Abstract
This paper explores how arts-informed pedagogies—including New Media Arts, generative-AI brushwork, and multimodal creative inquiry can cultivate ecological consciousness and relational ethics among undergraduate students enrolled in a Study Abroad at a Sydney university’s investigating Australian Perspectives on Global Environmental Challenges. The concept of Glimmering—a term we introduce to describe fleeting, perceptual, affective and relational moments when ecological relations become sensorially vivid. Draws on a body of student ecological reflections and long term research into arts-based inquiry and reflective practice. The study demonstrates how innovative and creative pedagogies enable the emergence of ‘Glimmering’ as a creative-ecological process: focusing on aesthetic sensibilities, sensory movements and self-awareness, bringing a more-than-human world into vivid presence. Anchored in Deborah Bird Rose’s Indigenous philosophical ecology, Gregory Bateson’s meta-patterns, and Malone’s notions of shimmering relationalities, students learn to perceive ecological patterns as communicative, ethical, and affective fields. Through reflective eco-writing, sensory mapping, and arts-informed field responses, students express ecological noticing that dissolves boundaries between humans, technologies, land, and other species. Three transformations emerged: (1) Shimmering attention—students tune into ecological signals through sensory and creative modes of knowing; (2) Entangled identity formation—students re-situate themselves within aesthetic, and Indigenous-informed relational ecologies; (3) Ethical imagination—arts-informed inquiry fosters commitments to environmental care, reciprocity, and planetary responsibility. This work argues that New Media Arts-informed, reflective practices, cross-cultural, and technologically augmented pedagogies offer powerful pathways for bridging social, cultural, ecological, and global boundaries, enabling students to participate more deeply in fostering their understandings of Global Environmental Challenges.
Presenters
Bronwen Wade-LeeuwenEducator Researcher (STEAM), School of Natural Sciences, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia Kathryn McLachlan
Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Creative-ecological processes, New Media Arts, AI-visualisations, Reflective eco-writing, Ethical imagination
