Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Theses
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ItemCollaborative songwriting with children experiencing homelessness and family violence to understand their resources( 2018)This thesis uses a range of creative and inductive scholarly approaches to highlight the creative resources that children bring to research, as well as the range of resources that they draw upon in the face of adversity. Children’s voices are central to this research and their contributions will be used to inform future music therapy practice, the homelessness and family violence system, and child welfare research. The majority of the literature about children experiencing homelessness and family violence focuses on reporting the perceived ‘problems’ and ‘challenges’ faced by children, with little acknowledgement of children’s personal resources and capacities in times of crisis (Fairchild, McFerran & Thompson, 2017). As a result, children are represented through the lens of risk which in turn impacts the ways that they are viewed, understood and responded to by professionals, researchers and the service system. Drawing upon participatory, resource-oriented and arts-based approaches, this research seeks to balance the representation of children in this context by exploring their resources and what helps them to ‘do well’ throughout their experiences of homelessness and family violence. Songwriting was used as a collaborative research method to co-construct knowledge with children through group and individual interviews. The children were engaged as co-researchers in generating and interpreting the data, and in representing the results. The group interviews focused on what music means to children in this context and through group songwriting the children identified that music offers an escape from the outside world and provides hope that the future will be better. The individual songwriting interviews were used to expand the breadth of this examination of resources and the children described a range of supports, such as friends, family, sport, pets, journaling, hope and creativity. Six identified themes explore the role that these resources play in children’s lives: seeking refuge, wanting to feel safe, hoping for a better future, feeling cared for, being self determined, and protecting self and others. In order to reflect further on the results of the collaborative song writing projects, two additional reflexive projects sought to provide further depth and integration of knowledge. The first was a collaborative article written with an 11-year-old child (‘Malakai Mraz’) who believed that learning to play the drums in music therapy changed his life. The process of writing the article provided an avenue for reflecting upon our experiences of engaging in music therapy together. In the final reflexive project I used songwriting as an arts-based method to explore my own experience of being involved in this research. I used concepts of vicarious trauma and vicarious resilience to discuss how arts-based approaches might also support other researchers to process their own experiences of becoming immersed in deeply personal research data.