Arts in Health

Course Description

Introduction to Arts in Health is a three-credit, interdisciplinary course that explores the emerging, experimental field of Arts in Health. While there are many directions and priorities across the field, the National Organization for Arts in Health (known colloquially as NOAH) shares a definition that emphasizes the expansive field's focused “dedication to using the power of the arts to enhance health and well-being in diverse institutional and community contexts.” Throughout the semester, students will study the historical and contemporary roles that art and creative work have played in fostering a culture of health and well-being, explore how arts and cultural policy can be reconceived as health policy, and create art and cultural work that may contribute to good health. At the same time, we’ll practice holding questions, dilemmas, tensions and disturbances present across our cultural industries that exacerbate harms to public health.

This course will combine lectures, group discussion and activities, and student assignments to illustrate major aspects of the development of arts in health, including the process of planning, implementing, and evaluating arts participation and cultural engagement with various health outcomes. Through engagement with readings, recordings, artwork, memo-writing and discussions, students will co-construct a community of practice with peers where personal and shared commitments to health can be developed and cared for with an emphasis on health equity, community euphoria, and a sense of belonging. Multimodal scholarship assignments, conversation, and self-disciplinary critiques will offer tangible application of course concepts and activate students to initiate a discerning intuition for how their art can facilitate health and healing. This is leading-edge work that is probing and exploratory—a mind-opening exercise that encourages critical inquiry and helps students unpack their assumptions.

Course Learning Objectives

Recognize notable contributions of art and cultural work that enact values of health and well-being which are found formally in the arts in health field, as well as past and present iterations of mainstream art and community contexts.
Apply principles and theories of health promotion ethics related to creative action.
Define what has been described as Culture of Health Action Framework₁ as well as their personal definition of what good health means to them as culture-making citizens.
Identify facilitators and barriers to developing an artistic and creative practice that embodies their personal definition of good health in relation to society.
Demonstrate the ability to conceptualize arts in health across multi-level interventions by narrating the socio-political contexts for arts in health equity and accessibility.
Embody awareness and practice of art and creativity for health as cultural work.

Arts in health syllabus.pdf