The transformative impact of creativity, by design.

A semester-long inquiry that began by asking how community-based arts practices make creativity more accessible, and ended somewhere broader: where does creativity actually live? The answer I argued for is that it does not sit inside individuals at all, but emerges as a relational ecology between people, places, materials, cultures and environments.

The inquiry was built from field encounters rather than literature alone, the Potter Museum's A Velvet Ant, A Flower and a Bird, the Estonian Open Air Museum and the Museum of Puppetry Arts, the community-led transformation of Kampung Warna-Warni in Malang, Indonesia, and my own participation as one of eighteen artists live-painting at the TISM Death to Art concert at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, where the finished works were thrown into the crowd to be destroyed.

Presented as a curated exhibition, with the artefact functioning as a mode of inquiry rather than a report on one. Grounded in creative ecologies (de Bruin & Harris), relational pedagogy (Hickey & Riddle), a/r/tography (Healy et al., Irwin) and community arts and cultural development (Kasat, Lowe).

A comparison of two curriculum models that both claim creativity but mean different things by it: the arts-based curriculum, which treats creative and cultural expression as intrinsically valuable, and the STEAM framework, which more often positions the arts as an instrument for innovation in technical disciplines.

The analysis tested each against equity, inclusion and social justice, drawing on Ewing, Biesta, Belbase et al. and Fraser's distribution, recognition and representation. STEAM offers real interdisciplinary strength but its inclusiveness is not automatic. Without attention to subject hierarchies and to what Keane et al. call epistemic pluralism, it risks reinforcing the inequalities it means to address.

The paper integrates First Nations knowledges through Yunkaporta's 8 Ways of Learning and Mills and Doyle's work on visual arts as a multimodal language, then applies both frameworks to a Year 6 unit, Caring for Country: Identity, Art and Sustainability, built around Elder-led yarning circles, collaborative artwork and a design thinking challenge. Mapped to SDG 4 and SDG 10.

Designed and conducted stakeholder interviews examining how artificial intelligence, digital creativity and technology integration are reshaping educational practice, focusing on teacher perspectives and where promise and anxiety diverge.

An extensive review synthesising contemporary literature on curiosity as a motivator for creativity, inquiry-based learning and long-term engagement, drawing across educational psychology and creativity research.

Investigated the relationship between learning environment design and creativity, wellbeing, collaboration and student engagement, covering flexible and studio-based learning, inclusive space design and environmental psychology.

Explored how visual arts education supports empathy, social-emotional development, perspective-taking and cultural understanding, connecting arts-based inquiry to inclusive classroom practice.