Abstract

A researcher in creativity, capacity building and teacher education for social justice, Janice is a lecturer in arts education and undergraduate program coordinator for the Bachelor of Education Program at the University of Southern Queensland. A Churchill Fellow and member of the Australian Association for Research in Education and Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia, Janice is also a member of research groups focusing upon community development and technologies in education. Her career as an educator has taken her from the United Kingdom to Canada, Turkey, Korea and Australia.

Data gathered during Janice’s participatory research in a non-traditional primary school and with pre-service teachers over a 3 year period suggests that a curriculum which evolves from play and the arts may transform students’ personal and social development. However, study findings also point to a gap between the ‘talk’ of transformative pedagogies, sustainability and lifelong learning and the practices of educators within the constraining influences of government-mandated curricula, testing and reporting. This gap challenges educators to create a third space (Bhabha, 1994) for learner agency and transformation.