The Master of Arts at Curtin University is a coursework degree for students new to the field. It offers majors in the always-artistic disciplines of Creative Writing, Screen Arts and Fine Art, along with the sometimes-artistic disciplines of Professional Writing & Publishing and Digital Communication. The course attracts a wide range of students who choose to enrol in the degree for a multitude of reasons such as pursuing a career dream, finding a foothold in Australia, extending employment opportunities and moving towards a higher degree by research. In the last two years, students ranging in ages from 21 to 68, from 23 countries have started the course. These cohorts encompass people of diverse sex, sexuality and gender, non-binary, and neuro-divergent students. Each student brings their unique educational, cultural and personal backgrounds along with equally unique ways of engaging with study and research.
The research methods unit discussed here, the first of only two cohort-wide core units, aims to create an experience of belonging and connection within the course, while developing an understanding of the critical-creative nexus and skills in reflective practice, and encouraging students to think about ideas for their future research projects.
The unit attempts to achieve equity of voice (who gets to speak and what is heard) by using yarning as a method of collective learning.
This approach is scaffolded with Tyson Yunkaporta’s five Indigenous ways of thinking: kinship-mind, story-mind, dreaming-mind, ancestor-mind and pattern-mind and his emphasis on the significance of relationships to successful knowledge transmission (2019). To help connect diverse and intersecting backgrounds, students are encouraged to use Yunkaporta’s five types of Indigenous thinking to link their own experiences and knowledges to the western paradigms that continue to inform Australian higher education.
Introductions – a sense of belonging
The first class establishes the importance of relationships to knowledge transmission and retention (Yunkaporta 2019, p.169) as well as speaking protocols that give every student space to share as much or as little as they wish. The tutor models the introduction and students then introduce themselves via the relationships that make them, and that bring them to the course. This allows the diversities each student brings to surface, and begins to open the space for how they will express and use those diversities in their creative and academic practices.
Yarning – critical perspectives
Roughly half of the classes are preceded by exercises that encourage students to reflect on their individual personal and creative values while also providing ways of interrogating these through different critical perspectives – currently these perspectives include climate change and concepts of self via hydrocommons and feminism, and race and gender via Black art and activism. Alongside this, there are ongoing considerations of the ethics of representation and of being represented. These exercises prepare students for engaged conversation that values every perspective offered in the room. While the exercises that students complete before class give some focus to the conversation, the yarning session goes where the students take it, and it runs for as long as it needs to. Sometimes this is half an hour, sometimes it is two hours –
the beauty (and challenge) of yarning is that control is yielded to the group as a whole and the outcomes are both individual and shared.
High- and low-context cultures – reflective practice
Towards the end, the unit returns to Yunkaporta’s discussion of oral, or field-dependent reasoning cultures, and print, or field-independent reasoning cultures (Yunkaporta 2019, p.172-77) – also known as high- and low-context cultures – which allows students to reflect on their own educational and personal experiences to date, and how these may influence and/or inspire their creative practice in a western university setting.
Outcomes
Formal and informal feedback suggests students experience a sense of safety and belonging in the class, and the kinds of research projects they have proposed at the end of that first unit speak to that as well. These project ideas have included the use of mixed media in fine art to express the student’s own cultural identity and foster cultural dialogue; representation of Buddhist impermanence in film and its effect on audiences; and using porous and delicate materials in an interactive arts installation that engages with human impact on the climate and natural world.
While it is impossible to know what might have happened had students been taught a different way, what is known is that in this unit, students have freely shared with the class their sexuality, gender, age, socio-cultural background, family history, cultural history and experience, their values, their fears and ambitions as students and as budding researchers. The students have listened to their peers and engaged with their ideas and experiences in the context of a critical or creative research approach and/or idea, and with increasing levels of engagement across the semester.
References
Yunkaporta T (2019) ‘Displaced Apostrophes’, Sand talk. How Indigenous Thinking can save the world, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 164-81.
Anne Ryden is a migrant and senior lecturer who lives and works on Noongar Boodja where she coordinates the Master of Arts course at Curtin University and teaches research methods to students in the course via two common core units.