined the term ‘research paradigm’, his definition did not emphasise methodology as is common today. Instead, a research paradigm was defined as centred on three characteristics: (a) mutual engagement in specific problems or issues to advance knowledge, (b) shared practice and understandings about appropriate research techniques to address those issues, and (c) a shared researcher identity that is reinforced through exchange and networks (Kuhn, 1970). Additionally, all these activities operated in a research paradigm by connecting to multilevel, overlapping, and potentially fluid communities on various levels.

Interestingly, these same four criteria that define a research paradigm precisely map onto the notion of art therapy as ‘communities of practice’ rather than as a single profession. I argue that if we rooted our research agenda in practices and communities instead of philosophies or orthodoxies of methodology, an array of possibilities would present themselves with respect to where art therapists put their focus and choose to construct knowledge and create greater impact. In such a paradigm various sub-communities of art therapy would be understood to exist within different subject areas, different orientations, and different research traditions (e.g., post-positivist, constructivist, historical, etc.).

In a community of practice, research and practice can be one and the same. Research can inform one’s practice; practice can inform one’s research. Figure 3 illustrates this idea of cross-fertilisation. Moving in the direction of research for practice, we can investigate art therapy to develop evidence-based practice; with research into practice we are able to create practice-based evidence. Both these positions turn practice into an object of study. Movement in the opposite direction, however, positions practice not as an object but as a research method; that is, research through and as practice. The kinds of studies produced in this way include participant research, participatory research, action research, and participatory action research among others. When leading with art practice (i.e., practice-led research) we produce art-based research.

The following are four examples of how research can be dynamically positioned within a community of practice paradigm (Figure 4). The first is the doctoral research of Jonathan Haag (2015). Over the course of many years, Haag utilised Silver’s (1993) Draw-A-Story (DAS) assessment in his clinical practice. The DAS is one of the oldest and most independently validated art-based assessment for various clinical conditions (see e.g., Earwood, Fedroko, Holzman, Montanari, & Silver, 2005; Kopytin & Lebedev, 2013; Silver & Ellison, 1995). But Haag was not interested in Silver’s assessment as a means of clinical appraisal or research measure; as a practitioner he valued the DAS for its tremendous value as a creative tool in art therapy. His research re-conceptualised the DAS to document its therapeutic effects in actual, real-life practice. For his study, Haag invited client participants to recreate their DAS drawings in a stop-motion video, along with an added voice-over in which clients told the narrative of their stories in their own words. The participants worked with the DAS creatively in therapy, then re-created their DAS drawings in the medium of a video. Finally, they viewed their video in a subsequent therapy session. The entire process produced a ‘ripple effect’ that transformed the participants’ therapy.

Haag’s (2015) study is a dynamic re-positioning of a traditional art assessment that can promote scientific knowledge, to that of a creative tool producing verifiable therapeutic outcomes. New knowledge was created, first by drawing from the researcher’s understandings, beliefs, and attitudes to pose new possibilities for an old idea, and then by organising and re-shuffling these ideas into coherent patterns. Having re-contextualised old patterns and ideas into new ones, assimilation and/or accommodation become possible. Haag produced new knowledge about the therapeutic use of the DAS through re-purposing the assessment’s established function and testing out the validity of the new ideas produced. Dissonance between established and newly created ideas, insights, and outcomes was resolved through realignment and repositioning of art therapy values and practices.

The research of DeLucia (2015) is a dynamic example of what happens when an evidence-based study crosses into participatory practice. DeLucia found that most knowledge about art therapy with veterans comes from evidence-based treatments of post-traumatic stress. However, her art therapy work with combat veterans is aimed at veterans’ struggles with re-adjustment to civilian life. DeLucia decided to acquire evidence of art therapy’s effectiveness by directly involving USA combat veterans who were clients to participate as co-researchers in her study. The client-veterans documented their own outcomes from art therapy as evidence of what approaches worked best in their treatment.

Another dynamic example is an art-based research study conducted by Klorer (2014) after discovery of an old newspaper clipping in an abandoned building that inspired artwork about her family’s and local history. Collaborating with a local natural history museum, Klorer playfully hid her art works (many of them altered books and sculptures) throughout the library where patrons would come upon them unexpectedly. The library, in turn, sponsored community workshops for people who were researching their family histories. Exposure to Klorer’s artworks inspired the workshop participants to incorporate art-based research into their own family projects. Klorer’s study was grounded in artistic knowing but crossed over from her own art-based inquiry to a form of community art therapy, which created a ripple effect that impacted more than 500 people.

As a final example, for over a decade I have been involved in collectively organised action research to address the effects of trauma in Nicaraguan communities (Kapitan, Litell, & Torres, 2011). My collaborators are explicitly organised as a community of practice to address common needs. Initially they invited me to incorporate art therapy into collective research projects that were being conducted by 30 to 50 local community leaders. They, in turn, multiplied their research knowledge by sharing it with people in their local communities and using art therapy to assess what they needed and how to go about it. Where once there had been no art therapy, and art-making itself was relatively unknown or under-utilised, today over 1000 people are using art therapy in over 20 research projects all over Nicaragua.

In our study, community participants generated local, grassroots knowledge and societal impacts that expressly addressed social justice concerns. As ‘ordinary people’, community members are continuing to transform knowledge through research in just the ways I am describing here. Acting on “a universal right to participate in the production of knowledge” (Freire, 1997, p.xi), such research collectives are being organised throughout the world by disenfranchised or marginalised people. Those of us who are interested in research to inform art therapy would benefit from connecting with these communities of practice, given the latter’s emergence as leaders in transformative research. Thus, we might recognise the fundamentally collective bases of learning and research, which is to say that the knowledge we acquire is always shared knowledge; the process of acquiring it is through participation and shared practice. Research does not exist in isolation nor hew to a singular place or hold up the perfectly generalisable research design as a community’s only valid model. Rather, research is conducted in collaboration with and through relationships with the people who are closest to the problems and critical questions, yielding new, innovative thinking and solutions.

If art therapists were to conceive of art therapy research within communities of practice, the differences and inconsistencies in the art therapy discourse would quite possibly no longer be a problem. This is because communities of practice can provide a research paradigm to accommodate all the ways art therapy is used and the variety of motives that art therapy researchers have. Rather than treat research design decisions as purely individual, or even entirely rational, we would accommodate the ‘social’ real-world art therapy factors that influence research frames and methodological choices.

What’s our impact?

In the world today, people are continually exposed to the principle of connectivity: the rapid exchange of knowledge and ideas that is increasingly internationalised, diverse, and interdependent. Why not make better use of it, especially for a relatively small field like art therapy where our efforts are dispersed across different geographic and cultural locations? The ripple effect of these exchanges produces growth and change as it carries knowledge across time, distance, and cultural/disciplinary differences. Collaboration and rapid dissemination across interconnected groups offer tremendous opportunities to transform knowledge directly into action.

Imagine what art therapy would be like if every art therapist asked the question: ‘What’s my impact – not just for one’s own clients but for every art therapist’s clients and toward a better, more just world?’ The problem, I’ve observed, is the temptation to say no. We might say, ‘oh, I’m an art therapist, not a researcher’ or ‘oh, I don’t have time. I don’t know how I’d go about it’. But take another look at your clients and consider: what if they are the world’s researchers and change agents? Research that multiplies impact and creates change is highly valued among the very ordinary people I have collaborated with, despite living in one of the poorest countries in the world and suffering from traumas, poverty, and economic despair. They are committed, socially engaged researchers. They, more than anyone, could be forgiven for not having the time, resources, money, skill and knowledge, influence or power to make change and increase impact. But that is not the case. They are doing the work of knowledge construction and transformation. They are claiming their voices and making research a priority despite having little expectation of success.

It is time for us to dissolve the barriers and learn to maximise art therapy impacts in the world. When research moves beyond individuals and into the wider world, its effects are multiplied and transformed by interactions with diverse standpoints, identities, and sociopolitical experiences. Thus, we come to know much more about the world than we could possibly access solely through our own art therapy practices.