21st Century societies are increasingly seeing the need for creativity, critical and reflective practice in higher educational programs. Artistic mediums explored through a ‘spirit of play’ opens the way to imagination and intercultural understanding. As aesthetic experience and social practice for change in transdisciplinary spaces, this approach disrupts and shifts the learner out of conformity towards risk-taking, complexity, uncertainty and change.

 

As practitioners/educators we investigate diverse pedagogical ways of learning, facilitating experience, creativity and reflective practice for teacher education and professional development programs. In an Arts-based workshop we used ancient and contemporary Fresco techniques to work with 30 students and Indigenous staff at Macquarie University. Material explorations of drawing with pigment, found materials in wet plaster, sculptural modelling and integrating with the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s, 2015) produced a series of fresco paintings for the Earth Day Event happening on 22 April 2021.

 

This approach to experiential learning as “Doing” through the Arts (Dewey, 1934; Green, 1995 and Eisner, 2000; Guyotte et. Al., 2014) leads to becoming, knowing, understanding and engaging with new possibilities in the world while encouraging ethical responsibilities for social change.  Creating a learning environment focused on holding the space to ‘be on Country’, encouraged  by listening to Indigenous Elders and artists. Incorporating mindfulness and reflective practices such as breathing, further encouraged participants to listen to their inner and outer voices.  Reflective practice used before, during and after the  workshop, opened the space for their imagination and practice of Art as an aesthetic experience.

 

Creative and reflective processes draw on the learners’ imagination to connect to cultural practices of two diverse styles of fresco making from the ancient Hawaiian and Italian fresco artists. The theme focuses on the interconnectedness of our relationship to the ‘Earth’ by provoking responses and actions that have the potential to generate individual and collaborative creativity.