Exploring how creative practices can revolutionize wellbeing and resilience in higher education, this groundbreaking collection brings together 25 academics who reveal how engaging with creative processes—from visual arts and crafts to performance and digital media—can serve as powerful tools for self-care and professional flourishing.
It acts as a guide for navigating the pressures of contemporary academia while maintaining one’s authentic self through proven strategies like the CRAFT framework, visual journaling, collaborative filmmaking, and embodied creative practices. Each chapter combines theoretical insights with practical applications, offering both autoethnographic narratives and actionable case studies that demonstrate how making practices counter neoliberal academic pressures. Whether you're seeking to integrate creativity into research, enhance teaching through artistic approaches, or build sustainable practices for personal wellbeing, this book provides a roadmap. From soil-based art projects that foster ecological connection to comic-making strategies for international educators, it offers diverse pathways for reimagining your academic journey.
This would appeal to academics across all disciplines, researchers in educational wellbeing, and practitioners in arts and health fields. With this, one can transform isolated academic work into collaborative, meaningful practice that nurtures both individual growth and institutional change.
This collection brings together 25 academics who reveal how engaging with creative processes can serve as powerful tools for self-care and professional flourishing. It would appeal to academics across all disciplines, researchers in educational wellbeing, and practitioners in arts and health fields.
Section 1: Foundations: Creative Practice as Wellbeing in Academia
1. A
call for change: Creative and making practices as essential practices to
support wellbeing and the transformative potential of education. Narelle
Lemon, Sharon McDonough, and Mark Selkrig
2. Reviving the Creative Academic:
Integrating the Creative Being and Values Flow Models to Promote Wellbeing in
Higher Education Cedomir Ignjatovic, Katie Beresford, and Margaret L. Kern
3.
Intersecting Identities and the Pracademic Paradigm Cheri Flewell-Smith
4.
Comic-making as Wellbeing: Supporting International Students during
Professional Experience Fiona Boylan and Karen Nociti Section 2: Embodied
Knowledge: Sensory and Physical Dimensions of Making
5. Thinking Through the
Ground: Art, Ecology, and Relational Wellbeing Cassandra Tytler
6. Exploring
Experiences and Impacts of Creative Arts Therapies Catherine Oxworth
7.
Embodied Connections Conversation Series: Women's Conversations in Landscape
and Climate through Collaborative Nature-based Photographic Practices Alyson
Agar
8. From Family Legacy to Care: An Autoethnographic Journey of Music and
Memory Simone Marino Section 3: Relational Making: Collaborative and
Community Approaches
9. Ex:Change Validating Conversations about Waste and
Sustainability through Craft Joanna Rucklidge and Wendy Ward
10. New Ways of
Workshopping: Research-based Theatre and Collaborative Creativity for
Wellbeing Richard Sallis, Chris Summers, and Prue Wales
11. Filmmaking 'With'
as a Creative Process that Uses Relational Ideas of Care Catherine
Gough-Brady
12. Providing a Voice: Using Creative Ethnographic Collaborative
Methodologies to Explore and Represent Cultural Heritage in the Commonplace.
Maxine Beuret Section 4: Identity and Transformation: Navigating Academic
Life Through Making
13. Moving through Liminal Space: Visual Journaling as a
Creative Ritual and Spiritual Practice Christopher M. Strickland and Jane E.
Dalton
14. Creativity Under Constraint: The Academic Struggle and the Need
for Systemic Reform Bronte van der Hoorn
15. Loki's Tail Karen Kenny
16.
Navigating Academia with a Design Mindset: A Project of Ambiguity,
Prototyping, and Failures
Linus Tan
Narelle Lemon is a Vice Chancellor Professorial Research Fellow at Edith Cowan University, Australia, Lead of the Wellbeing and Education Research Community, and is an interdisciplinary scholar across arts, education, and positive psychology. She is the Director of Explore & Create Co.
Sharon McDonough is an Associate Professor in Teacher Education in the Institute of Education, Arts and Community at Federation University, Australia. Sharons research focus draws on socio-cultural theories of wellbeing and resilience to explore professional development for educators, initial teacher education, and how to support and advance wellbeing across a range of contexts.
Mark Selkrig is currently based at the Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne, Australia. His research and scholarly work focus on the changing nature of educators work, their identities, lived experiences, and how educators navigate the ecologies of their respective learning environments. He engages with digital and arts-informed methods in these research domains to probe the uneasy tensions and intersections that influence change, capacity building, and agency of individuals and communities.
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