Mindful Interconnections in STEAM: Generating Sustainability Fresco Sculptural Forms

Abstract

This workshop applies a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths) theoretical base together with an embodied arts research approach to encourage participants’ creativity and imagination. The facilitator creates a ‘third space’ for transformative views to emerge through an exploration of UNESCO SDG’s (2015), using Fresco sculptural forms, emotive music, and new media arts. The ‘third space’, encourages mindful interconnection: listening to inner voices, as well as what happens in the between ’spaces’. The presenter facilitates an interplay where learners actively explore, create, and reflect, through a ‘spirit of play’ designed to elicit new insights based on PhD research into five levels of creativity (Wade-Leeuwen, 2016). Participants generate a deeper understanding of their emotional connections to sustainability (SDG’s) expressed through their personal visual language and collaborative communicative practice. The experiential learning processes in the workshops connect directly to UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals (2015), forming intrinsic associations that engage critical and reflective thinking skills to surface assumptions, question values, beliefs, and encourage inventive forms of creativity connected to change. Participants will experience an increased sense of self-awareness that fosters self-efficacy (agency) and acknowledges our shared humanity, which is crucial for Artists wishing to disrupt and challenge social, environmental, economic, cultural, and political inequities.

Presenters

Bronwen Wade-Leeuwen
Educator Researcher (STEAM), School of Natural Sciences, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia

Hew A Reid
Masters Student of Data Science, Central Queensland University

Details

Presentation Type

Workshop Presentation

Theme

Pedagogies of the Arts

KEYWORDS

STEAM, Sustainability, Fresco, Third Space, Mindfulness