Ali Black

We are a collective of academic women engaging in decolonial inquiry and slow scholarship. Through our research focus of ‘Art and Wonder in Education (AWE)’, we are valuing and promoting aesthetic ways of knowing in education and research. Art, wonder, and imagination support our expression of the relational and cultural characteristics of our being and knowing in the world. Our research offers a challenge to accelerated grind culture. Our experiential and creative research approaches offer ways to inhabit our university, our academic work, our academic identities, and our academic bodies, differently. Our research writing uses arts-based and autoethnographic fragments of our lived experiences of the academy. Theorising with slow scholarship, we engage a relational ethics which guides our collective writing and supports our building of community. Engaging with a spirit of listening and responding, our poster shares a series of aesthetic-relational explorations, experiments, and reclamations from our embodied and storied inquiries together. Our research and writing together offers us alternatives to the competitive counting and output driven culture that drives universities and promotes individuals. Functioning more like an ecosystem rather than isolated silos of people and projects, we use our writing to create spaces of healing, generativity, and kinship in our workplace. Our research writing is conducive to ‘life’, providing opportunities for joy and connection. It is guided by a more feminine and circular ethic of care, an ethic that values meaning-making, relationship, collaboration, emergence, wonder, creativity, and wellbeing.

We also connect to the SDGs in the following ways:

SDG 4: Quality Education: Incorporating deep philosophical inquiry into education supports SDG 4 by ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education. It fosters critical and creative thinking and broadens the scope of learning to include ethical and existential dimensions.
Cultivating a sense of wonder and curiosity in education can drive lifelong learning and innovation. Our work aligns with SDG 4 by fostering an engaging and stimulating educational and research environment.
SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being: Encouraging individuals to explore their passions and ethical responsibilities can enhance mental health and well-being. Our work together aligns with SDG 3 as we are promoting holistic well-being through our co-creation and ethical behaviours.
SDG 5: Gender Equality: We write against a cultural backdrop where we have each experienced gender-based discrimination, inequality, sexism, and harassment. Collective attention to persistent gender inequality and the emotional and psychosocial experiences of masculinized and patriarchal work cultures is necessary if we are to reimagine universities. Valuing philosophical and existential inquiry alongside ethical callings encourages an academic environment where gender equality is discussed, leading to greater awareness and action towards achieving gender parity.
SDG16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions: Establishing environments for reflection and dialogue can promote peace, justice, and strong institutions. By encouraging the exchange of diverse ideas, research can contribute to more inclusive and responsive institutions, aligning with SDG 16. Through incorporating and honouring the arts (and alternative ways of knowing and communicating knowledge) we strengthen capacities for inclusion and understanding, moving forward towards peace and justice and away from managerialism’s neoliberal operations where push and shove, competition, and ‘winning’ reign.

Foregrounding this project is a commitment to nurturing children's intrinsic ecological identities and engaging seriously with the place of nature in early childhood education. Children have an important contribution to make to the world and an important role in shaping its future. The University of the Sunshine Coast is one of many universities now including information about the importance of early childhood education for sustainability in their teacher education courses. Linked to a belief in the importance of early childhood education for sustainability, this presentation shares strategies for impassioning early child educators to build children's connectedness with nature and for recognising their own professional role involves reconnecting people - especially children and families - with nature. In this case study 30 early childhood preservice teachers have been engaged in reflection and representation of their personal stories and connections with nature and natural environments. Reminding them of their tender relationship with the earth, their stories and artmaking highlight how experiences in nature have promoted and strengthened 'connectedness' with nature and within and support their intentions as early childhood educators promoting issues of sustainability.

There is an increasing recognition that the future requires a 'conceptual and creative workforce' where 'artistic and aesthetic ways of knowing' are highly valued and where creativity, innovation, design and meaning are cherished aptitudes. As a result, many industry leaders, organisations and researchers are also starting to recognise the potential and significance of the arts and creative forms of knowledge. Especially as they seek to fully understand and address the complex realities and dilemmas that constitute educational, business and everyday worlds, and that face individuals and communities. There is a growing awareness that knowledge can be developed and formed in new shapes, and that these new shapes allow us to think and therefore see in new ways. Arts-based inquiry (research inquiry which embraces the language, practices and forms commonly employed in the arts) is offering new shapes and innovative opportunities for learning and meaning-making, and for shedding light on the particular experiences, dilemmas and situations we care about. Arts-based research methods and practices are increasingly being recognised for their transformational and unique ability to both 'access and represent' knowledge and multiple personal and professional meanings. As well as encouraging a creative inquiry process, arts-based methods can make visible the way knowledge and meaning is constructed while simultaneously offering representational shapes, forms and products for reflection and action. They can be used during 'all phases' of the research endeavour from data collection to analysis as well as continuing to serve as a subject of inquiry and a pedagogical tool. Arts-based methods have enormous potential for engaging and transforming the lives and work of both individuals and communities and for opening up public discourse. For individuals, arts-based practices support inquiry into personal and professional meaning-making with products of reflection capturing aesthetic responses, revealing previously held tacit knowledge, communicating stories of experience and offering new possibilities for action and agency. For researchers, arts-based methods are proving to be a legitimate and robust research methodology that transcends the limitations of traditional approaches to investigate and explore educational and social questions in personal, engaging and connected ways - ways that reach, and are accessible to, wider, diverse and non-academic audiences. For communities, arts-based methods support research that cares about who people are, what they know, how they experience their world and how they make meaning. Arts-based methods support the telling and understanding of human stories - stories of identity, knowledge, context, place, experience and relationships.