The research aims for the Australian branch of the project, specifically are to:
1. Establish a student-led network of researchers engaging walkography and a/r/tography as acts of inquiry into artistic, pedagogical, environmental and curricular practices;
2. Engage in a deep mapping of connections, ecologies and experiences of the Gondwana Rainforest site through the languages of Environmental Education, Art and creativity; and
3. Mobilize sensorial knowing as an opening to innovative teaching and learning, and emergent geographies of self and other through walkographic inquiry by developing collaborative and creative student exchanges that address storytelling through geo-specific understandings of a/r/tography.
This Australian offshoot of the Mapping A/r/tography Project (located at Southern Cross University, Gold Coast, QLD) has a unique opportunity to initiate innovative pedagogy and curriculum and practical actions through our collective commitment to advancing walkography (Lasczik Cutcher, 2018) as a methodology for exploring emerging transcultural perspectives that are mapped in the intersection between art practice and philosophy as a matrix of the sensing body in movement.
As a team of students as co-researchers (from 2 independent, QLD schools), along with Alexandra Lasczik, Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles and Katie Hotko as the SCU research team, we sought to identify and promote new models of artistic collaborations and pedagogical experiments representing a coherent picture and strategy for analysing the complex connection between identity and space/place.
Long-term benefits of our partnership include forging new curriculum in the Arts/Environmental education intertwined with creative research outcomes, offering a systematic approach to understanding walkography as a viable research alternative for social innovation, but more importantly as a pedagogy for enhancing student learning outcomes and enriching international debates about human-land relations associated with economic, cultural and environmental sustainability.
The two schools involved, a secondary college and a primary school were invited to participate due to their unique and specialised foci. Atlantis College (pseudonym) is an empowering school for youth at risk due to factors such as (but not limited to) mental health, physical health, learning challenges and personal/home challenges. Evergreen School (pseudonym) is an alternative school that is deeply student-centred with a developmental educational approach that has a focus on the processes of learning how to learn. These two school sites are amenable to research that empowers their students through creative, artistic and environmental paradigms and thus are innovative in their mission and their focus.
The research approaches are as follows (in sequence):
1. Students (20 year 11 students from Atlantis, 55 year 6 students from Evergreen) were invited from each of the school sites by the school-based researchers Tahlia McGahey (Atlantis) and Janaya Brennan (Evergreen) and were positioned as co-researchers in the project. Lasczik, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles and Hotko visited the schools to prepare the students as a/r/tographic co-researchers, to develop research walkography, a/r/tography and mapping skills through the use of visual diaries and photography/video, as well as the important presentation of a Yugembeh Elder (the site is on Yugembeh Country) who spoke with the students and the project team about the deep history, Indigenous culture, knowledges and protocols of the site;
2. All researchers visited and walked the site of the Gondwana rainforest in SE QLD together in each of the 2 cohorts – specifically at Natural Arch, where the trails are established and safe - to walk, map and document the ecologies of the site through drawing, photography, sound recordings, and an environmental transect as well as noting its threatened and endangered species;
3. The research team (students, teachers and the project team) then assembled to create individual and collaborative artworks (during school time at each of the school sites) through a series of artmaking workshops, working towards a curated exhibition (open outside of school hours and mounted by the research team - scheduled for September 2019) of the information collected and created; and
5. From this material, a curriculum framing is also being created for Primary, Secondary and Higher Education students that foreground walking as a pedagogy in the Arts/ Environmental education.
Data/ information gathered include artworks, photographs, recordings, and students writings such as poetry, speculative fiction and creative writing.
Images and artworks to follow in the next posts.