Speaker: Lisa Grocott, Mia Perry, Sharifa Abdulla, Reagan Kandole, Alison Colwell-Matsuura
This panel will open up a dialogic and practical space for considering the affordances of creative methods when it comes to supporting people to shift their mental models, worldviews, beliefs and habits of mind. The shiftwork we will do together sits where the theme Transformative Learning and Knowledge Practices intersects with a practice of Inner Transformation.
The work of perspective-shifting is core to transformative practice, and yet the reflexive and vulnerable nature of the work calls for radically different ways to engage audiences. Conventional modes of translating research insights often take a low-context, cognitive path to advance change. White papers and industry-facing reports with their quantitative diagrams and 7-point lists of recommendations are not relevant methods when it comes to shifting individuals’ long-held beliefs or contesting internalised social norms. We need alternative modalities that can push back against an approach that privileges objective notions of evidence and believes in universal notions of how to proceed.
Guided by Indigenous values of respect, responsibility, relationality, reciprocity and representation the invitation will be to listen to the speakers’ plural perspectives and reckon with how they might affirm or contest your own worldviews or mental models. To this end, we explore the role of social learning and creative methods in pathways to transformation pathways.
The first half will conceptually frame perspective-shifting work, through applied examples from artists, designers and theatre practitioners. In the second half, participants will work creatively with an online Miro board to conceptually consider the role of perspective-shifting in their practice and creative strategies for making that happen. The board will double as a site for capturing the collective insights from the session.
With a focus on pluriversal literacies and transformative learning the session will be co-facilitated by academics Mia Perry and Lisa Grocott, with creative practitioners Sharifa Abdulla, Reagan Kandole and Alison Colwell-Matsuura sharing decolonial, Indigenous and disability perspectives that productively unsettle and reframe our ways of seeing the world.