Arts-based responses to cultural and religion identity to inform Initial Teacher Education

With increased globalization and the internationalization of education cultural identity and religion are increasingly becoming sites of exclusion, discrimination and violence in the Australasian region, and increasingl y the perpetrators are youth. This paper explores how universities might move to address these serious concerns. It is argued that universities, and education faculties in particular, hold a strategic place and indeed a responsibility to equip students to respond sensitively, intelligently and proactively to these contemporary contexts. Arts-based research, images and drawings (Thomson, 2009) and drama (Cahill, 2006; Harris & Jones, 2014) was conducted with cohorts of pre-service teachers in three Indonesi an universities. Artefacts from these workshops are presented as exemplars of students‘ person - centred wisdom (Leavy, 2015) produced as they explored identity, enacted scenarios of exclusion and conceived some possible solutions. These artefacts provide pause for academics to consider, if and when, we move to address these local and regional imperatives how courses might move from learning about ethnic and religious diversity to learning from our students‘ diversities and xperiences.