Nish Belford

Nish works in the Faculty of Education at Monash University as a Lecturer. Her teaching responsibilities include units dedicated to Visual Art and Design Education in the secondary and Creative Arts Education in the primary years for pre-service teacher education. She has teaching experience in; Visual Art and Design at secondary level in Mauritius. She previously taught in pre-service teacher education (Art Education programs) for primary and secondary education as course coordinator, lecturer and tutor at Deakin University. She studied a Teachers Diploma in Visual Arts in 1994 and later completed Bachelor in Education (Visual Arts) with Honours in 2004, and a Masters of Education (Arts Education) in 2008. Nish completed a Doctor of Philosophy degree and graduated in 2014.

Nish is a practising artist and her PhD thesis addressed how cultures and identities are represented through an artistic expression. Central to her thesis is an understanding of discourses around culture, identity, postcolonial diaspora theory, migration transitions, identity crisis, and cultural hybridisation and acculturation experiences. She has used autoethnography, a/r/tography, visual research methods, narratives, and a reflexive analysis of her own artworks to explore these issues. Her work also discusses her experience and challenges as a women artist coming to terms with changing landscapes in renegotiating an artistic practice in a new environment and as influenced by multi-layered identities.

Nish has diverse international experience from teaching and research in the field of Art Education, curriculum and educational policy. She has conducted personal development for teachers and worked on research projects that explore how artistic experience can promote intercultural understanding and interdisciplinary pedagogical approaches. Her current research targets to develop collaborative partnership with schools in implementing creative visual arts pedagogies to promote intercultural capability in young children.

Nish is currently supervising five PhD students as main and co-supervisor in the area of art based research pedagogy and methods with migrant communities, engagement of migrant’s children learning and parental influence on student’s subject choices, influence of design semiotics of megachurches on young people’s learning and sociocultural interactions.

• Intercultural understanding through art education, artmaking and creative pedagogies

• Identity politics within transnational spaces: International students, women artists, migrant women, artist/researcher/teachers

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