ABSTRACT
The choice of participatory action research (PAR) approaches is justified as a means for teachers, music/arts therapists and trainers to conduct enquiries about the impacts of sharing knowledge and skills together. PAR is seen as effective for documenting the pioneering introduction of music/arts based therapeutic teaching practices, a term coined during the Learning in a New Key (LINK) project. Ethical procedures for safeguarding participants, including young people, during the enquiries are outlined along with methods that complemented the PAR approaches. These included the use of narrative/graphic accounts from the classrooms, of an observation schedule based on Csikszentmihalyi's ideas about Flow to discern young people's engagement and of a framework to identify emerging professional competences during music/arts interventions. The chapter emphasises that the close to practice enquiries draw on the established educational traditions of reflective practitioner research. The significance of documenting classroom experiences is recognised in supporting inter professional theorising about classroom experiences, including through the use of reflexive products – crafted descriptive and reflective research outcomes that triggered participants’ willingness to engage in iterative review of practice as a basis for addressing issues of mental health in the classroom.
