Re-Creating Higher Education Pedagogy by Making Materiality and Spatiality Matter

Abstract

This study marks a resting point within ongoing explorations of creativity, transdisciplinarity, materiality, and spatiality in Higher Education (HE) pedagogy. It interrogates how different materialities and spatialities shape learning to re-create practices to better respond to societal challenges. This is situated within an imperative to move away from Western-dominated approaches to pedagogy and research, where “Western” is characterized as onto-epistemological rather than place-based. The study draws on postqualitative enquiry into two creative, transdisciplinary HE courses, which entwined the arts, sciences, and entrepreneurship to facilitate responses to societal problems. Framed using posthumanizing creativity, the research aims to decenter the human and posit creativity as a dialogic, intra-active process with the capacity to change education from within. A postqualitative approach works through three data diffractions. The first two involve glow moments used for collaging, cut through with theory. The third diffraction involves glow moments from which a short dance film was created. The study aims to stir readers/engagers to action their creativity as feeding forward into their own work in HE pedagogies, to consider how to move beyond the word, and the influences all of this can have on reimagining practices and changing structures.