By showcasing the experiences of making academics, this book advocates for higher education professionals to integrate creative practices into their lives, recognising the potential to facilitate personal growth, self-discovery, and alternative ways of knowing.
By showcasing the experiences of making academics, this book advocates for higher education professionals to integrate creative practices into their lives, recognising the potential to facilitate personal growth, self-discovery, and alternative ways of knowing. Higher education contexts can be demanding, challenging and rewarding and this book shares the practices of scholars who intertwine their intellectual pursuits with hands-on creative activities to support both their scholarly work and their wellbeing.
Presenting visual narratives and describing their experiences, the authors inspire readers to consider how creative expression can support fulfilment, meaning, purpose and wellbeing in academic work and life. The chapters focus on the arts, making, creating, and creativity, highlighting the crucial role these making practices play in the embodiment of knowing and exploring the self. Ultimately, this book contributes to a broader conversation about the importance of valuing and nurturing various forms of creativity within the higher education sector, as a means of promoting wellbeing, self-care, and a more holistic approach to scholarship.
This is an essential read for individuals working in higher education at various career stages, as well as higher degree research students.
Section One: Playing with identity and place
1. Making as Wellbeing: An
Autoethnographic Exploration of Academic Maker Identities in Higher Education
2. Constructing myself as an academic: states of flow and multi-membership to
balance vulnerability with creativity
3. When having a meltdown is a Good
Thing
4. Answering The Craftsmans Call To Be Academic
5. Finding my place in
academia through mixed-media embroidery practice
6. Finding Me in the Midst
of Chaos Section Two: Developing, growing and maintaining self-care and
wellbeing
7. Knitting and spinning: How fibre craft can support you as an HE
professional
8. Crafting academic connections across time and disciplines
9.
Rediscovering the self: Music for wellbeing, aesthetic, and making
10.
Sanctuary in spice: The kitchen as a space of wellbeing for a migrant woman
in academia
11. Mapping Terrain: Stitching Gariwerd
12. A Proximal
Conversation Section Three: Thinking, telling and sharing stories
13.
Thinking through and speaking to: A daily stitching story
14. Made to Measure
15. Creative carding: Life giving and receiving in the academy
16. Patterns
of Wear: Wardrobe Research & Self Care Through A Daily Hand Sewing Practice
17. Making time for making: The complexities of a creative practice-led PhD
through 3,500 hexagons Section Four: Developing and informing scholarly
inquiry
18. Making friends: creativity as a catalyst for conneciton and
community
19. Unravelling Researcher Bias through Doodling
20. Everything you
dont have to do: how fostering individual creative practice enables others
to create
21. Musical flourishing as a music teacher educator
22. Attuning to
jazz in the process of becoming a making academic
23. The Power of a
Pinchpot: Embracing Imperfection and Spontaneity in our Academic and Artistic
Lives Section Five: Power, aesthetics and knowing
24. The Promise of Creative
Education in Neoliberal Times: Ideology, Sensibility, and Natality
25. The
Craft of Academic Podcasting: Creating and Curating Connections and Living
Knowledge
26. Re-representations of self: A turbulent journey towards Honans
(2007) swinging rope bridge
27. Creativity through blogging: A duet in an
academic key
28. The Interplay of Artistic Practice, Academic Identity, and
Aesthetic Considerations: A Personal Journey
29. I am out with lanterns: a
printmakers' path to academic authenticity
30. Making shimmers
31.
Cultivating Safety, Connection, and Emotional Regulation: Insights from the
Intersection of Art, Education, and Research
Narelle Lemon is a Vice Chancellors Professorial Research Fellow and Professor of Education in the School of Education at Edith Cowan University, Australia.
Sharon McDonough is an Associate Professor and Teacher Educator in the School of Education at Federation University, Australia.
Mark Selkrig is an Associate Professor in Education and the Arts at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
