Creativity and Culture: The redefining of knowledge through the arts in education for 1 the local in a globalised world.

UNESCO World Conference on Arts Education: Building Creative Capacities for the 21st Century Lisbon, Portugal, March 6-9, 2006.

Creativity and Culture: The redefining of knowledge through the arts in education for the local in a globalised world. Presenting three projects for advocacy of the creative arts in education in the Southern Hemisphere including Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Region.

Professor Elizabeth Grierson, PhD, FRSA Head of the School of Art RMIT University Melbourne Australia Email: elizabeth.grierson@rmit.edu.au

While recognizing that globalization and internationalization are irreversible trends, support for these concepts should not lead to dominance or new forms of imperialism by major cultures and value systems from outside the region; rather, it is of vital importance that every effort should be taken to protect and promote the strengths of local cultures and intellectual and scholarly traditions. (UNESCO, 1998b, p. 57)

the nation needs its artists, more than ever, to cast light on the path it has chosen. (Emmanuel Kasarhrou, 1999, p. 91)

Cultural Identity and the Arts Kasarhrou speaks here of New Caledonia but his statement indicates a vital register for our attention beyond those shores. Arts practitioners and professionals have a vital role to play in revealing local conditions of the past as they light present directions and forecast the futures. Through the arts stories are told as histories are interwoven and futures imagined. The arts are also economically significant and epistemologically diverse. Following the UNESCO priority to mobilise the power of culture (1998a) this discussion proposes that arts education must take account of local political, economic and cultural histories and co-existence of diverse practices, plural narratives and different systems of knowledge in the exchanges of a globalised world. The need for cultural recognition and sustainability for the local has never been greater than in todays global economy where knowledge itself is folded into the marketplace of mobility and transfer. If the arts represent a site of knowledge then the arts are already implicated in the political economy of knowledge exchange and development, yet too

Creativity and Culture: The redefining of knowledge through the arts in education for 2 the local in a globalised world. often culture escapes the attention of policy makers at national and state levels with the arts positioned as frills on the side of the real business of the economy. This is a situation that must be challenged and will only be changed, I suggest, if leaders in the arts and cultural sectors continue with strategic research and advocacy to bring the arts, culture and sustainable development together in policy frameworks. This discussion brings a focus to the mobilisation of the arts in education and the work of arts practitioners, researchers and educators in regional processes. Three projects are profiled: one in research and publication; the second in knowledge mobilisation and transfer; and the third in establishing a mode of regional thinking for the recognition of sustainable futures. Overall each project is working towards building social and cultural capacities of the region through the arts in context of the very real challenges of a global knowledge economy. UNESCO Context In November 2002 I participated in the UNESCO Regional Meeting for Experts in Art Education in the Pacific Region, Fiji,1 with its focus on regional perspectives and its aim of devising strategies for mobilising the arts in education for the region. The Action Plan from the meeting made specific recommendations to be taken up by delegates. In a poetic vein the Action Plan urged that the arts in education resonate across the Pacific Ocean, like the frigate bird Kasaqa, as a symbol of commonality in the Pacific, a navigational spirit of creativity and culture. Symbols of commonality tend to carry with them an aspirational principle or call. This is no exception. From this meeting delegates were called to stay aloft as birds of navigation to lead the consolidation and communication of creative arts in education as a way of strengthening cultural knowledge not only of the Pacific Region, but also throughout the global world (Voi, 2003, pp. 6-7). This call is both poetic and pragmatic. The frigate bird identifies not only the winds and currents between the scattered islands and lands of the Pacific Region, but also like the arts illuminates the spaces between different histories and knowledge systems. Knowledge of epistemological difference is crucial in a region as vast and diverse as the Pacific. If kasaqa provides us with a guide or beacon on our voyages across the oceans of knowledge, then as navigators we must keep our eyes on political implications of globalisation and relationships of knowledge with power, implicit in UNESCOs (1998b) observation regarding the dominance of new forms of imperialism by major cultures and value systems from outside the region. Therein lies the continuing need for awareness that cultural and practice-based knowledge is too often the poor cousin of technological and scientific information and exchange. The UNESCO Medium-Term Strategy 2002-2007 reflects UNESCOs global role in forecasting the future and establishing strategies for capacity-building for social, cultural and economic sustainability. Its unifying theme is, Contributing to peace and human development in an era of globalization through education, the sciences, culture and communication (UNESCO, 2002a, 31/C4, Cover Page), while acknowledging the emerging ethical challenges of globalisation and the need to build new norms and principles to respond to these challenges (2002a, 31 C/4, 25).

Creativity and Culture: The redefining of knowledge through the arts in education for 3 the local in a globalised world.

From 2001 to 2004 UNESCO brought together designated representatives of the creative arts in education in regional locations around the globe with the fundamental belief that artistic creativity and culture are the cornerstones of a safe and sustainable society. Five regional meetings were held in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Arab States, Pacific, Asia and Europe, with the aim of examining the contents and conditions of creativity and the arts in education throughout school and tertiary systems of each location, and to consider pedagogical methods and approaches to artistic education in the interests of integrating artistic programmes into national education systems (see UNESCO, 2002b). The Pacific meeting drew forty specialists in Arts Education in fields of drama, music, visual arts, dance, creative writing and story-telling, from twelve countries including Fiji, Tonga, Cook Islands, Western Samoa, Republic of Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Niue, Australia and New Zealand, as well as representatives of UNESCO Division of the Arts and Cultural Enterprise, Paris, and of the arts in education from Finland and Canada. Delegates shared perspectives, field experience and academic research on the arts in education, and offered viewpoints that would provide the means for building on existing knowledge about the arts in education in the Pacific Region. Under discussion were issues of the paucity of public attention to the arts, marginalisation of the arts in education, poor resourcing, inequalities of participation, impacts of cultural tourism, the need for heritage protection and preservation, and lack of political awareness of arts social role. The Pacific Regional Meeting made recommendations that could be implemented by delegates on their return to their various locations. These included: (1) The mobilization of strategic research projects (quantitative and qualitative) to determine specific practices and particular needs of arts education at all levels of schooling and tertiary, as well as community locations and modes of practice; (2) The encouragement and support of documentation, publication and dissemination of research findings; (3) The networking and linking between institutions, universities, social and cultural organizations and agencies that are dedicated to the development of the Pacific Region through the arts in education; (4) The establishment of a mode of regional thinking on culture and the arts in education whereby positive action and change will be implemented through drawing on expertise available in the Region; (Wagner & Roundell, 2003, p.78): In profiling three projects I have been involved with, between the 2002 Pacific Regional Meeting in Fiji and the 2006 UNESCO World Summit in Lisbon, I am drawing attention to the diverse range of activities for the enhancement of cultural and scholarly capacities in the Pacific Region. Each of these projects has a part to play in mobilising the power of culture through the arts in education as each works towards the strengthening of local and regional perspectives on the arts and cultural knowledge.

Creativity and Culture: The redefining of knowledge through the arts in education for 4 the local in a globalised world. PROJECT ONE: The Arts in Education research In the early 2000s there was a sense of urgency to mobilise leaders of the arts in education to bring together the voices of arts professionals in an educational research framework. A political focus at the time in Aotearoa New Zealand was a new national arts curriculum for primary and secondary schools, The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2000). The time was right to proactively consider questions of curriculum and pedagogy in the arts within context of globalising knowledge frameworks. The building of national curricula is crucial if official governmental support is to be put towards the arts in education, but equally crucial is the need for research and analysis of officially inscribed processes. This calls for a critical approach to arts, curriculum and pedagogy in institutional policies and practices. In the case of Aotearoa New Zealand the implementation of the arts in education, The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2000) was the last phase of a long-lasting process of setting up The Curriculum Framework (1993), an outcomes driven system that was based on seven essential learning areas. Official attention to the arts predictably fell way behind numeracy, literacy, science and technology, with the highly contentious situation of technology being introduced into the curriculum as a latecomer and immediately privileged for attention over the arts (see Mansfield, 2000; ONeill, 2004; Clark, 2004; also Grierson & Mansfield, 2004). Within an educational context the arts as a single field of study provides difficulties of definition and categorisation whereas technology holds to its skills-based necessities in cultural enterprise projects of social and economic restructuring. However categorised, the arts are more than mere skills and technological thinking. Thus they are constantly escaping definition as they respond to political, cultural and technological changes of local and global communities. When putting conditions of practice in the creative arts to the test of scrutiny it soon becomes apparent that such analysis is essentially a political activity. Rather than lie down and let the curricle roll on, the organisers of this research project2 opened questions of pedagogy and curriculum in the arts to critical scrutiny. The outcome was The Arts in Education: Critical Perspectives from Aotearoa New Zealand (Grierson & Mansfield, 2003), the first book of its kind on the arts curriculum in New Zealand. Contributions were solicited from leading academics on visual arts, music, dance, drama, design and curriculum theory to consider the arts in relation to questions of what it means to be critical in arts education today (see Peters, 2003).3 In October 2003, the New Zealand Prime Minister and Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, the Rt. Hon. Helen Clark, showed her overt support for academic research in the arts by launching the collection at a large gathering of arts supporters, professionals and academics at the University of Auckland. Situating the arts in the wider contexts of knowledge and globalisation ensured that issues of interdisciplinarity, aesthetics, literacy, identity, cultural diversity and difference would be addressed in relation to the needs of curriculum. Although the discussions responded in particular to New Zealand conditions the implications and applications were wider (these contributions have also a universal appeal, wrote Marshall in a review of the book, 2003, p. 108), as they dealt with the challenges and politics of curriculum for the

Creativity and Culture: The redefining of knowledge through the arts in education for 5 the local in a globalised world. future of a creative economy. Knowledge in and of the arts can be largely a safe procedure of aesthetic and formalist concerns apparently devoid of political contexts, or it can be a critically engaged practice whereby contextual enquiry exposes the social, cultural and political terrain within which practice is situated. Contributors positioned and debated the arts and curriculum policy in context of the political and social conditions and coordinates of new technologies, economic and cultural globalisation, and intersections of knowledge with the economy. This political framing was foregrounded by educational theorist, Michael Peters (2003): [Q]uestions of national and cultural identity loom large under the impact of an economic and cultural globalisation that threaten to displace many historical coordinates we previously took for granted; and a new kind of imperialism one ostensibly compatible with human rights and cosmopolitan values is being advocated by advisors to Western leaders as a foreign policy basis aimed at regime change of so-called rogue states. Aotearoa New Zealand is also at a critical point in coming to terms with its own colonial past in addressing historic Maori grievances, its constitutional ties with Britain and its relationship with the United States. (pp. 9-10) When the official rhetoric of government policy becomes the normalised language of educational practice, educators need to advance a political understanding of the discourses of policy in a globalised economy. The de-regulation of the New Zealand economy has had the effect of opening the country to the vagaries of the market economy with foreign investment and ownership of public assets, bi-lateral agreements, global trade pacts, and international competition for goods and services, which as Peters (2003, p. 10) points out, includes health and education that were once part of a protected public domain. The arts are not immune from such political moves and influences. Their material forms and social functions will inevitably respond to changing social conditions, and educators in the arts must be fully aware of social and political contexts if the arts and culture are to be positioned as significant sites of knowledge and partnered with development in a global economy of knowledge transfer and exchange. Artists reflect, critique and relate to the world in ways that bring the world into the line of sight. If as Emmanuel Kasarhrou (1999, p. 91) stated, artists are needed more than ever to cast a light on the path the nation has chosen, then our role as educators in the arts must be to ensure that learners are equipped with knowledge of the nation and its political directions. This can be done only with wider knowledge of the local, regional and global so that the nations path will be visible in its whole context. PROJECT TWO: Nga Waka and Te Whakatere The nations path and regional perspectives were made visible in two biennial conferences of ANZAAE, Aotearoa, New Zealand Association of Art Educators, Nga Waka (2003) and Te Whakatere: Navigating with the Arts in the Pacific (2005). They both positioned cultural aspects of the arts at the forefront of educational concerns. If we are to think and act regionally then epistemological differences that are inherent in the region must be understood via cultural, artistic, linguistic and textual practices. The

Creativity and Culture: The redefining of knowledge through the arts in education for 6 the local in a globalised world. voices and languages of diverse cultural histories and indigenous narratives must be heard, just as there is a need to recognise the persistence of historically dominant constructions of the Pacific through Western epistemologies. Thematically both conferences positioned navigations as historically appropriate for symbolising the processes of recognition and repositioning. In her Welcome, Kupu Whakatau to Nga Waka, Conference Director Jill Smith (2003) explained: Nga Waka translates as the canoes, a title chosen because of its capacity in Maori terms of representing variously the vessels of the Pacific migrations, the waka huia (carved boxes containing chiefly treasures), and the metaphorical/spiritual vessels which carry genealogies, knowledge and traditions. (Brochure Preface) From that starting point Nga Waka unpacked the WAKA, the canoe, letter by letter, in four dimensions of art education: Witnessing biculturalism; Activating technologies; Knowing art educations; Acclaiming Asia Pacific. Concepts of voyaging across space and time, exploration, discovery and new horizons in the worlds of art education found their form through various modes of scholarship and debate in the re-thinking of the arts in context of biculturalism, technology and cultural politics. At the Powhiri (opening ceremony), New Zealand Maori artist and educator Robert Jahnke (2003) spoke of a Maori-centric momentum (p. 1) in tertiary education driven by the Tertiary Education Commission, Te Amorangi Matauranga Matua, which was established in 2003. Jahnke explained that this strategy acknowledges matauranga Maori (Maori knowledge) as a valid knowledge paradigm and pathway alongside Western knowledge. This process has been achieved through bringing culture into alignment with development policy at government level. Jahnke further explains: Te Rautaki Matauranga Maori is one of six Tertiary Education Commission strategies specifically aimed at contributing to the advancement of Maori development aspirations by providing strategic direction for tertiary sector institutions to enable them to address: Maori management and delivery; Maori knowledge and ways of learning; and Maori advancement and aspirations (pp. 1-2). When state or national governance strategises policy support for cultural aspirations then issues of development can be mobilised at local or community levels. The crucial observation here is that policy frames practice, so it matters what sort of policy is strategised for the arts. For Aotearoa New Zealand to be a significant player in the Pacific Region the need to redress deficits of colonial inheritance has become a political imperative. Thus bicultural social and educational politics in New Zealand call for a workable understanding of what it means to be a colonised nation in the Pacific, for both indigenous and imperialist genealogies as well as for present practices of people, place and systems of knowledge. The implications of cultural politics upon the arts must not be missed. It is now a given that the arts, as defined by Western epistemologies have arisen in the economic and

Creativity and Culture: The redefining of knowledge through the arts in education for 7 the local in a globalised world. social discourses of Renaissance and Enlightenment and that the study of art works in the discipline of art history is situated in this same lineage and tied to Western systems of evaluation and recognition. Jahnke (2003) cites Jan Jagodzinski on this point, who said, Any radical change for a culturally diverse art education would need to re-write discursively all three terms: art, art history and the nation, which would virtually be an anathema to current art education curricula (p. 9). Many programmes and centres for the arts continue to grapple with the need for discursive strategies to open the politics of knowledge in the arts to question. Less apparent is placing the arts within contexts of new ways of perceiving and understanding the nation and the sorts of political imperatives that might arise from such analysis. These are the sorts of conflicts and tensions discussed by Michael Mel (2003) from the University of Goroka, Papua New Guinea, who brought attention to the arts within an undercurrent of tensions that pull and push many of us between our own communities we live with, the institutions we work in, and the nation-state at large (p. 1). Situating the social and economic problems of the local in the wider frameworks of the global, Mel (2003) showed how people are placed in such situations or demands of choice between the self and the community, between the local and national and between the national and global. Proposing a positive strategy for this dilemma in the face of challenges offered by globalisation to make the world look, sound and taste the same, Mel revealed how the arts can be employed effectively in the hatching of a teacher education programme based on local knowledge (p. 2). Local and regional knowledge informed the continuation of the navigations theme at the next conference, Te Whakatere: Navigating with the Arts in the Pacific (2005) with Piikea Clark (2005) portraying the Navigator Concept in historical and material perspective: Our world of the Pacific, a network of islands dispersed across the largest expanse of Earth, has been defined by the exploration of navigators over the course of thousands of years. The names Kupe, Toi, Tafai, Magellan, Tasman, and Cook are remembered to this day among the great navigators of our collective past Beyond knowledge, skill and experience, the principle tool which the earliest navigators of the Pacific utilized to direct their ocean explorations was the hoe or steering paddle. Through it, navigators engaged with their ocean environment, transmitting their knowledge and intention upon the ocean medium to direct the course of their canoe and voyage. (Brochure Preface, n.p.) Materialising this concept into a communal ritual at the opening of the conference, Piikea Clark introduced a hoe made in Hawaii, which was passed around a circle of attendees, with each person taking a turn to hold the wooden paddle and introduce themselves to the group. Thus, via the imprint of navigations, the tide was set in a potently Pacific way to establish a community of practice, which would address the arts in context of winds of change in the social, cultural and economic currents of the Pacific Region.

Creativity and Culture: The redefining of knowledge through the arts in education for 8 the local in a globalised world.

The voices of indigenous people were centrally positioned with presentations on cultural perspectives and contexts of the arts for the future of the region, from Kiribati Islander Teweiariki Teaero of the University of South Pacific; Gregory Cajete, a Native American educator and visual artist from Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico; and two Maori artists, Rachel Rakena, digital and moving image artist of Nga Puhi and Ngati Pakeha descent, and Maori artist and educator Cliff Whiting, of Te Kaha, Bay of Plenty in New Zealand. Two Pakeha speakers, Jill Smith and I, reinforced the navigations theme with attention to specific needs and politics of cultural diversity and difference in New Zealand arts educational practice. Nga Waka and Te Whakatere were significant for their timing in relation to policy changes in New Zealand education through the Tertiary Education Commission and The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2000). Each gathering focused on the responsibilities we have as educators to navigate and lead the next generation of artists and arts educators in the region and on farther shores. The gatherings were significant also for the way they brought a focus to the political effects of governance in education and the arts. Globally and nationally inscribed systems of economic rationalism where knowledge is reduced to a measurable product something that can be audited, that can be exchanged in the market-place, treated as property and priced accordingly (Codd, 2005, p. 15) have an effect on the arts as on any spheres of knowledge. The challenge remains for us, as educators in the arts, to see that the potential lies in and through the arts to engage in both an emancipatory and an oppositional practice, for both are characteristic of the arts. PROJECT THREE: The South Project The potential of the arts for establishing a mode of regional thinking and working towards the realisation of sustainable futures was evident in my third case study, The South Project. Conceptualising the region in a wider frame of being South, The South Project acts as a capacity-building project with cultural identity at its heart. It works as a vehicle for artists to explore ways of linking different countries of the south, and furthering a dialogue on progressive art production away from the epicentres of the art world (Craft Victoria, 2005). Thus it aims to position the local within the impact and forces of the global in a potently creative way, asking where is here when it is far from there and you are South, which has always been the farthest point from anywhere. On The South Project website we can read: The Project started in 2004 when representatives from over fourteen different countries gathered in Melbourne, Australia, for South 1 The Gathering, to discuss how they might work together for the mobilising of culture and identity of the South. Despite great differences of language, colour, culture, economics and history, one element brought everyone together the condition of living in the south. What is normally a condition of isolation, has now become an opportunity for collaboration. (http://www.southproject.org/ )

Creativity and Culture: The redefining of knowledge through the arts in education for 9 the local in a globalised world. Something new is being created here; something vitally important in that it links, networks and collaborates in new ways; it has an inner momentum as it gathers individuals and communities together. Craft Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, is the host organising body with Dr Kevin Murray and Magdalena Moreno at the helm. Operating over time (2004-2008), and spread across place, the Project brings artists and writers together in a series of cultural gatherings in the Southern Hemisphere: South 1 - The Gathering, July 2004; South 2 - The Journey, 2005-2007; South 3 The Arrival, Festival of the South, 2008. It is primarily aimed at building the capacity of artists and writers to narrate their stories, to find a space of legitimation, and to identify what being South might mean in the twenty-first century. My involvement started in 2005 during the second phase of The South Project. As stated on the website, The second phase of the South Project is feeding off of the creative energy sparked at the forum and is developing ways to enable, stimulate, challenge and celebrate south-south dialogue, and creative exchange. (http://www.southproject.org/ ) In February 2005, I crossed the Tasman Sea from Aotearoa New Zealand to Australia to take up a new position as Head of the School of Art at RMIT University in Melbourne, there to come into new spheres of cultural exchange. We soon extended the RMIT School of Art International Artist in Residency Programme4 to become an active support partner with The South Project Residency programme, which enables opportunities for artistic creation to develop as response to the experience of cultural difference (Craft Victoria, 2005). The RMIT School of Art is committed to continuing support of The South Project as a major international cultural, political and social initiative, and as a support partner the School was honoured in 2005 to offer the first international studio residency of The South Project to Laura Vinci from Brazil, known for her work in the 2004, XXVI Bienal de So Paulo. In Melbourne her multimedia installation, Iguacu engaged our perceptions of the forces and transitions of the natural environment to turn us around to face our assumptions of the world, its resources and social controls. As artist practitioner, Laura Vinci was the maker and mediator, the vehicle and transmitter of energies to clarify a world ruled by divisions and continuities, fluidity and rupture, the origin of which might be locatable, as Rodrigo Naves (2004) suggested, in the nature of Brazil itself with its exuberant and varied natural reality linked to the violence with which it has been destroyed since the start of colonization (p.1). In these cultural histories and present geographies lie the sources of Laura Vincis cultural encounters with the diverse elements of nature to feed our sensory perceptions and understandings and to confront our responsibilities to the globe. Jeremy Wafer from South Africa, the second Artist in Residence with The South Project and RMIT School of Art, came to Australia to explore what it meant to be South by pondering how such states of place and time could be located, identified, mapped and documented. He was searching for Capricorn, that invisible Tropic that makes all things South available to our cognitive perceptions. Tropic was the first in a series of three installations to mark and trace sections of the Tropic of Capricorn across Australia, South Africa and South America, a locating point for my thinking about a more lateral set of relationships, said Wafer (2005).

Creativity and Culture: The redefining of knowledge through the arts in education for 10 the local in a globalised world. By walking an invisible line in the Australian Central Desert, Wafer was locating a borderless border, a threshold where the line appears only on those faded maps that bear no resemblance to our material footsteps. Yet he excavated a position, locating it by the stars with his GPS devices, quantifying it, and walking it step by step, frame by frame. Stone by red stone he noted minute variations on the ground as he mapped his journey from Capricorn to Melbourne, desert to city, stars to gallery, where we could celebrate the southern threshold together through his visual cartography. What were these marks that we witnessed? Wafers project brought us to that point of confrontation with the specificity of place and the invisible inflections of time. There, via the notations of visual culture we saw how an invisible line was crossed by his interruption to its invisibility; and we witnessed what being South might mean when one brings sky and earth together across the continents as, through his work, Wafer reflected on the layering of time in peoples and value systems, and the archaeologies of economic and cultural histories of dry, remote and resistant place. At South 2: The Journey, which was held at Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand, Wellington, in October 2005, my focus was also a mapping of sorts. As a speaker at The Journey: Between Sky and Earth. Ways of making a place in a placeless world, my interest was to locate ourselves not by walking a line, but by defining another threshold of language and loss. At The Journey the focus was on the exploration and creation of local identity in an increasingly global society, including creative responses to the histories of colonisation, internet, economic globalisation, migration and tourism; and keeping our eyes on the stars as markers in the sky that are shared with others across great distances of space and time (Craft Victoria, 2005). With a focus on the constellations, such as the Southern Cross and Matariki (the Seven Sisters or Pleiades), questions were asked, such as, how do artists uncover alternative meanings, and what are the stories of the stars that have emerged from the South? In Languaging the Local in the Global: Across the Pacific and beneath Southern Skies, I was undertaking a creative excavation of identity in the South by considering language and artistic practices across space and time. One of the practices was poetry, another memory, as ways of identifying our locations and histories. This was not about the search for an original southern meaning; nor did it claim a fixed southern construction. Rather it was searching for a way to talk about being South from a range of differing arrival and departure points, some personal, others political, as it directed attention to the creative fields of art and language as identifying forces. One of the United Nations targets is the promotion of new forms of social cohesion of the local, through new ways of addressing issues of tolerance, diversity, human rights, participatory democracy, interculturalism, equality of opportunity, and ethical practices of justice. In the global context of changing economic balances of power, The South Project has brought attention to the creative power of the arts as material, cultural, epistemological, and spiritual practices that work towards social cohesion and understanding.

Creativity and Culture: The redefining of knowledge through the arts in education for 11 the local in a globalised world. Culture per se can no longer be thought of in the older terms of industrial or colonial society with the categorising principles and organisational structures based around hierarchical discourses of modernity. In a global age, where the movements of people, finance, information and communications occur at an unprecedented rate, we face new architectonics of space, new logics of information and capital through which culture and the human subject are being organised and constituted. New forms and ideologies of centrality advance globally to blur boundaries, both actual and assumed, of the local and specific, and this tendency serves to deterritorialise traditional spheres of place, activity and identity of the local human subject, while at the same time redrawing boundaries to re-territorialise in the name of global peace and economic stability. The Pacific Region, as an historical void of oceanic space, is particularly susceptible to these pressures, and any moves towards developmental models of governance in the cultural and economic spheres must take into account the historical tensions and legacies of colonisation and new forms of imperialism. The United Nations strategies for peace and sustainability for local cultures are important measures, even if they seem impossible to implement in todays world with its profound inequalities, threats of terrorism and increasing global poverty. Through the creative arts and cultural enquiry we can be deeply empowered to protect and promote the strengths of local cultures, to open the spaces of knowledge for recapitulation and reinvention, and to engage with intellectual and scholarly traditions in the process. Conclusion This paper brings a focus to the arts and culture in the Pacific Region and being South where the local subject vies for cultural and economic space in a world of increasing social and economic pressures, and global struggles for power. When the central knowledge role of the arts is appreciated, then the arts may be valued in policy and practice as a force and forge for the heating and moulding of cultural values that go beyond safe landings, comfortable aesthetics, reductive practices and the seeming clarity of the already-thought. In meeting the challenges to mobilise the power of culture, educators in all disciplinary fields might reflect on the spirit of the arts as a site of knowledge and a potent location for the working through of important issues of social, cultural and economic sustainability of local communities in a global world order. At a time when knowledge economies are the driving force for sustainable knowledge societies, the knowledge role in the arts cannot be overlooked for its epistemological capacity to provoke and actualise the political dimensions of sustainable action. This paper has presented three projects that have provoked and activated research, knowledge exchange and a mode of regional thinking: a book, two conferences, and a series of gatherings across the South. Each has placed culture and the arts at its heart and each has drawn from the expertise of arts practitioners, arts educators, researchers, academics and policy-makers in the South; and each is just a beginning. We have far to go; and go we must, on calm and rough seas. I well recall that great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda: Where the sea is concerned I am an amateur. For years I have gathered a sea-wisdom which does me little good since I set sail only on land. The

Creativity and Culture: The redefining of knowledge through the arts in education for 12 the local in a globalised world. ocean of knowledge is vast and the process of political engagement may be fraught, but if we do not venture forth to advocate for the arts as crucial aspects of cultural policy and strategic development then we may never feel the surge of ocean currents and we may miss the chance to turn political navigations towards sustainable futures for the knowledge yet to come.
Elizabeth M. Grierson, InSEA World Congress; and UNESCO World Conference, Portugal, March 2006 This paper was presented as a Keynote at Interdisciplinary Dialogues in Arts Education, InSEA Congress 2006, International Society of Education Through Art, Viseu, Portugal, March 1-5, 2006. With thanks to my colleagues Dr Janet Mansfield and Peter Westwood for reviewing a draft of this paper.

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