Logo image
Back
When Pedagogy Walks: Place, Art, Higher Education (Abstract and Citation only)
Thesis

When Pedagogy Walks: Place, Art, Higher Education (Abstract and Citation only)

Adrienne Brown
Southern Cross University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Southern Cross University
2025
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25918/thesis.587
Appears in  Recent Southern Cross PhD Theses

Metrics

4 Record Views

Abstract

Process Art Walking Pedagogy Place Higher Education
When Pedagogy Walks is a practice-led inquiry into visual arts and explores what a walking aesthetic brings to practice and pedagogy. This is an experiment in walking as much as a visual arts practice regarding what walking might bring to pedagogy and practice. This practice-led experimental research sought to generate a body of creative work using technologies such as GPS, DSLR, phone, drawing, and wearable cameras (GoPro), culminating in a body of visual arts and a pedagogy of intra-action. The primary aim of this research was to explore how critical walking inquiry might function as a place-based pedagogical practice that situates visual arts in relation to pedagogy. Originally planned as a place-based and pedagogical study that intended to inquire with Chinese art and design students in Hunan province, the study was necessarily redesigned and repositioned to accommodate a practice-based inquiry impacted by the pandemic and its associated restrictions. The more-than-human presence of the pandemic created the conditions for an inquiry that shifted, responded and diffracted away from its initial planning towards an engagement with the posthuman entities of COVID-19 and the 2019/2020 Black Summer of bushfires in Australia. As the project transmogrified into a study focused on the more-than-human, it became a walking-with posthuman COVID, a ubiquitous and unyielding presence, always co-implicated in the study and the artmaking of myself (located in Australia) and my students (located in China). Posthuman COVID thus became a creature implicated in the work by its absent presence and inspired a more fully posthuman artmaking practice, where the agency of more-than-human entities became actively and agentically implicated in the materiality of the art process, art performance and resolved artworks. Once the study's initial focus, place and pedagogy became an apparatus of enactment in an ecology of practice – in this case, walking-with posthuman COVID. This thinking inspired a turn to the visual arts/performance methodology of walking inquiry, tied to process philosophy and posthuman COVID. This practice was then considered in relation to contemporary pedagogy in higher education, implicated through my then remote teaching of art and design students in China. The inquiry thus speculatively intra-acts with walking pedagogy in a digital classroom in China (artist/students) and with my (artist/teacher) walking practice in Australia. This practice-led research is, therefore, an experiment and speculation into what practice-based inquiry might offer art and design pedagogies in higher education through walking-with posthuman COVID. Process philosophy is a theoretical convention that focuses on ‘becoming’ (or change) rather than static states such as ‘being’, which underpins this study. As such, it upholds notions of movement, of walking and walking-with, specifically through the key work of Alfred North Whitehead. In alignment with Whitehead’s (1929/1978) thinking, propositions for walking were engaged in this inquiry - propositions that evoked becoming, change and movement. Whitehead’s key text, Process and Reality (1929/1978), is an important foundation for his speculative philosophy, exploring the adventures of becoming and relationality. Whitehead’s process philosophy, when read in conjunction with his contemporaries Deleuze and Guattari (1987), becomes a process-oriented philosophy. As a process-oriented philosophy, the doings of artmaking can be upheld as constant becomings, ontologically committed to creativity, potential, and novelty. Grounded in arts-based research, walking as a research methodology offered an interdisciplinary event for a movement-based scholarship. Movement is theorised as a creative, relational and place-making practice. Place can be a specific location, a non-place, a process or an event. Place in this study is both a location and an event, always in flux and correlating with Whitehead’s process philosophy as an event. The outcome of this study is a selection of curated artist/student works with written reflections, interpreted by the artist/students into English and presented as originally written. The presence of place, of atmosphere and ambience is foregrounded in the solitary focus of each artist/student’s gaze. When the entanglement of student images and text was curated - itself a process of analysis - it provoked deep memories of China and of the longing to be with the artists/students there. In responding, diffracting and reflecting upon the artist/students’ images, which could also be considered as a drawing practice – drawing (graphy) with light (photo) – the final drawing practice borrows conceptually and contextually from Klee’s assertion that drawing is simply taking a line for a walk. In the conceptualisations of walking-with the more-than-human, the final work, Drawing-with, was made in place in Australia, in collaboration with bushfire-damaged trees. Memories and experiences of place, Country, posthuman COVID, the bushfire-damaged trees, the now extinguished bushfires that burnt the trees, the paper – also made of trees – and many other matter and matterings are implicated in the artmaking processes. However, it is the trees as artists, their skins darkened and charcoal-black, that are the material collaborators as co-creators of the body of work that emerged from walking-with. From the concept of walking-with, I established the posthuman practice of drawing-with as an authentic and agentic artmaking collaboration within, between and through the human and the posthuman. Furthermore, as the trees and artist met to collectively and performatively make marks on paper, a pedagogy of intra-action is engaged in the connections, entanglements and processes of walking-with.

Details

Logo image