About:
Barbara Bickel is a writer, artist, researcher, teacher and an Emerita Associate Professor of Art Education at Southern Illinois University. She is co-artistic director at Studio M*: A Collaborative Research Creation Lab Intersecting Arts, Culture and Healing. A socially-engaged and collaborative artist she works with humans and more-than-humans. She maintains a multi-media studio and ritual performance practice and exhibits internationally. She has published articles and book chapters in over 60 peer reviewed journals and anthologies, and is co-founder and co-editor of “Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal”. Her books include: “Art, Ritual and Trance Inquiry: Arational Learning in an Irrational World”, the co-edited book “Arts-Based and Contemplative Practices in Research and Teaching: Honoring Presence” with Susan Walsh and Carl Leggo, the co-edited book “Arts-Based Educational Research Trajectories: Career Reflections by Authors of Outstanding Dissertations” with Rita L. Irwin and Richard Siegesmund, and most recently, the co-authored book “Art-Care Practices for Restoring the Communal: Education, Co-Inquiry and Healing” with her life-partner R. Michael Fisher.
Books:
Art-Care Practices for Restoring the Communal: Education, Co-Inquiry and Healing (see below)
“Art, Ritual and Trance Inquiry: Arational Learning in an Irrational World”
This book provides insights into the practice of trance-based inquiry through arts-based research, serving as a beacon to guide the way to thresholds of ancient, yet novel, transmissions. Embedded in lived experience and theory, this book introduces the reader to the liminal space of place and trance-based inquiry processes entwined with creative artworkings. The interweaving of art, ritual, and trance-based inquiry opens sacred spaces for learning and unlearning that bring spirit into form. Each chapter presents examples from women artists and culminates with experiential practices drawn from the author’s decades of creative peregrinations to assist artists, teachers, and researchers in transmitting a conscious way of practicing and creating with trance.
“Arts-Based and Contemplative Practices in Research and Teaching: Honoring Presence”
Susan Walsh, Barbara Bickel and Carl Leggo, co-editors
This volume presents a scholarly investigation of the ways educators engage in artistic and contemplative practices – and why this matters in education. Arts-based learning and inquiry can function as a powerful catalyst for change by allowing spiritual practices to be present within educational settings, but too often the relationship between art, education and spirituality is ignored. Exploring artistic disciplines such as dance, drama, visual art, music, and writing, and forms such as writing-witnessing, freestyle rap, queer performative autoethnograph, and poetic imagination, this book develops a transformational educational paradigm. Its unique integration of spirituality in and through the arts addresses the contemplative needs of learners and educators in diverse educational and community settings.
