Creative Engagement

Anyone who cares for someone living with dementia will gain valuable knowledge from this compassionate book.

An activity book to help caregivers improve the quality of life of people who have dementia. Whether they are cared for at home or in an assisted living community, adults living with dementia should be offered a life that is interesting and fun. But what can you do to enhance the everyday experience of a loved one who is losing interest in or is unable to participate in their old hobbies and pursuits? In Creative Engagement, dementia activity expert Rachael Wonderlin and developmental psychology professor Geri M. Lotze provide dozens of creative, hands-on ways to engage with people living with cognitive loss. Teaching caregivers how to find dementia-friendly daily activities and introduce them into a person's life, this comprehensive, empathetic guide is aimed at both family members and professionals. Twelve chapters full of useful, tangible activities touch on a range of topics, including exercise, technology, cooking and baking, memory games, and arts and crafts. Focusing on both group and individual dynamics, mundane activities and specially tailored pursuits, Wonderlin and Lotze offer proven strategies for interacting with people living with dementia. The authors include detailed tips for building a dementia-friendly environment, creating a daily calendar, and scheduling community entertainment. They also suggest special activities geared toward people in hospice care and give targeted advice for dealing with caregiver stress. Drawing on Wonderlin's own practice while incorporating the latest scientific research on dementia and eldercare, Creative Engagement is unique in its dementia-positive approach. Anyone who cares for someone living with dementia will gain valuable knowledge from this compassionate book.

This book offers an extensive range of ideas and practical developing service users' creativity including songmaking, drama, dance, creative writing, music, video and visual arts. It promotes innovation and encourages a fresh and enthusiastic approach to care that will appeal to anyone with a love of creative arts as a means of expression. The wide-ranging approach encompasses many different voices from patients, artists and healthcare professionals. "Creative Engagement in Palliative Care" is highly recommended for all palliative health and social care professionals and volunteers, including occupational therapists, and art and music therapists. It is a wonderful resource for health and social care educators, teachers and trainers and will be a immense source of inspiration for patients and their families.'This book is about user involvement. It is concerned with sharing knowledge and experience about user involvement in palliative care and making it more real for the future. In modern times, the importance of 'end of life care' was highlighted by the pioneers of the voluntary hospice movement. They emphasised the importance of palliative care being based on an holistic approach that took account of all aspects of people's lives and deaths; medical, social, spiritual and material. More recently the work of the independent hospice movement has been complemented by the development and expansion of specialist palliative care in state provision. The aim has been to enable people to be able to 'do it their way' with a real sense of control and to be able to communicate their unique words, voices and experience. This is and will always be a key potential of user involvement.' - Suzy Croft and Peter Beresford, in the Preface.

Summary: "Creative Community Planning provides clear access to emerging innovations in artistic, narrative, embodied and technological methods, exploring the frontiers of community engagement within a fresh sustainability framework. Academics, professionals and community members increasingly acknowledge that multiple perspectives enrich planning outcomes. Furthermore, it's acknowledged that the engagement process itself can create imaginative forums and spaces to nurture understanding and empathy for ourselves and for our environments. Reflecting on the wide continuum of participatory practice, the authors of Creative Community Planning discuss the work of planning theorists, researchers and practitioners engaging a diversity of people living in ever changing communities. The authors discuss how engagement practices are enhanced using practices such as visioning and participatory research processes, poetry, theatre, film, websites and exercises to access the creative ideas of all ages, including children and young people."--Publisher description.

Creative Engagement in Psychoanalytic Practice fills the gaps in current clinical training and theory by highlighting the importance of the analyst’s unique voice, creativity, and embodied awareness in authentically being with and relating to patients. In this original and personal account, Henry Markman provides an integrated approach toward analytic work that focuses on engaged embodied dialogue between analyst and patient, where emotional states are shared in an open circuit of communication as the route to self-discovery and growth. The involvement of the analyst’s singular and spontaneous self is crucial. In integrated and illuminating chapters, Markman emphasizes the therapeutic importance of the analyst’s embodied presence and openness, improvisational accompaniment, and love within the analytic framework. Vivid clinical vignettes illustrate the emotional work of the analyst that is necessary to be openly engaged in a mutual yet asymmetric relationship. From over 30 years of clinical practice and teaching, Markman has synthesized a variety of contemporary theories in an approachable and alive way. This book will appeal to psychoanalytically oriented clinicians, ranging from those beginning training to the most seasoned practitioners.

Creative Evaluation is both entertaining and stimulating reading for the practising evaluator looking for fruitful new ways of approaching evaluation research, training and consultation. The author's basic themes include the necessity for evaluators to recognize the limitations of routine response patterns, the value of situational responsiveness and the need to test new approaches and perspectives. Patton lets readers discover their own creative potential by guiding them towards expanding their options through a new awareness of the standard operating procedures evaluators fall back on and their usual way of doing things. This revised second edition is geared more closely to the professional evaluator than the first edition.

This book explores an exciting range of creative engagements with ecologies of place, using geopoetics, deep mapping and slow residency to propose broadly based collaborations in a form of ‘disciplinary agnosticism’. Providing a radical alternative to current notions of interdisciplinarity, this book demonstrates the breadth of new creative approaches and attitudes that now challenge assumptions of the solitary genius and a culture of ‘possessive individualism’. Drawing upon a multiplicity of perspectives, the book builds on a variety of differing creative approaches, contrasting ways in which both visual art and the concept of the artist are shifting through engagement with ecologies of place. Through examples of specific established practices in the UK, Australia and the USA, and other emergent practices from across the world, it provides the reader with a rich illustration of the ways in which ensemble creative undertakings are reactivating art’s relationship with place and transforming the role of the artist. This book will be of interest to artists, art educators, environmental activists, cultural geographers, place-based philosophers and postgraduate students and to all those concerned with the revival of place through creative work in the twenty-first century.

This book explores a major media management topic on the basis of case study research conducted in European, US and Brazilian media companies. More specifically, it examines the dynamics of employee engagement, aiming at organizational development through change. The book contemplates the discipline of Media Management through a management lens and focuses on the concept of employee involvement and its value with regard to successfully introducing change and achieving organizational development. It concentrates on providing the necessary information and organizational arrangements from the points of view of media managers and employees and highlights how this involvement can encourage employees to create and innovate. The book is directed towards researchers and students, as well as practitioners/professionals involved with media organizations.