Dr Onishi Pamela Grace Costes obtains a new grant and presented an online keynote at the University of Southern Queensland

Dr Onishi Pamela Grace Costes, Education Research Scientist from the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice (CRPP), obtained a new grant for her project titled “Developing Teacher competencies in Aesthetically-Infused Inquiry-Based Learning (AIIBL): An intervention to move IBL in Humanities and Arts to the next phase”.

Scholarship tells us that IBL is an approach to learning that can provide the rigor needed to develop discipline-based content understanding and offer holistic, student-centered processes that nurture skills and dispositions needed for the fast-changing future world. Locally, IBL comes to the forefront as a response to balancing the rigor and joy of learning despite limited evidence that a more holistic and student-centered teaching approaches and learning environments are being enacted in a sustained manner in classrooms.

A study on aesthetically-infused inquiry-based learning (AIIBL) found that IBL student-centered outcomes were optimized in lesson designs that showed frequently occurring relationships between aesthetic experience (AE) and inquiry. It forwarded a theory that inquiry and aesthetic experience are inextricably interdependent. These moments where AIIBL were observed, however, were reported as not significant and the dynamic interactions and correlations were not observed between AE outcomes in all IBL modes and phases.

This proposed follow-up Design-based Research (DBR) intervention aims to do the following: (1) To observe teacher professional learning through an iterative co-design and implementation of IBL curriculum units with teachers in Humanities and Arts primary and secondary schools using the AIIBL framework and determine areas to support growth and development (GERA priority); (2) To develop Humanities and Arts curriculum units’ AIIBL design to support the growth and development of students’ 21CC (GERA priority);  and (3) To build a foundation for a theory of transference of learning and skills across domains by exploring the potentials of AIIBL for cross-disciplinary development of 21CC (MERA priority).

In infusing the concept of AE in IBL, the study addresses GERA’s priority on cross-disciplinary learning merging artistic and scientific big ideas. Likewise, the focus on teacher professional learning will help develop a sustained effective professional development practice that targets competencies for future teaching in schools.

On 20 August 2025, she was invited by the University of Southern Queensland’s School of Education: Pedagogy, learning innovation and excellence research cluster, to deliver an online keynote titled “The Value of Aesthetic Experience in the Quality of Teaching and Learning Environments: An introduction to the concept of aesthetically-infused inquiry-based learning (AIIBL)”

Her presentation focuses on unpacking the concept of aesthetically-infused inquiry-based learning (AIIBL). It presents qualitative findings supported by epistemic network analysis (ENA) that measures the aesthetic quality of experience-inquiry interrelationships in humanities and arts lessons (n=87) in Singapore primary schools. It explores current understandings and practices of teachers to enact sensorial and affective inquiries for more personally and socially relevant educative experiences. The findings suggest that while the teachers express desire to provide holistic and student-centred learning environments, aesthetic experience (AE) is rarely infused in the inquiry-based learning (IBL) process. This results into unsuccessful IBL outcomes. The discussion focuses on how AIIBL can be a meaningful and novel way to empirically ground evidence that build on theories on the inextricable link between IBL and AE to more effectively support teachers in their professional growth. The conclusion supports and provides evidence to Dewey (1938) that inquiry, scientific or otherwise, cannot be entirely separated from the experiences that shaped them; and that experience is based on the interactions between the person and the world in which meanings are gained through reflection and inquiry.