“Why Art?” Ways Of Responding To The World Around Us

This study represents an exploration of how the Expressive Arts and Arts Based Research can be introduced in a seminar class in a rural university in the southeastern United States. It reflects an opportunity to present a curricular format much different from the market driven structural design associated with an increasingly corporate consumed culture that saturates most aspects of our society, even our educational system (Behrent, 2016). This study represents a form of education that defies the structure inherent in not only the sterile features that define our current predicament around education as usual, with its obsession around data driven models, evaluative measures, and accountability policing; but also offers up a form of research that levels the playing field of all involved, researcher and participant alike.