Author(s)

Eva Bojner Horwitz^1,2,3, David Thyrén¹

¹Department of Music, Pedagogy and Society, Royal College of Music, Stockholm, Sweden.
²Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Solna, Sweden.
³Center for Social Sustainability, CSS, Karolinska Institutet, Solna, Sweden.

There are few studies on how to use art to prepare students, through higher education, to lead a sustainable and healthy working life. In order to enhance and develop the learning environments regarding creativity and health in higher academic education curricula, more studies are needed. Studies linking the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from the agenda 2030 into higher education practice are also few. The aim of this study is to gather information from creative music students to be able to build an educational platform for “arts & health” that facilitates a sustainable future working life for students. The results from two focus group interviews were used to develop an interview guide for five following in-depth individual interviews. The analytical lens that was used to conduct the interviews was based on a phenomenological hermeneutic method. The complete interpretation of the study is: “Educating meaning instead of perfection—Building a Health-Arts-Sustainability (HeArtS) platform”. According to our results, meaning is not created by doing things that you are good at. The students want a curriculum where the focus is on challenges; skills that you are not good at and therefore need stimulating. The students want more collective self-aware- ness and body awareness training and sharing in their curricula. The results strongly imply that art-based curricula or the art intervention programs increasingly practiced in academia can be effective for enhancing workplace creativity and sustainable health in working life. Therefore, we suggest that higher educational programs should employ more art-related creativitytraining programs in the future.

Arts, Higher Education, Creativity, Health, Sustainability, Hearts-Program, Working Life

Horwitz, E. and Thyrén, D. (2022) Developing a Sustainable and Healthy Working Life with the Arts: The HeArtS Programme—A Research Dialogue with Creative Students. Creative Education, 13, 1667-1681. doi: 10.4236/ce.2022.135105.