The Creative Pedagogue: Enacting Affective Pathways for Interdisciplinary Embodied Creativity in Primary Education

This chapter has grown through dialogue about creative pedagogies across the primary curriculum. The concept of the creative pedagogue traverses subjects, spaces and classes. It is an idea through which we express the creative synthesis of curriculum into embodied learning experiences for primary aged students. The creative pedagogue understands learning as embodied, experiential, unconscious, affective. Embodied expertise is central to the creative pedagogue, which in the context of this chapter we define as knowing and feeling through the body. Children often learn without thinking that they are learning - they sense and intuit knowledge as they pick up patterns, numbers, information. In developing embodied expertise in creative education, the primary school teacher on our authorship team, Nathan Portelli, has been inspired by specific educational strategies such as The Learning Pit , Talk Moves and yarning circles with indigenous communities. We focus on two case studies from Nathan's classroom, firstly a creative and embodied approach to mathematics education and, secondly, reconciliation yarning circles and indigenous gardening.