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Creative Industry Encounters: Digital Ecologies in Art, Design and Media
Abstract
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.
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This study investigates and compares elements of creativity in secondary schools and classrooms in Australia and Singapore. Statistical analysis and qualitative investigation of teacher, student and leadership perceptions of the emergence, fostering and absence of creativity in school learning environments is explored. This large-scale international study (n=717) reveals the impact of teacher behaviours, teaching environments and school leadership approaches that promote and impede the enhancement of creative, critical, and innovative thinking, organisation, and curriculum structures. Implications for Australian schools and teaching urge for secondary education to challenge current, practices, pedagogies and environments, arguing for school-based strategies and considerations that enhance creativity and critical thinking and the fostering of creative ecologies within Australian schools.
Fragmentation and modularisation of e-learning in tertiary contexts is a proliferating phenomenon, driven by innovation in technology and economies of sustainability, accreditation and cost effectiveness. Within such technologies of reproduction, functionality can be negotiated within templated ePortfolio packages in preservice art and design education. Land, Rattray & Vivian's (2014) forays into learning in liminal spaces are relevant for engagement of learners. Moving towards professional learning entails educators redefining their position. Providing learners with opportunities to make connections between internet-derived knowledge and real world application relies on teacher case based knowledge, new learning communities and spaces for transaction. For example, enforcing templated online ePortfolios leaves little space for creation of new knowledge, especially in the contested space of Indigenous Knowledge. How rethinking and prioritising Indigenous Knowledge might be achieved within a 'liminal' e-learning space, is highlighted through case study 'encounters' of an Indigenous educator's history and experience. Connecting video, artworks and textual artefact exemplars with student expertise in curating ePortfolios directly links learners with previously undisclosed and unsettling knowledge. Learning opportunities that allow students to reflectively engage with contested spaces of liminality, within the " Cultural Interface " Nakata (2004) creates new meeting places and spaces for scholarship. 'Convergences' (Nakata et al, 2014) of Indigenous and 'Western' knowledge domains contextualise experience and make complex ideas accessible in visual form. Co-authoring in this case by Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators reflects an amalgam of understanding to effectively utilise technology, prioritise Indigenous Knowledge and negotiate systems of professional accreditation within standards based frameworks.
The conundrum of understanding, practising and teaching contemporary creativity is that it wants to be all things to all people. Almost all modern lists of creativity, creative thinking and how-to ‘becoming creative’ books begin with one premise: the creative individual/artist is not special, rather each of us is creative in a special way and these skills can – and must - be nurtured. Increasingly, industry and education leaders are claiming that creativity is the core skill to take us into a prosperous future, signalling the democratisation of creativity as industry. Yet centuries of association between aesthetics, mastery and creativity are hard to dismantle. These days, it is increasingly difficult to discuss creativity without reference to business, industry and innovation. Why do we love to think of creativity in this way and no longer as that rare visitation of the muse or the elite gift of the few? This book looks at the possibility that creativity is taking a turn, what that turn might be, and how it relates to industry, education and, ultimately, cultural role of creativity and aesthetics for the 21st century. In proliferating discourses of the commodification of creativity, there is one thing all the experts agree on: creativity is undefinable, possibly unteachable, largely unassessable, and becoming the most valuable commodity in 21st-century markets.
Significance
Pattern-formation theory predicts that vegetation gap patterns, such as the fairy circles of Namibia, emerge through the action of pattern-forming biomass–water feedbacks and that such patterns should be found elsewhere in water-limited systems around the world. We report here the exciting discovery of fairy-circle patterns in the remote outback of Australia. Using fieldwork, remote sensing, spatial pattern analysis, mathematical modeling, and pattern-formation theory we show that the Australian gap patterns share with their Namibian counterparts the same characteristics but are driven by a different biomass–water feedback. These observations are in line with a central universality principle of pattern-formation theory and support the applicability of this theory to wider contexts of spatial self-organization in ecology.
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 ‘practice encounters’ as a way to re-consider
community connectivity related to the visual domain. The significance of creative
encounters and the efficacy of participation is an expanding field of discourse in
relation to post human professional identity formation, audience engagement and
creative industry partnerships. 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’
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, dialogue and pre-determined goals. 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.
Creativity, Education and the Arts
Series Editor: Anne Harris, Monash University, Australia
This book advances an environmental approach to enhancing creativity in secondary schools, by interweaving educational creativity theory with creative industries environmental approaches. Using Anna Craft’s last book Creativity and Education Futures as a starting point, the book sets out an up-to-date argument for why education policy should be supporting a birth-to-workplace approach to developing creative skills and capacities that extends across the educational lifespan. The book also draws on the voices of secondary school teachers, students and school leaders who suggest directions for the next generation of creative teachers and learners in a rapidly evolving global education landscape. Overall, the book argues that secondary schools must find a way to make more room for creative risk, innovation and imagination in order to adequately prepare students for creative workplaces and publics.
Anne Harris is Senior Lecturer in Education at Monash University, Australia. Her most recent publication include Queer Teachers, Identity and Performativity; Creativity, Religion and Youth Cultures; The Creative Turn: Toward a New Aesthetic Imaginary; and Video as Method.