Haley, D., 2016.

Weaving the filigree: Paradoxes, opposites and diversity for participatory emergent arts and design curricula.

The chapter critiques contemporary Art and Design learning, teaching and research curricula with regard to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Formal, informal and non-formal education approaches are offered as potential good creative practice for ESD, and these find synthesis in the interdisciplinary project, Walkabout the City? for Manchester Festival of Social Science, devised by the authors. The text finds that such arts-led practice-based research reveals the need to resolve rather than solve paradoxes, opposites and diversity, suggesting that the lived world is far more complex than current HE curricula structures would allow us to believe. The apparently banal method of inquiry, talking-while-walking offered insights into people’s understanding of urban sustainability that would otherwise not been revealed. Analysis of this method adds to the concept of emergent knowledge, and it is postulated that this form of knowledge is vital to understanding and responding to qualities of resilience necessary for adaptation to the 21st Century challenges.