Education through the arts and arts-based interventions have often been linked to wellbeing improvements. This scoping review explores a specific aspect of wellbeing, personal growth, and maps how this concept has been related to aspects of sensory awareness in research literature focussed on the context of arts/arts education. This review follows the PRISMA guidelines and was conducted using the following databases: Academic Search Elite, ERIC, Google Scholar, PsycInfo, PubMed, PubPsych, Scopus and Web of Science. Following pilot searches, (n = 642) search results were generated, which were primarily based on the appraisal criteria of direct associations between sensory awareness and personal growth and were reduced through screening to (n = 17) relevant articles. These articles present a broad range of methodological approaches and epistemological positions, including qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods approaches. Geographically, the included studies are concentrated within Europe, in addition to publications from Asia, America and Australia. The disciplinary spread of the articles covers neuropsychology and neuroaesthetics, philosophy and neo-Aristotelian theory, as well as arts in education and arts and health/wellbeing research. The findings also highlight an increase in interest in this topic of research after 2019. The studies emphasise the complexity as well as different aspects of the concept of personal growth, and present four distinct personal growth themes: self-regulation/emotional balance, self-knowledge and identity, meaning making and flourishing, and social and relational wellbeing. Taken together, these themes problematize the conceptual elasticity of ‘sensory awareness’ and the often-unexamined narratives linking it to personal growth, revealing how both constructs can be presented through multilayered individual and interactional dynamics that may risk obscuring their normative and context-dependent foundations.
Dodson et al. (Tue,) studied this question.