Constraints, creativity and challenges: educators and students writing together

Australia's national curriculum calls for the prioritisation of teaching and learning in literacies. From 2013 there is also a requirement for schools to familiarise students with a broad range of literature, and teachers are required to engage children in creating plays, stories and poems in traditional and multimodal forms. Similarly, universities must prepare future teachers with a deep understanding of the creative processes involved in thinking about, writing and editing such works, with a consideration of audience and genre. Drawing upon the experiences of pre-service teachers in their co-writing with young students, the author considers how writing within literary genres may support possibility thinking, relational and dialogic pedagogies and learner agency, as well as what challenges and constraining factors may operate upon the teacher writer partnership

The challenge to write: dangerous and disruptive words

This seminar engages with emerging debates around the value and danger of writing as a creative experience, and what forms of writing are valued and supported within 21st century teaching and research. Janice brings together examples of the creative works and reflections written by pre-service teachers as novice authors over a three year period, and reflections on the experience of researchers as writers using qualitative methods in a climate of neo-positivism. She suggests that writing that is audacious, troubling and creative supports powerful thinking and has the power to disrupt our personal and professional habitus as artists, educators, and researchers

Neither of the air, nor of the earth but a creature somewhere between: the researcher as traveller between worlds

In this story of places, spaces and power I adopt the persona of the bat as storyteller, bringing together narratives of my experience as an educator of pre-service teachers, and from my three years’ participatory research within a Reggio-informed and community-managed primary school. The bat’s story becomes a fable for neo-liberal times as the forced closure of the alternative school and university restructures reflect increasing government controls of educational systems in Australia and globally. In and between these seemingly contradictory epistemologies and ontologies I re-interpret the bat’s hybridity and experience of darkness as a disruptive and generative third space for re-thinking education

Conference Workshop: AURASMA – bring your poster alive!

Augmented reality brings together traditional print material or traditional media and additional hidden content. This augmented display is presented as an animated overlay which is activated by the viewer through the use of mobile technologies such as a mobile phone or tablet. This workshop is an introduction to the use of AURASMA, for creating simple overlays that may be used in research posters, or in the classroom

Creative destruction: An ‘Open Textbook’ disrupting personal and institutional praxis

Universities seeking to engage in Open Education practices on a global stage are challenged to balance the drive for innovation, expressed as a co-construction and free-sharing of content and knowledge, and the contradictory imperatives of institutional control and protection of Intellectual Property. Reporting on her experience of managing an Open Textbook project during a one-year Australian university-funded teaching and learning initiative, the author explores the tensions generated by differing axiologies and practices at the levels of the individual educator and the employing institution. As a project facilitator and also as an educator of pre-service teachers in arts and literacies, the author encounters technical and personal challenges as she creates and integrates an Open Textbook for the arts into her courses for pre-service teachers. Using a narrative approach, she critically appraises institutional boundaries and frameworks for innovative practice in Open Education. She illustrates the challenges for lecturers implementing such initiatives within university and government policies and procedures whose intent is to ensure quality curricula, uniform branding and control of Intellectual Property as unanticipated factors impact upon the project. Her experience, that creative destruction and risk are abrasive but essential aspects of Open Education, has implications for institutional support for innovative practice and for policy makers and educators within systems where ‘openness’ is promoted and valued

Bridging the gap between rhetoric and practice: data from 4 studies into the arts and creative writing for personal and professional learning

Findings from four research studies offer a challenge for systemic practices of formal education in Australia in relation to the national government's strategies for reducing the widening achievement gap for students of low socio economic status or who are of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander heritage. They point to another gap between the 'talk' of transformative pedagogies, sustainability and lifelong-and-lifewide learning and how this is embodied in the practices of educators and teacher educators working within the developing frameworks of national systems of curriculum, testing and reporting. This gap between rhetoric and practice has the potential to undermine the visionary intent of the Melbourne Declaration and may go some way to explaining the worsening performance of Australia in comparison with other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries as shown by statistics gathered by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2006 and 2009. The Primary Review of Education in the United Kingdom reported that an intensified focus upon literacy and numeracy had negative impacts upon learner enjoyment and motivation. Similar concerns arise in the following data which include journals and films captured during the researcher's participatory engagement as an arts facilitator in a non-traditional primary school where the curriculum emerged from children's play; a large-scale mixed methods study into pre-service teacher beliefs and perceptions of their future careers, and the level to which their school experience included the arts, captured across two intakes in 2010 and 2011; the third data set consists of visual images, graffiti and facilitator journal notes captured in 2012 in a juvenile justice context of education; and the fourth is reflections of final year pre-service educators upon their perceptions at being asked to engage in creative writing. For the researcher who is a lecturer in the arts in a university program for teacher education, the findings indicate that her own and other educators' practices of pedagogy appear to be constrained by systemic factors, creating a divergence between what we believe our practice should be, and our lived experience. That distortion manifests as a split between the conscience and consciousness, expressed at both individual and institutional levels. To address the equity gap, and to counter student disengagement, the researcher recommends a repositioning of the arts for greater learner agency, supporting the affective, cultural, intellectual and creative dimensions of learning that are features of an enacted transformative pedagogy

Current trends in university-community partnerships: the arts as an engine for cooperative development [Keynote]

Universities inhabit a complex space, striving for eminence in research and knowledge dissemination in a competitive global market, yet situated in place, culture and community. Asset Based Community Development requires sustainable practices, the sharing of knowledge and power, and outcomes negotiated between partners. While these strengths-based approaches appear to be inconsistent with contemporary practices for the conduct and reporting of research, this paper reports upon a new paradigm. Networked global relationships, both formal and informal, allow new and multi-layered cooperation by which artists and researchers may co-operate, create, co-generate power and articulate unique social and cultural position

Reducing the drag: creating v formations through slow scholarship and story

Every seed destroys its container, or else there would be no fruition (Scott-Maxwell, 1979). We are three women working across two Australian universities. Frustrated at the deadening, withering nature and containment of the neoliberal university, and inspired by the wisdom of slow scholarship and the cooperative reciprocity inherent in the V formations adopted by groups of flying birds to boost vital energy, our chapter encapsulates our efforts to ‘care for self and others’ and ‘count what others don’t’. It follows our attempts to resist the insidious, diminishing drag of metric-based audits and managerialism. Having joyfully discovered we have ‘outgrown’ narrow academic containers of measurement, comparison, and productivity, we are responding to our longing to connect and to ‘be’ differently in academia. Our resistance is characterised by efforts to listen and converse in meaningful ways, ways that speak our lives into the academy. For over a year we have been initiating conversations with a trusted group of colleagues and acquiring responsive, personal and aesthetic ways to address and reconcile our personal/professional lives. Inviting the reader into our deliberate storying and de-storying of our lived experience whilst practicing a politics of care, collaboration and authenticity, we are subverting what it means to be productive and accountable and what it means to be an academic. And in so doing we are seeding new and fruitful ways of working. We are unearthing our individual and collective voice, and creating and expanding safe spaces for scholarly, professional and personal disclosure and meaning-making

Dinawan Dreaming: pre-service teachers seeing the world with fresh eyes

Australia's National Curriculum for schools seeks to engage students beyond the static frameworks of subject knowledge, through cross curricular experiences in 'Indigenous history and culture', (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2010, p. 1) with the intent that this 'three-dimensional' (p.10) approach will lead to a deep understanding of historical and contemporary Indigenous perspectives. Similarly, university educators preparing pre-service teachers for their role in this transformative pedagogy, and undergraduate student teachers of whom the majority are not of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander heritage, are faced with a challenge. In embedding Indigenous perspectives they must shift beyond the boundaries of personal and professional habitus and the constraints of program planning, in order to reach a deeper understanding of the multiple histories, cultures and ways of knowing that are aspects of self, society, and the land for Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples past and present. This paper is the second in a series reporting upon the impact of pre-service teachers' immersive experiences in natural environments, Indigenous perspectives, and the arts. It is co-authored by an Indigenous researcher, who is an artist and educator, and by an arts educator who is the coordinator of an undergraduate program for pre-service teachers and who is a migrant of Celtic heritage. The research findings indicate that immersive experiences in natural environments have the potential to be transformative, potentially opening up a Thirdspace wherein participants may transcend personal culture and history, to share new understandings. In this paper, 'Dinawan Dreaming', a painting by the Indigenous artist and researcher, is the lens through which the research team and undergraduate students came to reframe personal and professional understandings of self, time and the land as they engage in immersive experiences at three sites in South East Queensland. The sites are the Gummingurru site, an environmental education centre and a museum. Data in the form of anonymous student reflections, and transcripts of interviews with researchers and undergraduate participants, indicate that the experience has informed a reframing of the world-view of all participants. Describing a moment of transformative power, a participant observes: 'in our culture we'd sort of laugh...that's of our way of dealing with (the spiritual) it is almost like if you give it power, it will have life, if you give it power it will be true.' The study offers important insights into the potential for immersive experience outside the classroom to support new and connected ways of knowing and understanding self and the world

Collaborative writing ‘betwixt and between’ sits jaggedly against traditional regimes of authorship

In the context of academic financialisation where writing is ‘repurposed’ as an outcome designed to maximise financial profit, and to resist the pressure to be ‘careless’ (Lynch 2010) ‘ideal functionaries’ (Pereira 2012), we – a group of five women academics – come together to share stories of our accrued wisdom about living in the afternoon of our lives. We also share our creative writing and theorising about collaborative writing processes in papers, chapters, and conference presentations. As we do so, we encounter a conflict between our practice of inter-personal collaboration and the traditions and pressures of academic authorship where we are expected to publish in a vertical hierarchy of (first author, nameless et al.s, date). We therefore reflect on the paradoxes and tensions involved in collaborative writing within the academy. In particular, we explore how co-operative practice congruent with the philosophical framework of new materialism sits jaggedly against an academic culture of individualism, surveillance, audit, and the pressure for academics to (be seen to) publish. We offer no conclusion or easy resolution, but like Socratic ‘gadflies’ we seek to trouble the structural impediments to collaborative writing in the academy