Dr Marta Kawka (BFA.Hons, B.Ed., Ph.D., G.C.Gestalt.T., G.Dip.P.Couns)
I am a Visual Arts and Media Arts Education academic with over 20 years of experience designing and delivering arts education programs for pre-service teachers at university level.
My approach integrates embedded counselling practices, drawing on my professional expertise as a pastoral counsellor to support the diverse neurodivergent profiles of my students.
As a neurodivergent individual myself, I deeply understand the challenges of navigating a world that often feels mismatched with one's ways of thinking, sensing, and being. This lived experience fuels my commitment to cultivating neuroaffirming learning environments - spaces where students feel seen, safe, and empowered to grow into the fullness of who they are.
My teaching is a space of reflective artistic inquiry, where students are invited to connect with their authentic self, discover a sense of purpose, align with their values, and cultivate compassion - for self and for others. I aim to nurture not only artistic and pedagogical skill, but also presence, depth, and wholeness.
As a Christian on the lifelong journey of spiritual formation, I am continually being shaped into the person God is calling me to be - an authentic presence of Christ in the world. My life is centred in the sacred mystery of God, a mystery I seek not to solve, but to dwell within.
My special interests:
- Christian practical theology and aesthetic theology
- Christian mysticism; particularly Apophatic theology
- Experiential phenomenology of art practice
- Analytical Psychology (Jungian Psychology): particularly focusing on the Jung’s metaphysics
- Spiritual Direction; the spiritual director/companion serves as a third partner in the process of connecting with the Ground of all Being.
- Non-Duality, Advaita Vedanta (Rupert Spira)
- Panpsychism (David Chalmers)
- Psychospiritual Development (Ken Wilber)
- Cosmological Spirituality (Brian Swimme)
- The Omega Point/Noosphere (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)
- Morphic Resonance (Rupert Sheldrake)
- Creation Spirituality (Matthew Fox)
- Anthroposophy (Rudolf Steiner)
- Generative AI in artmaking and Ministry
- Transpersonal Research Methods; particularly in relation to Being-With non-human life (i.e. Nature)
