Transformative Repair

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Transformative Repair (TR) is a research initiative with Independent Schools Victoria to investigate how strategic and sustained engagement with transformative repair as an artistic practice can create supportive conditions for individuals and communities to find personal and broader purpose in times of unprecedented uncertainty and challenge, and design effective ways to “repair” their communities both literally and figuratively.

The TR project explores how the practice of “transformative repair” might support cognitive shifts, compassion, self-care and an ethic of care for others within communities. More specifically, the TR program aims to support three cognitive frameshifts in participating teachers and students: reframing damage as an opportunity for agency and action, striving not for perfection but for possibilities in repair, and seeing repair not as an end in itself but as insight into other aspects of life.

Over the course of the project, the research team will design, test and refine a pilot TR program for students that supports them in (1) finding their own voice and articulating their personal and broader vision for the future, (2) building a personal and a community story that embraces and reimagines challenges as opportunities for transformative repair, and (3) sharing their stories of themselves and their communities through the arts.