Associate Professor Kim Snepvangers

This book reconsiders fundamental questions about visual and embodied practice by developing responses to walking and embodied pedagogy using arts-based research methodologies. Beginning with a creative research symposium, chapters address research creation in arts-based and related research. Diverse practices of data gathering, observation and collation of the visual and experiential archive are successively linked to experimental pedagogic practice and concepts of mobility to enhance possibilities for knowing. The contribution of this book lies in the recognition of visual and embodied performativity for transforming meaning and beyond cognitive and affective dualities. Collective action and provocations under experimental conditions expand sensibilities towards the social realm extending ecologies and environmental discernment beyond human deliberation. Diverse media and transformative visual practices are envisaged and provide dialogic exchange with Australian and International researchers. Responses engage concepts from new-materialism and embodiment with arts-based researchers and practitioners who engage with collaborative practice to explore boundaries and disrupt territories. Geo-location data, video and photographic evidence and textual capture of research co-creation methodologies release emergent qualities of ‘being’ and becoming. The role and place of ‘material’, affect and embodiment in participatory pedagogies signals new relationships between objects, sites, bodies, events, display, exhibitions, affective research methodologies and learning. The chapters re-imagine sites and situations of learning through movement, mindfulness and living embodiments of practice as non-territorial spaces with the capacity to cross immutable boundaries. New ways of conceptualising difference, dynamism and movement using critically reflective practice anticipates the value of local and trans-regional knowledge exchange as well as 21st century global connectivity.

This book examines the gaps in creativity education across the education lifespan and the resulting implications for creative education and economic policy. Building on cutting-edge international research, the editors and contributors explore innovations in interdisciplinary creativities, including STEM agendas and definitions, science and creativity and organisational creativity amongst other subjects. Central to the volume is the idea that good creative educational practice and policy advancement needs to reimagine individual contribution and possibilities, whilst resisting standardization: it is inherently risky, not risk-averse. Prioritising creative partnerships, zones of contact, practice encounters and creative ecologies signal new modes of participatory engagement. Unfortunately, while primary schools continue to construct environments conducive to this kind of ‘slow education’, secondary schools and education policy persistently do not. This book argues, from diverse viewpoints and methodological perspectives, that 21st-century creativity education must find a way to advance in a more integrated and less siloed manner in order to respond to pedagogical innovation, economic imperatives and creative possibilities, and adequately prepare students for creative practice, workplaces and publics. This innovative volume will appeal to students and scholars of creative practice as well as policy makers and practitioners.

This book reconsiders fundamental questions about relationships between community engagement, art and education within cultural spheres. Transdisciplinary chapters bring together researchers as “insider-practitioners” to challenge assumptions and offer new insights about practice, engagement and possibilities for transformation. The chapters reflect both localised projects and international perspectives on ecologies of practice as a key marker of the mobility of ideas as well as social mobility. Addressing socially engaged, informal pedagogy re-examines the aesthetic possibilities of social capital in the public domain. Re-considering contributions of education and research through transfer of knowledge and expertise across small social collectives, partnerships and larger institutional agencies is a growing practice. Examining equity and types of participation alongside issues of local and global significance is emergent in new, pop-up and continuing communities. Gauging social impact through case studies is an important project within the tertiary sector to ensure that critically reflexive visual research methodologies gain currency within contemporary neo-liberal funding and educational agendas. In the current milieux we ask, is all engagement transformative, educative, sustainable and linked to democratizing principles that address civic agendas? Re-imagining sites/situations of learning, culture and place as “practice encounters” utilises practices relevant for educators and practitioners. Applications of ecology, practice architectures and site ontologies inform broader social challenges. Conceiving arts-based research as a network, prioritises transitions and becomings to re-conceptualise the significance of relationships within local/global connectivity. Linking professional networks and agencies to adaptive communities, creates an expanded field of real world creative partnerships to enable changing pedagogies.