This presentation speaks to a developing appreciation of the necessary and optional pooling of our resources and energies in regard of pedagogical possibility and enrichment in a distinctly ‘northern Europe’, indeed ‘Arctic and ‘near Arctic’ arts educator context. Our conversation invites reflection on ‘nurture’ in a higher education arts pedagogy context as processes of reflexive, embodied and material collaboration seeking to examine ability to find and reassure comfort. We offer this account as learners and educators – being together yet apart - with reference to our recent international exchange working within the UArctic ASAD network. ‘Getting it’ – a sense of ‘knowing’ as coming together in support and unity around ‘good learning’ process across different regional contexts - is positioned here as a focus for reflection, and gratitude, but also a comment on art educator consciousness, agency and negotiation. What is understood as of value, and how to more actively ‘find comfort’ in learning together is examined. Informed not least by what it is to care, to comfort and to flourish (Wood and Millett, 2026; Finley, 2017; Rabinow and Bennett, 2010). Using Finnish, Swedish and Scottish experience, research and debate, we explore how is such nurturing understood as welcome, ‘other’ and appropriate between arts educators today? Barone and Eisner (2012:6) claim that any virtues to be found in arts based research are “not located in some isomorphic relationship between a statement and an event” but rather – and in this we too celebrate conversational form -“to be found in the degree to which, as Geertz says, it makes our conversation more interesting." Nevertheless, what frames interesting, how do we ‘know’ thick description in our intercultural education communities asks us to attend, be closer, and find togetherness ‘often’ in both failed and successful attempts of repeated ‘returning’ (Kartsaki, 2016).

With examples drawn from our distinctive Finnish, Swedish and Scottish centred pedagogy traditions, our methods include field site interventions, archive resourcing, creative arts led practice and sharing dialogues and approaches to better appreciating different local and regional higher education ‘learner’ environments. Our ‘place-situated’ task working as dwelling and doing in and between nature and other spheres, offers opportunity to explore and engage each other in learning together as nurture through collaborative togetherness, making and doing (Lundstedt et al., 2023). Consciously we have situated methods of ‘finding comfort’ in learning through creative materiality, artworks and embodied critiques. Attending to poly crisis ‘attacks’, denigrations, and demands we respectfully acknowledge widespread affective ‘dis-comfort’ in research learning contexts including tensions and constraints of intercultural and interdisciplinary arts education practice. We nonetheless undertake to share our senses of ordinary and extraordinary making and doing process of ‘comfort-able’ as a valuable pedagogical nurturing of environment, resources and self.

We share examples as moments, ‘situated appreciations’ of what is gained and ‘yet hidden’ and unspoken in higher education learner contexts with our particular focus on being an educator as learner, comfort and well-being informed pedagogical process, material tangible creative undertaking and investigation. We offer documenting and questions that speak to how we as educators learn through collaborative ‘comfort’ in sharing narrative, artworks, visual and other critique. Each contribute to our applied learning appreciations of (for example) both dwelling and being in relation to a wider conceptual appreciation of in-situ nature, landscape and ‘porous’, contested place (Jess and Massey, 1995) educator working. Our presentation, acts as an invitation into our conversation and to stimulate other connection. It reflects how might a pedagogy of nurture – specifically here ‘learning as comfort-able’ - be usefully developed for applied educational context and inter-disciplinary arts education methods working in the European circumpolar north, near Arctic, and beyond.

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