Arts-therapy as innovative educational strategy for embodied narrative, lifelong learning and inclusion

Abstract

Art, artistic expression and arts-therapy can be an opportunity to the pedagogy need to develop effective, innovative and avant-garde visions and strategies on issues considered crucial for cohesion and inclusion, in particular regarding migration issue. Dance-movement-therapy is central to this project which is configured as art-based research in the educational / intercultural field. It is a political-pedagogical project starting within the school context to open up to the territory. The research question therefore aims to verify whether arttherapy can create inclusive and intercultural environments, integrate with autobiographical methods through embodied narratives and stimulate selfawareness and lifelong learning. Main aims are: analyzing ways of inclusion, making significant and transformative changes to growth processes, modifying prejudices and stereotypes. The research, moving within the theoretical and methodological framework of the research-intervention, followed a mixed method preserving its qualitative nature, following the phenomenological and hermeneutic approach and, at the same time, using a questionnaire (Pettigrew, Meertens, 1995), which characterized the quantitative part. Among the main results, the discovery of feeling directed towards new perspectives from which to look at the world, more aware and proactive, emerged. Results have strengthened the choice of adopting a such innovative integrated educational strategy for inclusion and lifelong learning.