In this edition of Creative Matters students and teachers from across a range of creative arts disciplines share examples of how they are working to make room for diverse voices, experiences and world-views. The articles collected show various examples of what diversity and inclusion can look like, from cross-cultural collaboration, to thematic concerns and curriculum design.
The facilitation and promotion of diversity in creative arts higher education is not just a matter of addressing historical inequities and accessibilities, it is to expand our scholarly interests and strengthen the range and benefits that creative arts provide to communities. To illustrate this last point with an analogy, within the product design discipline it is known that optimising use or affordance for marginal use-cases can improve the design for non-marginal cases, an approach that can also be applied in the service design of programs and courses in creative arts. Another relevant concept from design is that inclusion and diversity add additional layers of resilience to a system – something engineers term redundancy. While redundancies can be removed from a system without that system breaking down, their value lies in how they support systems in persisting through change, as layers of protection that work in different speeds, means or expressions.1 Broadly, this concept applies to the creative arts as expressions of human cultures – making space for all kinds of humans within the creative arts strengthens our creative culture and helps us persist through adverse conditions, when they arrive…
The rise of Trump and relentless attacks on Diversity Equity and Inclusion policies gives urgency and relevance to this issue of Creative Matters. Concern for trumpism is specifically expressed by Noah Moon, in his co-authored article Queering the Pitch with Peta Murray about their work with the iconic Australian magazine The Big Issue. Noah writes ‘With Trump’s recent second election, it feels even more important to write stories that are true to my queerness, my transness, and the greater human experience… I feel a responsibility to use my words to turn the rising tide any way I can.’ We believe that resistance to homogenising forces requires careful articulation of the value in diversity.
The value of encouraging self-expression of diverse voices is evident in Amber Janowicz and Donna Mazza’s article, Epistolary Form and Inclusive Creative Writing Practices in Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) Research. Janowicz’s Honours research strategically uses the method of letter writing to bridge the gap between the ‘clinical, detached discourse on PMDD’ and its personal impacts, which includes effects on a candidates higher education goals.
How a PhD supervisory team can work to support a candidate’s goals is detailed by Dida Sundet, Lyndall Adams and Joanne Dickson in their article, Neuro-affirmative practices beyond tokenism: access and inclusion in HDR. They identify how particular components of HDR study, such as oral exams, are designed for ‘ideal students’ that don’t actually exist – presenting especially difficult conditions for neurodivergent students to negotiate.
As Katherine Moline, Chantelle Baistow and Scott Brown point out in their article Neurodiversity and Opportunity in Tertiary Education at Honours Level, Australian universities have used the United Nations Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), to inform policies for non-discriminatory, inclusive education for tertiary students from all backgrounds and walks of life. One of the motivations for this special issue is to better understand how such policies have come to fruition. Some of our contributors (Kim Percy, Doreen Donovan and Guy Keulemans) have noted an apparent increase in students self-identifying as neurodiverse in recent years, but as Kim Percy in Thinking in Pictures states, without rigorous data this cannot be assumed. And we cannot assume this change hasn’t been decades in the making. Nonetheless, inclusivity can be encouraged; Percy argues for the emerging role of AI tools for neurodiverse students, and Moline et al, outline a range of approaches – relational learning especially – that actively make Honours programs more inclusive over the span of a few years. Doreen Donovan and Guy Keulemans in Illustrating Diversity in Honours Level Student-led Research, report that encouraging self-actualisation, through research topics chosen by students, fosters a diversity of Honours theses emergent from personal experiences of neuro-divergent, queer, First Nations and transnational cultures. Percy makes the point that ‘accessible, universally designed curriculum will benefit all students regardless of their neurotype.’
As an example of inclusive methods capturing diversity of thought and culture, in Ata-foafoa ma fa’atinoga i le va o feso’otaiga fa’aleaganu’u: Fa’atinoga o tomai patino i totonu o nei feso’otaiga (Creative Practice and the Vā: Making meaning within intercultural relational spaces), Adrian Harris’ collaborative work in Samoa with Samoan artist, poet and educator, Mrs Papali’i Momoe Pomona Malietoa von Reiche, leverages a combination of practice-based and Samaon research methods, including Talanoa conversational discourse, to explore Samoan perceptions of identity in a time of rapid globalisation.
Globalisation is also addressed in the article From Hand-Stitched Memories to Sustainable Futures: Navigating the Australian Education System as a Global Learner, in which PhD candidate Wajiha Pervez describes her personal journey growing up with Pakistani textile crafts before going on to study industrial textile design. She felt a disconnect between the aesthetics and sustainability of her craft and industrial expertise that persisted until she discovered critical design during her higher degree research in Sydney. This new training allowed her to reframe her craft sensibilities towards challenging the modernist paradigms of factory garment manufacturing and its problems of pollution, waste and inequity. In her article she presents an argument for the value of using diverse approaches to critique mass production.
Wajiha’s transnational experiences across universities is increasingly shared by international students coming to Australia for Master’s education. Mongolian student Bujikham Batmunkh, co-author of Innovating the Mongolian Yurt with this issue’s co-editor Guy Keulemans, joined the Master of Design program at the University of South Australia as just one of 17 different nationalities within the cohort. As Batmunkh and Keulemans indicate, such diversity is an opportunity for studying design and art from unfamiliar cultures, with transformative potential.
Dai Trang Nguyen, in Interwoven Perspectives: Mindfulness, Visual Art, and Inclusion, is another example of the way in which cultural contexts and specificities determine one’s methodological approaches and identity formation as an artist. Nguyen shares how a cross-cultural encounter has the capacity to expand not only one’s own practice but the methods available to her discipline.
In Ludic Inquiry: Levelling academic playing fields via games as creative pedagogy, Amelia Walker, Helen Grimmett & Ali Black show how ludic inquiry incorporates various creative methods of research and pedagogy which can be used to enhance inclusion and support diversity.
University policy and programming have a crucial role to play in enabling a more inclusive tertiary education. Anne Ryden, in Yarning as a Pedagogical Tool – diversity in a research methods unit, discusses how the Indigenous method of yarning, framed by Tyson Yunkaporta’s Indigenous ways of thinking (kinship-mind, story-mind, dreaming-mind, ancestor-mind and pattern-mind) are used to foster student sharing and interpersonal connection among their cohort.
Celebrating Indigenous Creative Pedagogies in the Northern Territory, by Aly de Groot, Amanda Morris, Larissa Pickalla and Lucy Stewart, reports on a range of initiatives at Charles Darwin University to make tertiary education more inclusive for Aboriginal Australians. This includes support for university-community partnerships, curriculum co-design, and recognition of cultural expertise and micro-credentials within teaching training programs. The creative arts are placed centre stage among these initiatives – art making, music and performance are embraced as alternative forms of communication among Aboriginal students, guests and collaborators, whose first language may not be English.
- Thanks go to Cameron Tonkinwise for exploring, in two recent LinkedIn posts, these aspects of universal design and redundancy in relation to inclusion and diversity. ↩︎
Main image: Wajiha Pervez, MPhil research, zero-waste experimental hand-smocked linen athleisure garments. (Photo Credit: Romon Yang)