Learning Sciences Lunch and Learn with Dr. Mindy Blaise, “Collaborative Experimentations Outside of the Classroom: Other Places, Other Ways of Working, Other Publics”

Drawing from two collaborative and experimental place-based inquiries (Kids on Country and Child-soil Relations), Mindy will share how these projects experimented with other places, other ways of working, and other publics to generate and share Kalaaku water stories and child-soil stories to a broad audience. These projects understood place as agentic, alive, and full of Ancestral knowledges and colonial histories. For these projects, other places included the Great Western Woodlands, Western Australia, and everyday soil worlds in Boorloo, (Perth), Western Australia. Counter-mapping and pedagogical documentation were the other ways of working with Aboriginal communities and teachers and children. These other ways were creative, participatory, and pedagogical. Both projects shared findings outside of academia through public exhibitions at galleries and museums. Kalaaku water stories and child-soil stories show how ‘we’ are all interconnected and part of ongoing water and soil worlds.

Bio:

Dr Mindy Blaise is a Professor, Vice Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow, and Director of the Centre for People, Place, & Planet, a University Strategic Research Centre at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. She is a transdisciplinary leader and researcher whose scholarship is at the forefront of feminist knowledge making, and anticolonial and activist research that generatively responds to the ever-growing injustices of sexism, racism, ecocide, and neoliberal capitalism. Her research challenges the modernist frameworks that ground education and has come to include a commitment to working together with others in creative ways to make change. This is evident through the research networks she has co-founded, such as the Common Worlds Research Collective and #FEAS Feminist Educators Against Sexism.