Peter J Cook | Southern Cross University (original) (raw)
Papers by Peter J Cook
Choreographic Practices, 2018
In this article we argue that the power and politics of the arts is a way of raising awareness an... more In this article we argue that the power and politics of the arts is a way of raising awareness and responding to the globally shared problem of climate change. We illustrate how climate change is integral to a choreographic practice that inheres in: the performing body, which moves while it thinks, feels while it imagines and senses as it understands; and the intercultural dance performance Melting Ice. At the core of this article is a view of epistemology that is embodied, artistic, practical, reflectively dynamic and adaptive to the conditions in which knowledge is created, such as our journeying into Melting Ice. This choreographic practice and performance explores the radical harmony or solubility of the body in all that we do not call the body. The impact of this practice manifested itself primarily when looking back at how the dancers were learning, becoming and being icebergs, and in the act of labelling the choreographic practice of dance-making, the process gives rise to ac...
Research Handbook on Childhoodnature, 2020
This chapter works through a series of methodological experimentations with movement and material... more This chapter works through a series of methodological experimentations with movement and materiality in order to explore the potentials of environmental arts pedagogies. We address the question of what environmental arts pedagogies might come to look like in the ever-changing contexts of children's social and environmental worlds. This leads us to engage with choreographic movement and the heterogeneous materialities of place through differential flows of human and non-human agencies as they come to co-compose pedagogical encounters. In doing so, we draw on new materialist accounts of matter as agentic, fluid and dynamic, movement as a choreographic architecting of experience, and a/r/tographic approaches to pedagogical engagement and embodied practice. We acknowledge that the impetus for movement generation may come from a multitude of sources, however in this project we develop a series of experimentations with movement, materiality, environment, art, and pedagogy through a/r/tographic fieldwork. These propositional encounters generated four artistic processes as they emerged through the concepts of 'corridors', 'flight', 'viscosity' and 'construction'. In teasing out the implications of these concepts for an environmental arts pedagogy, we combine imagery and text to both render and diagram the movement of bodies, materials and environments in passage through each of these four conceptual enactments. This leads us to develop a series of propositions for environmental arts pedagogy based on our creative research process. In doing so, we aim to retain the radical openness and contingency of what environmental arts pedagogies might come to look like in response to the rapidly changing material conditions of our times.
The Australian Educational Researcher
This article details how and why we have developed a flexible and responsive process-based rubric... more This article details how and why we have developed a flexible and responsive process-based rubric exemplar for teaching, learning, and assessing critical and creative thinking. We hope to contribute to global discussions of and efforts toward instrumentalising the challenge of assessing, but not standardising, creativity in compulsory education. Here, we respond to the key ideas of the four interrelated elements in the critical and creative thinking general capability in the Australian Curriculum learning continuum: inquiring; generating ideas, possibilities, actions; reflecting on thinking processes; and analysing, synthesising and evaluating reasoning and procedures. The rubrics, radical because they privilege process over outcome, have been designed to be used alongside the current NAPLAN tests in Years 5, 7 and 9 to build an Australian-based national creativity measure. We do so to argue the need for local and global measures of creativity in education as the first round of test...
International Journal of Education and the Arts, 2016
The shift in teacher education from face-to-face delivery to Distance Education mode means that t... more The shift in teacher education from face-to-face delivery to Distance Education mode means that the current landscape for the preparation of specialist and generalist Arts teachers is both complex and challenging, particularly since there is almost no guiding literature in the field of teacher education that attends specifically to this curriculum area. This paper takes as its case, one regional Australian School of Education that has translated face-to-face delivery into distance education modes in both secondary and primary arts education, through a suite of interactive programs and pedagogical engagements. Some of the approaches include re-designing curriculum, the provision of rich resources and relevant formative assessment, and perhaps most importantly, the establishment of caring, attentive relationships. The IJEA Vol. 17 No. 13 http://www.ijea.org/v17n13/ 2 construction of communities of inquiry and in the case of the Arts, a community of practice, is essential to the succes...
The shift in teacher education from face-to-face delivery to Distance Education mode means that t... more The shift in teacher education from face-to-face delivery to Distance Education mode means that the current landscape for the preparation of specialist and generalist Arts teachers is both complex and challenging, particularly since there is almost no guiding literature in the field of teacher education that attends specifically to this curriculum area. This paper takes as its case, one regional Australian School of Education that has translated face-to-face delivery into distance education modes in both secondary and primary arts education, through a suite of interactive programs and pedagogical engagements. Some of the approaches include redesigning curriculum, the provision of rich resources and relevant formative assessment, and perhaps most importantly, the establishment of caring, attentive relationships. The
Choreographic Practices, 2018
In this article we argue that the power and politics of the arts is a way of raising awareness an... more In this article we argue that the power and politics of the arts is a way of raising awareness and responding to the globally shared problem of climate change. We illustrate how climate change is integral to a choreographic practice that inheres in: the performing body, which moves while it thinks, feels while it imagines and senses as it understands; and the intercultural dance performance Melting Ice. At the core of this article is a view of epistemology that is embodied, artistic, practical, reflectively dynamic and adaptive to the conditions in which knowledge is created, such as our journeying into Melting Ice. This choreographic practice and performance explores the radical harmony or solubility of the body in all that we do not call the body. The impact of this practice manifested itself primarily when looking back at how the dancers were learning, becoming and being icebergs, and in the act of labelling the choreographic practice of dance-making, the process gives rise to ac...
Research Handbook on Childhoodnature, 2020
This chapter works through a series of methodological experimentations with movement and material... more This chapter works through a series of methodological experimentations with movement and materiality in order to explore the potentials of environmental arts pedagogies. We address the question of what environmental arts pedagogies might come to look like in the ever-changing contexts of children's social and environmental worlds. This leads us to engage with choreographic movement and the heterogeneous materialities of place through differential flows of human and non-human agencies as they come to co-compose pedagogical encounters. In doing so, we draw on new materialist accounts of matter as agentic, fluid and dynamic, movement as a choreographic architecting of experience, and a/r/tographic approaches to pedagogical engagement and embodied practice. We acknowledge that the impetus for movement generation may come from a multitude of sources, however in this project we develop a series of experimentations with movement, materiality, environment, art, and pedagogy through a/r/tographic fieldwork. These propositional encounters generated four artistic processes as they emerged through the concepts of 'corridors', 'flight', 'viscosity' and 'construction'. In teasing out the implications of these concepts for an environmental arts pedagogy, we combine imagery and text to both render and diagram the movement of bodies, materials and environments in passage through each of these four conceptual enactments. This leads us to develop a series of propositions for environmental arts pedagogy based on our creative research process. In doing so, we aim to retain the radical openness and contingency of what environmental arts pedagogies might come to look like in response to the rapidly changing material conditions of our times.
The Australian Educational Researcher
This article details how and why we have developed a flexible and responsive process-based rubric... more This article details how and why we have developed a flexible and responsive process-based rubric exemplar for teaching, learning, and assessing critical and creative thinking. We hope to contribute to global discussions of and efforts toward instrumentalising the challenge of assessing, but not standardising, creativity in compulsory education. Here, we respond to the key ideas of the four interrelated elements in the critical and creative thinking general capability in the Australian Curriculum learning continuum: inquiring; generating ideas, possibilities, actions; reflecting on thinking processes; and analysing, synthesising and evaluating reasoning and procedures. The rubrics, radical because they privilege process over outcome, have been designed to be used alongside the current NAPLAN tests in Years 5, 7 and 9 to build an Australian-based national creativity measure. We do so to argue the need for local and global measures of creativity in education as the first round of test...
International Journal of Education and the Arts, 2016
The shift in teacher education from face-to-face delivery to Distance Education mode means that t... more The shift in teacher education from face-to-face delivery to Distance Education mode means that the current landscape for the preparation of specialist and generalist Arts teachers is both complex and challenging, particularly since there is almost no guiding literature in the field of teacher education that attends specifically to this curriculum area. This paper takes as its case, one regional Australian School of Education that has translated face-to-face delivery into distance education modes in both secondary and primary arts education, through a suite of interactive programs and pedagogical engagements. Some of the approaches include re-designing curriculum, the provision of rich resources and relevant formative assessment, and perhaps most importantly, the establishment of caring, attentive relationships. The IJEA Vol. 17 No. 13 http://www.ijea.org/v17n13/ 2 construction of communities of inquiry and in the case of the Arts, a community of practice, is essential to the succes...
The shift in teacher education from face-to-face delivery to Distance Education mode means that t... more The shift in teacher education from face-to-face delivery to Distance Education mode means that the current landscape for the preparation of specialist and generalist Arts teachers is both complex and challenging, particularly since there is almost no guiding literature in the field of teacher education that attends specifically to this curriculum area. This paper takes as its case, one regional Australian School of Education that has translated face-to-face delivery into distance education modes in both secondary and primary arts education, through a suite of interactive programs and pedagogical engagements. Some of the approaches include redesigning curriculum, the provision of rich resources and relevant formative assessment, and perhaps most importantly, the establishment of caring, attentive relationships. The