Handbook

What if a doctor gave you a prescription to participate in a creative workshop to help reduce your anxiety? Can watching a play or film, reading a book, or listening to music improve your health? In what ways is care itself a creative practice? In this course you will learn about how the arts can support individual and community wellbeing, amplify health messaging, and ameliorate the impacts of health challenges. You will discover what happens when the arts move into contexts such as hospitals, schools, and aged care centres. And you will uncover how these care settings have reinvigorated artistic ideas about audience, participation, ethics and aesthetics. By the end of this course, you will have a solid foundation in this exciting and growing field, its key concepts, and its leading practitioners and their works and methods. Whether you plan to become an artist, educator, health care or social worker, or you simply want to learn more about improving the health of self and others, this course will help you to develop skills for working with creativity and care.