Personal profile

Biography

Nish is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University, where she teaches units in Visual Art and Design Education for secondary students and Creative Arts Education for primary pre-service teachers. She has extensive international experience in art education, curriculum development, and educational policy.

As a practising artist, she integrates her roles as artist, researcher, and teacher (a/r/t). Her research spans various areas, including art-based research, teacher education, and the exploration of culture and identity through arts-based methodologies. She applies these approaches across diverse fields to understand how cultural diversity can be better supported in educational settings. Her current research focuses on culturally responsive pedagogies aimed at fostering inclusion and supporting cultural diversity within education.

Her other key research interests include examining issues of race, gender, colour, and class through a postcolonial feminist lens. She explores themes such as postcoloniality, patriarchal legacies, diasporic heritages, migration transitions, and the identity negotiation of transnational women of colour.

She is highly skilled in qualitative research methodologies, particularly autoethnography, narrative research, and visual research methods.  

Research interests

  • Culturally responsive pedagogies, decolonial lenses to education
  • Gendered lenses of identity politics: transnational women of colour, women artists, migrant women, international students.

  • Migration and its impact on migrant communities from both educational and social dimensions

Monash teaching commitment

  • EDF5179 - Visual art and design education in the secondary years 1A
  • EDF4093 - Primary creative arts
  • EDF2069 - Primary creative arts
  • EDF5849 - Early childhood and primary arts

 

Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):

  • SDG 4 - Quality Education
  • SDG 5 - Gender Equality
  • SDG 10 - Reduced Inequalities

Education/Academic qualification

Doctor of Philosophy, Deakin University

Research area keywords

  • Sociology, history, and philosophy of education
  • Art Education
  • creative art pedagogies
  • intercultural understanding
  • cross-cultural teaching and learning
  • women artists and teachers as artists
  • visual research methods
  • art-based research pedagogy and methods
  • Educating for diversity and inclusion
  • Transforming teaching and learning
  • Transnational and migration studies
  • integrative abilities of the arts
  • culturally responsive pedagogies
  • postcolonial feminist lenses

Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years

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