Associate Professor Kim Snepvangers

The Australian art and design curriculum is informed by the country’s status as an island continent as well as a specific historical and contemporary cultural milieu. Australia is the smallest continent and the only one surrounded by water, and is administered by one national federal government. Australia is the sixth largest country in area after Russia,Canada, China, the USA, and Brazil. However, one of the key historical and contemporary challenges for Australia in educational provision relates to the size and distribution of its population of 24million people, which is small relative to the landmass.This brings a suite of social and political ecologies into the purview of curriculum organization and authority. In terms of population dispersal and differentiation, diverse populations are largely concentrated in cities mostly along the coastal fringe, in addition to smaller rural communities and large unpopulated remote regions. High levels of postwar immigration, alongside religious and cultural diversity, ensure a wide range of approaches to curriculum design, implementation, resourcing, and impact.

Makerspaces nest concepts of flexible, community-based learning with the aim of increasing the effectiveness of student learning and efficiencies in terms of staffing and space requirements. Rapid demand for the makerspace has increasingly seen direct links to academic programs alongside its physical growth from one small room to multiple spaces within the faculty and across the university. Art & Design has a combination of makerspaces, labs, studios, and workshops comprising analogue and digital technologies across a diverse range of design and art disciplines from woodwork to Virtual Reality. The maker movement reopens a way for the adult imagination to operate outside system constraints, democratizing knowledge exchange by removing the notion of an authority figure and replacing it with the shared expertise of multiple participants. Changing the nature of the traditional workshop has led to a desire for greater inclusion of makerspace activity in formal classroom outcomes.

This chapter introduces the book and highlights the significance of research and practice focussed on embodied and walking pedagogies with learning and pedagogical implications. Case studies of practice, interaction and the sensibilities afforded by diverse conceptions of mobility and affective relations will be discussed. Using new methodologies and scholarship, issues of movement and mobilities as research method imply that social phenomena can be analysed differently with regardto worldly sensibilities, affordances and interactivity. The primacy of connectedness, contemplation and relationships are situated within provocations and critically responsive disruptions to everyday experience, typically organised around an event. Embodiment and performativity have important psycho-social and ethical dimensions when engaged with participants, audiences and sensory environments which will be explored using examples from a range of projects and programs. Historical and contemporary perspectives inform a range of visual-spatio-temporal scenarios toanticipate innovative research creation and observational strategies. An interest in bridging artistic and scientific media and research recording methodologies across sonic, visual and embodied practice informs the transformative potential of these exemplars/projects about arts based research creation. Re-imagining situations of learning through movement together with groundedness emerge as important concepts as pedagogy and transformative learning is re-envisaged in the 21st century. The everyday acts of walking and the human reality of embodiment are often taken for granted, but in recent times these ancient practices have been newly appreciated. This is especially so in relation to research and scholarship with new technologies and approaches across multiple domains. These reveal enhanced possibilities and greater awareness of what it means to know, for how we come to know and what might be possible through pedagogies to enable others to come to know. It is perhaps worth noting that realisations regarding the limitations of past paradigms of knowing have arisen from widely divergent fields from the post-humanist, post-positivist through to those grounded in traditional positivist research such as neuroscience. Such a diversity of work has drawn attention to the flesh and blood physicality of the human experience, the grounded nature of the loftiest of abstract thoughts, and the interplay of the visual and the material, thinking and feeling in being, becoming and transforming.

Walking and embodiment, groundedness and mobilities are the key pedagogical and research creation strategies that emerge as key findings from this book and from the focus of this chapter, which also addresses the significance of visualisation across artforms, perspectives, publics and dimensionality. Within the broader context of the book, research and practices in walking (Solnit, 2000; Gros, 2015; O’ Rourke, 2016) and concerns with diverse trajectories for mobility (Cresswell, 2006; Urry, 2011, Snepvangers, Davis & Taylor, 2017) have been foregrounded through the concerns of the various authors. For example: ecological art/science collaborations in remote locations, contemplative art practices and artmaking and the analysis of walking in cinematic representations in south east Asia, sit actively alongside innovative participatory work with a range of diverse audiences. The sensorial and ecological aspects of walking as pedagogy are also central to the work of many new materialist scholars, especially with regard to the agency of participants and the role of data gathering, analysis and presentation. Coole and Frost (2010) for example in referring to a resurgence of interest a what they call a critical new materialism (p.27) highlight how power develops and practically manages ‘embodied subjectivities’ which extend beyond human subjectivities to other non-human and material objects and networks. They particularly highlight sociologies of everyday life and, significantly for the work in this book, focus on phenomenologies of the ordinary alongside critical geographies of space (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 27-28). Through the lens of exploring how walking and in some cases sitting strategies inform visual and performative practices, production and political interrogation have been articulated as a central concern of the authors’ in this volume. What is now the task of this chapter is an examination of the potentiality of prioritising embodied pedagogies as “ learning encounters”, visualised, envisaged and embodied using arts-based research methodologies. Fundamental questions about visual and embodied practice have been developed through both singular and collaborative responses to walking and visually derived scopic regimes of practice as engaged with systems of inquiry.

The significance of creative ecologies and acknowledging existing creative partnership research is an expanding field of interest both in Australia and the United Kingdom. This chapter reflects on a contemporary range of creative engagement practices, creative partnerships and emergent ecologies as new ways of working in the cultural sphere. Propositions that signal purposive change have been articulated, rather than perpetuating assumptions about how creativity has been used to describe all processes of change as innovation for example. Evidence and considerations for recalibration that respond iteratively and interstitially to complex ecological phenomena are articulated. The chapter presents a brief summation of the major contributions of this volume, and directions forward for the field of creativity research in current policy contexts.

The significance of creative ecologies and acknowledging existing creative partnership research is an expanding field of interest both in Australia and the United Kingdom. This chapter reflects on a contemporary range of creative engagement practices, creative partnerships and emergent ecologies as new ways of working in the cultural sphere. Propositions that signal purposive change have been articulated, rather than perpetuating assumptions about how creativity has been used to describe all processes of change as innovation, for example. Evidence and considerations for recalibration that respond iteratively and interstitially to complex ecological phenomena are articulated. The chapter presents a brief summation of the major contributions of this volume, and directions forward for the field of creativity research in current policy contexts.

This chapter reflects on the scope of community engagement practices, creative partnerships and emergent ways of working in the cultural sphere. Providing an articulation of key ideas significant in creative partnerships this chapter critically reflects on the theoretical framework of ecologies of practice to re-consider community connectivity related to the visual domain. Evidence of transformative pedagogies as strategies to inform practice will be articulated. An examination of the ways in which practices can be considered as living things interdependent and connected in ‘ecologies of practice’ (Kemmis et al, 2012) will be undertaken using contemporary community engagement projects. Evidence of practices as orchestrated transdisciplinary arrangements are described using reflexive accounts to further examine specific projects and how ideas, methods and approaches are situated in relation to the broader field. The implications of ideas presented as “practice encounters” is considered in terms of participatory practice and transformative research methods. We revisit the existing terrain and identify how community engagement encompassing art, education and the cultural sphere can be re-imagined and re-oriented to explore concepts of educational encounter beyond experience and dialogue. How social worlds related to art, education and the cultural sphere are prefigured, enacted and reconfigured using permeable boundaries and transformative pedagogy is disclosed. We conclude by speculating on the adaptations and implications of transformative pedagogies and ecologies of practice in art, education and the cultural sphere.

Challenging traditional formats for dissemination of scholarly work in the arts often means adapting creative works into text-based documents for assessment. Complexity in such discursive spaces of representation frequently results in unsatisfying outcomes. New materialist theories extend ideas beyond visual production and reproduction towards seeing social practice as an entanglement. The theoretical concept of encountering is introduced to interrupt stability of past recording platforms, enabling design of learning interventions in everyday routines. Three case studies of social cultural histories embodying video, pencil drawings, sound and video installation interrogate ways of encountering contemporary textuality. Each case presents a diverse approach to speaking as a synthesised knowledge protocol, reflexively speaking, reading and performing within liminal learning spaces. Uncovering the situated mechanics of production enables modification of an educators’ role. Speech conceived as artistic devices opens novel opportunities for change. Each case initiates action by recognising constrained acts of speaking/voice within cultural and geographic displacement. The role of educator in acknowledging self, then devising altered encounters to countermand prior invisibility or disparagement is highlighted. Like a doppelganger, it becomes possible to suspend authority yet simultaneously work with full knowledge of system rules, to challenge contested ideas across geographies of place and time.