Janet McDonald

Balancing the 'town and gown': the risky business of creating youth theatre in regional Queensland

Abstract QUE Theatre Inc. is a new youth theatre company in the rural Queensland town of Toowoomba that was established in March 2003 through a specific outcome of a regional partnership among the state theatre company, Queensland Theatre Company, the Department of Theatre at the University of Southern Queensland and the Empire Theatre which began in 2001. Although QUE Theatre Inc. receives generous advisory and in kind support from all three industry professionals, it is QUE’s relationship with a regional university (USQ) that has emerged as a key to the company’s success. The findings in this paper are a result of an audit of the programs and pedagogy at the heart of this regional youth theatre initiative.

Harnessing the Bohemian: artists as innovation partners in rural and remote communities

Book review of Harnessing the Bohemian: artists as innovation partners in rural and remote communities, by Peter Skippington, Canberra, Australian National University Press, 2016, xxvi + 327 pp.,

Wellbeing in Classroom Arts Collaborations

55.00 (paperback), ISBN 9781760460525, or free (online) ISBN 9781760460532.

Boys at Gender-Play inside the Muscular Christian Ideal

While the research undertaken across six primary schools in Queensland, Australia, for this chapter did not exclusively address wellbeing in arts collaborations in school classrooms, its undeniable presence was acknowledged consistently by all participants; teachers in particular. Faced with the possibility of the complex deployment of a National Curriculum in Australia for the first time, primary school teachers are generally reticent about the impact of a curriculum designed to measure student progress and potentially reduce capacity for wellbeing through engagement with the arts. Similar “worries” are identified by Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE) which seeks to use arts to inject passion into learning: “to bring academic subjects to life through art.” This chapter aims to draw some findings about the often ignored presence of wellbeing at the site of collaborative arts practice that is used to engage students across curriculum areas in primary school.