Author/s: Faith Thorley
Edition: Volume 51, Number 4, Special edition, December 2011
Summary: I use my passion and skills as an artist to deal with my various disabilities resulting from brain tumour surgery. The ‘artvantages’ of this approach have been many: improved self-esteem and a greater sense of wellbeing, to name just two. On reflection and after revisiting the experiences of my healing journey, I now know when this journey began. Today I’ve come to recognise its beginning as the onset of my personal transformation.
My aim in this paper is to explain how I believe my personal transformation happened after my brain tumour surgery and to describe the transformative learning process that followed. I will support these explanations with valuable insights that I’ve gained from research in adult education and my involvement with others with disabilities. Next, I will introduce my interpretation of a phenomenon that I call ‘arts-based resistance learning’. This has been a major phase in my personal transformative journey and the subject of my current PhD inquiry. I am strongly committed to my research inquiry because it is uncovering new ways of using art to enhance life, which gives me hope, and may inspire and so assist other like afflicted people, health professionals and concerned individuals.
Keywords: disability, transformation, brain tumour, adult education, wellbeing
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This article is part of AJAL, Volume 51_4_Special Edition. The entire volume is available in .pdf for purchase here.