Page 6 - Thinking through Diversity with Art

(1) How does Research Become Artwork and a Teaching Resource?
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The project involved ethnographic field work with students and communities from Chinese ethnic backgrounds in the Northern part of England. This included extensive interviews and observations with 11-15 years old students with Chinese ethnic backgrounds, their parents, teachers and community members from May 2019 through August 2020. Throughout the COVID-19 lockdown, Dr Bonnie Pang worked with creative collaborators in England (Writer Mary Cooper, Production manager Tony Macaluso, Play director Olwen May, five professional artists and two children participants) and Hong Kong (Comic artist Bonnie Pang) in producing four radio drama scripts and three recordings and two comics based on the research data. The artwork is used to disseminate the research to more people and to engage diverse communities in creative and playful ways.
This teaching resource is designed to increase the capacity of academics and students to teach and learn about ethnic diversity and children’s health-related experiences through arts-based methods.
This teaching resource includes three workshops, in which radio dramas and/or comics can be used as a starting point for developing understanding and emotional connection with the overlooked British Chinese diasporas communities’ health-related experiences.
Each of these workshops includes 1.5 hours of activities with a radio drama recording and script and/or comic, discussion questions, suggested readings and assessment for teaching and learning in relation to diversity work. The three workshops do not need to be used chronologically and they can be led by students or teachers depending on the lesson structure. Some of the activities with performative elements can be conducted as an assessment.
The radio drama scripts are written by Mary Cooper (Writer in Leeds, UK) based on the ethnographic research data provided by Dr Bonnie Pang and later co-produced into recordings for online dissemination. The comics drawn by Bonnie Pang (Comic artist in Hong Kong) are based on the radio drama scripts. The stories are
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