Michael Koon Boon Tan
Towards a Caring Practice
2017-2020
Output: Journal Article
This research addresses the limited guidance to promote effective arts for health practice for artists in the fast-emerging interdisciplinary field of Arts and Health. With the increased mobilisation and engagement with non-therapy, non-clinically trained artists in varied settings, observers of arts and health have called for a need to establish clearer guidelines and ethics of practice for such a group.
The Caring Arts-Health Practice Framework derived from this research offers a much-needed guide. It was developed by amalgamating Tan’s arts-health practice with qualitative social science methodology (action-research case study). This unique mode of arts-health practice is proposed as critical arts-health practice, which expands current practice by enabling the arts-health practitioner to carry out research independently, build criticality among arts-health practitioners and develop an ‘insider’ view and professionalisation.
The practice framework has been dissemination in the Journal of Arts and Health (Taylor & Francis 2018) and at several International symposia including; the Art, Education & Cross Sector Collaboration Conference, Bangkok (2016), International Arts & Health Conference, Sydney (2017) and the Arts in Eldercare Seminar, Singapore (2018).
The framework also found application in training and community care resource. It was adopted by the Agency of Integrated Care (AIC) Singapore, the national agency for eldercare planning and development, for training of artists in their seminal art residency in nursing homes programme (2017) across Singapore.
The framework was subsequently incorporated in a number of creative activity tool kits, namely Sparks! Art for Wellness Toolkit (2018) and Arts, Ageing and Wellbeing Toolkit (2020). The toolkits encourage and support the roll out of creative activities to help enhance in community care services. Digital versions of the toolkits are available to the public from AIC’s resource site.
Research Output
This collection of images displays the outputs from this project. Find out more details in the full case study below.
Research Method
This project synthesises participatory art practice with qualitative research. It comprises of Three interelated phases: Research Design; Practice and Field Research; and lastly Analysis, that lead to the conceptualisation of a practice framework.
Key Methodologies:
