Mary Ann Hunter

Cultivating the art of safe space

Performance-making and peace-building are processes predicated on the production of safe space. But what is ‘safe space’? In performance-making, what is it that makes space safe without losing the creative potential of tension? What role is there for risk? And, once achieved, how does safe space become meaningful beyond its immediate community of participants? This paper examines the value of the concept of ‘safe space’ in performance, suggesting that for applied theatre practitioners it is more than just a precursor for the art-making processes it supports. Here, safe space is considered as a processual act of ever-becoming: a space of messy negotiations that allow individual and group actions of representation to occur, as well as opportunities for ‘utopian performatives’. Contact Incs Peace Project is profiled as a performance-based program that grounds these issues and offers insight into the ways in which ‘safe space’ might function beyond its conventional connotations of protection and guardedness to be mobilised in a broader grassroots agenda for social change.

(What’s at) The Heart of the Matter? Sustainability, Arts, and the Case for Change

We need only experience a 24-hour news cycle for evidence of the unsustainable state of life on this planet. Environmental disasters, civil unrest, economic doubt and reports of violence within and among nation states and faith communities dominate in sensationalised news bites created for our limited attention spans. What troubles a critical viewer is that complex issues of social and environmental unrest are often reduced to disaster snapshots, while graphs of upward trending company profits and consumer indexes get celebrated in featured finance news. The relationship between these graphs and the rise of poverty, inequality, violence, and environmental degradation simply do not feature in the sensationalising news stories that are sold.

Towards a Radical Compliance

Throughout this book we have called for an integration of arts and sustainability education and documented a number of case examples. We have highlighted the values underpinning the partnerships of teachers, students, artists, and others at each site, and we have discussed the concepts of change as they relate to arts and sustainability principles and practices. We have been curious about these examples as everyday innovations, not as major interventions or grandly funded projects. But when we speak of the future and “innovation”, we wish to distinguish our meaning from the widespread co-option of the term as part of the metrics of a neoliberal education agenda. In this final chapter, we explore the ways in which innovation might be reclaimed from such an agenda and instead operate in a politicised everyday way to bring creativity and teacher agency to the fore. This is an approach of radical compliance that can enable and sustain arts–sustainability pedagogies, and is evident in the case studies in this book.

Reorienting Teacher Professional Learning (Partnerships for Change)

This final case study is an exploration of the sustainability education principle of partnerships for change. It focuses on our (the authors’) experience planning and hosting a teacher professional learning event on the integration of arts and sustainability education. With our discussion of this event, we hope to illustrate how committing to these ARIES sustainability principles means enacting them in one’s own daily spheres of activity and influence; and, for us, this is in working with teachers, artists, and researchers. Here, we describe our process of planning for the event to illustrate our own partnership for change. We then address this principle in greater detail through examples from the day’s events (Fig. 7.1).

Education, Arts and Sustainability

This book addresses this challenge by proposing an integration of sustainability and arts education in both principle and practice. In a global context of intensifying social, economic and environmental crises, education is key to raising awareness and motivating individuals and communities to act in sustaining life in our more-than-human world. But how is this done when the complexity and need for change becomes overwhelming, and schooling systems become complicit in supporting the status quo? Drawing on critical education theory and precepts of creativity, curiosity and change, it documents a series of case examples that demonstrate how five principles of Education for Sustainability - critical thinking, systems thinking, community partnership, participation, and envisioning better futures - are found at the heart of much arts practice in schools. Featuring the creative work and voices of teachers working in arts-based enquiry and diverse community-engaged contexts, the book investigates how sustainability principles are embedded in contemporary arts education thinking and pedagogy. The authors are unapologetically optimistic in forming an alliance of arts and sustainability education as a creative response to the challenge of our times, arguing that while they may have operated on the margins of conventional pedagogy and curriculum, they have more than marginal impact.

The Festival of Wood (Envisioning Better Futures)

Lilydale is a rural community in northern Tasmania that is experiencing a significant shift in its economy. The timber industry was one of the major employers in the region, but the community is transitioning out of a reliance on old growth logging. The Festival of Wood celebrates the region’s connections to the forests that have been central to Lilydale’s history. For the Lilydale District School, an invitation to participate in the festival became the focus for an inquiry about envisioning better futures. Led by the school’s visual arts teacher, Kim Schneiders, the students partnered with artists and local community members to visually map their community, create public art on the town’s lampposts, and collaborate on an installation that repurposed old books and paper as a gesture to their community’s changing resource base. In this chapter, we first consider the visionary capacities of arts–sustainability pedagogy in addressing the principle of envisioning better futures before discussing the Festival of Wood in greater detail (Fig. 6.1).

A Conversation on the Possibilities for Arts and Sustainability Education

How to open a book? We have spent much time thinking and rethinking about how we might begin a book that blends the ideas, passions, critiques, and voices of four authors from diverse backgrounds and scholarly traditions, as well as those of the many more educators and young people who have engaged in the creative projects we document here. It has been a daunting, enjoyable, and at times confronting process to stay open to wild thinking and sometimes uncomfortable critique. Central to our collective effort was a commitment to a spirit of inquiry and dialogue—a spirit made all the more necessary when, in the closing stages of the manuscript’s preparation, there was an arresting change in the dynamic of the world’s political leadership; a change with as yet unknown impacts that reach to the very heart of this text.

The Story of a SmartPhone (Systems Thinking)

Ever wondered where all the components of your smartphone came from? How was your smartphone produced, distributed, and then disposed of when it became yesterday’s news by the release of the newest model? What about other products that you consume? How are they part of global commodity chains or systems? And, how are these systems understood, or not? These questions, and many more like them, relate to systems thinking; a way of seeing problems and processes in the world through a lens which recognises the complex whole and web of relationships within systems, rather than on the detail of a particular piece (Fig. 5.1).

Creative Criticality in the meenah neenah Cultural Arts Program (Critical Thinking)

Critical thinking is acclaimed as a highly valued twenty-first century skill set. In a world of rapidly developing digital technologies and multiple ways of accessing information, critical thinking enables us to be discerning, rational, and evaluative about what’s relevant and appropriate to our purpose or context. Moreover, critical thinking can help people to better understand the world they live in and potentially interrogate assumptions and social structures which frame people’s existence. Alongside creativity, critical thinking is at the forefront of innovation agendas espoused by industry and government and is positioned as a key skill set in education curriculum documents across the world (Fig. 4.1).

Crafting Community with the Billy Project (Participation)

A cold clear northern Tasmanian morning and there is a hive of busyness within an otherwise quietly humming school. Two children (aged five years) are hammering, chatting, and seriously checking plans with a bunch of adults who are also pretty serious but cannot help hiding their delight. They include parents, a resident from the local aged care home, a helper who’s been long-term unemployed, and a couple of artists and educator artists. They are making billycarts (or go-karts) together and everyone’s got something to do and stories to share. They are participating in the Billy Project, an initiative of the arts company, Creature Tales, that aims to build a more child-friendly, connected and resilient community in the north coast town of Burnie. Following the closure of a paper mill that had been the mainstay of the local economy in Burnie twenty-five years ago, the region experienced large-scale unemployment and associated negative social impacts and challenges. As a response, a number of government and community-based organisations have sought to sustain the region’s economic viability and social vibrancy through initiatives like the Billy Project. Creature Tales’ coordinators, Stephanie Finn and Chris Mead, drew on Burnie’s older population as a resource by enlisting them as mentors and friends to beginning primary school children and their families. An arts-based project bringing seniors and children together to design and build billycarts was born, presenting an opportunity for intergenerational social participation as well as an alternative to individualising screen-based entertainment. The project celebrated a low-tech, high-construction, and very sociable form of childhood play.