CHAPTER FIFTEEN 'RUNNING THROUGH OUR VEINS': A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF THE AGENTIC ROLE OF ARTS-BASED PRACTICE IN NATURE ATTUNEMENT Building Sustainability with the Arts: Proceedings of the 2nd National Ecoarts Australis Conference 2016. Cambridge Scholars Publishing (original) (raw)
Related papers
Re-Connecting With Nature: Transformative Environmental Education Through the Arts
Educators are seeking ways to make learning relevant at a time when students are increasingly disconnected from the natural world and the places where they live, and more connected to digital media and technology. Guided by Thomas Berry’s influential vision and David Orr’s environmental education work, this theoretical study argues for a humane and integrative environmental education and the important pedagogic role of art and modern communication technologies in support of it. This thesis examines how the arts may nurture environmental sensitivity, shape ecological identities, and engage students in a co-creative dialogue with nature and culture, directing older students toward a more responsible and critical view of technology and media. By examining different worldviews, philosophies, educational paradigms, the role of arts in learning, and the use of media and technologies, in light of childhood and youth identity development, this thesis explores how the arts can effect ‘transdicisplinary’ learning, a deeper connection to nature and help establish a holistic and humane environmental education curriculum.
At the Heart of Art and Earth: An Exploration of Practices in Arts-Based Environmental Education
2013
In today’s technological world, human intertwinement with the rest of nature has been severely diminished. In our digital culture, many people hardly have any direct experience of and sense of connection with “the real” of the natural world. The author assumes that when we want to find ways to mend this gap, arts-based environmental education (AEE) can play a meaningful role. In AEE, artmaking is regarded as itself a way of potentially gaining new understandings about our natural environment. As a reflective practitioner, the author facilitated three different AEE activities, at several times and at diverse locations. On basis of his observations, memories, written notes, audio-visual recordings and interviews with participants, teachers and informed outsiders, he interpreted the experiences both of participants and himself. To this end he employed interpretative phenomenological analysis paired with autoethnography. The artmaking activities researched here aimed to bring about a shift in focus. Participants were encouraged to approach natural phenomena not head-on, but in an indirect way. Moreover, the artmaking process aspired to heighten their awareness to the presence of their embodied self at a certain place. The research questions that the author poses in this study are: (1) What is distinctive in the process of the AEE activities that I facilitate?; (2) Which specific competencies can be identified for a facilitator of AEE activities?; and (3) Does participating in the AEE activities that I facilitate enhance the ability of participants to have a direct experience of feeling connected to the natural world? In this explorative study, the author identifies facilitated estrangement through participating in AEE as an important catalyst when aiming to evoke such instances of transformative learning. In undergoing such moments, participants grope their way in a new liminal space. Artmaking can create favorable conditions for this to happen through its defamiliarizing effect which takes participants away from merely acting according to habit (on “autopilot”). The open-ended structure of the artmaking activities contributed to the creation of a learning arena in which emergent properties could become manifest. Thus, participants could potentially experience a sense of wonder and begin to acquire new understandings – a form of knowing that the author calls “rudimentary cognition.” The research further suggests that a facilitator should be able to bear witness to and hold the space for whatever enfolds in this encounter with artistic process in AEE. He or she must walk the tightrope between control and non-interfering. The analysis of the impacts of the AEE activities that were facilitated leads the author to conclude that it is doubtful whether these in and of themselves caused participants to experience the natural environment in demonstrable new and deep ways. He asserts that most of their awareness was focused on the internal level of their own embodied presence; engagement with place, the location where the AEE activity was performed, seemed secondary. The findings show that AEE activities first and foremost help bring about the ignition and augmentation of the participants’ fascination and curiosity, centered in an increased awareness of their own body and its interactions with the natural world. The present study can be seen as a contribution to efforts of envisaging innovative forms of sustainable education that challenge the way we have distanced ourselves from the more-than-human world.
Transforming Environmental Awareness of Students Through the Arts and Place-Based Pedagogies
Incorporating the Arts into immersive place-based education programs can increase connectivity with the environment and facilitate the development of socially responsible and pro-environmental learners. Increasingly, children and adolescents are alienated and detached from the natural world. Given this noticeable shift, educators working in the outdoor setting need to rethink their modus operandi. Past attempts to promote learner connection with the environment have centred upon short-term stays and risk-centric approaches that embrace high adrenaline activities. This is the antithesis of Touched By The Earth, a yearlong place-based enrichment program using multi-modal creative methods with young learners to delve into the impact of experiential learning and how the Arts promote a personal relationship with the environment.
B. Drillsma-Milgrom & L. Kirstinä (Eds.). Metamorphoses in children’s literature and culture (pp. 145-164). Turku, Finland, 2009
When educators try to encourage children to establish a bond between them and nature, they are faced with a major challenge. In general, many children seem to have lost interest in nature because it is less exciting than the world of electronic illusions. Educators seem badly in need of innovative ways to awaken and nourish the sensibility of children to the natural world. Art, through engaging the senses, can be a unique catalyst in developing a “sense of wonder” about nature. Art practice encourages us to see the world again afresh, as if we see it for the first time. This state of mind and sensitivity enhances the ability to tune in with the slower rhythms of the “more-than human- world.” Children are often rather aware of the ecological crisis that is taking place and that manifests itself most dramatically right now through global warming. A common response to this is psychic numbing, a mild form of cognitive dissociation. Art as a therapeutic practice – without being labeled as such – can help children cope with the “idea of crisis”, e.g. through the expression of (often suppressed) inner images and the subsequent discussion of these. In my paper I discuss how arts-based environmental education can both facilitate children in the opening of their senses to nature, and provide them space for coming to terms with their fears about the ecological crisis.
Canadian Review of Art Education: Research and Issues / Revue canadienne de recherches et enjeux en éducation artistique, 2016
Experiences of artistic engagement share many commonalities with those of being immersed in the natural world. Both experiences call upon sense perception, embodiment, the imagination, the emotions, as well as a sense of beauty and the spiritual implications it can bring. These commonalities are of value to education in their own regard, yet when the arts are explored and experienced in relation to the natural world, they have the potential to form fertile ground in which the seeds of a personally involved and deep ecological awareness can grow.
Eco-Capabilities: Arts-in-Nature for Supporting Nature Visibilisation and Wellbeing in Children
Sustainability
Estimates of mental health disorders and poor wellbeing among children and young people in England are escalating. While maintaining a positive relationship with nature is thought to promote personal and collective wellbeing, children and young people are spending less time outdoors, exhibiting a lack of appreciation for the environment and degrees of ‘plant blindness’. As such, there is a pressing need on behalf of schools to address these issues, and to adapt to students’ needs for a deeper and more purposeful connection with nature. This study aimed to explore the potential of one avenue to achieving this: arts-in-nature practice. This involved utilising arts-based research methods, through which 97 children aged 7–10 drew their ‘happy place’, alongside participatory observations, and interviews and focus groups with artists and teachers, as part of the wider Eco-Capabilities project. Findings suggest that following the arts-in-nature sessions there was a significant increase in ...
'Touched by the Earth’: a place-based outdoor learning programme incorporating the Arts
With growing disconnection from the natural world, educators who work in the outdoors need to philosophically rethink their modus operandi. Past efforts by adventure and outdoor educators to promote connection with nature have often centred upon risk-centric approaches incorporating adventure-fuelled and high-adrenalin activities. This paper explores how the Arts may be incorporated into ecopedagogies, and what creative work can reveal about the nature of communication with the environment. ‘Touched by the Earth’ is a year-long place-based enrichment programme using multi-modal creative methods with young adolescent participants. Our research addressed the following questions: what does it mean to be ‘Touched by the Earth’; and how can the Arts amplify a personal relationship with the environment? Data were collected through interviews as well as student-generated material such as artefacts, video and photographs and field observation. Our findings indicate the crucial role the Arts can play in embodied and multi-sensory learning for participants, which in turn nurtures greater nature awareness and attachment. This transformation may, in fact, be termed ‘love’. We conclude that place-based, interdisciplinary and immersive modalities galvanise a deeper appreciation of the natural environment.
2013
In light of the much discussed ‘disconnect’ from Nature, educational moves towards a ‘connect’ with the natural world through ecological ways of experiencing, thinking and knowing are crucial- these are called ecopedagogies. If the arts are incorporated into ecopedagogies, what may this reveal about the nature of communication with the environment? ‘Touched by the Earth’ is a year long part- time enrichment program for year 7/8 gifted and talented students focused on one very special place beside the Shoalhaven River near Nowra, NSW. Bundanon Trust is an arts and education centre gifted by artist Arthur Boyd and his wife Yvonne to the Australian nation. Dialogue across artists, scientists, historians is facilitated with students as a means of broadening their own creativity as well as to explore ideas about how the arts can express relationships with the environment. How are they touched by the earth? -“The best thing about the program was working with the artists because they had good ideas and made me think about art differently.” -“It has given me a better idea of how we should preserve our beautiful land. Without this land, I wouldn’t have found my passion for nature. I love it!”
Reorienting Environmental Art Education
Reorienting Environmental Art Education, 2021
Art educators have already responded to eco-social challenges for decades by seeking to advance environmental awareness, sensitivity, eco-social justice, democracy, and cultural sustainability. These various approaches and conceptualisations are discussed in this doctoral dissertation as environmental art education (EAE). The dissertation investigates EAE with a focus on its philosophical-theoretical groundings. A comprehensive mapping of EAE literature highlights that despite EAE aims at challenging modern Western dualistic thinking, the applied humanist theories problematically reassert the separateness of the categories of human and nature. The dissertation discusses the limitations of traditional EAE as it does not seem to offer a means for questioning human exceptionalism (anthropocentrism). Particularly when living through ecological crises, EAE, which furthermore runs the risk of romanticising human-nature relations, appears inadequate. The research reorients EAE by engaging with posthumanist theories. It draws from the threads of environmental, critical, feminist, and educational posthumanist theories that decentre the human, unpack categorical divides through materialist and process-oriented ontologies, and intersect with decolonial, race and other critical theories. The methodology of the research is informed by the recent developments in post-qualitative inquiry, including multispecies and walking methodologies. The research puts posthumanist theories to work by developing and employing an experiment called becoming-with the forest. Through focusing on artistic thinking, and embodied, sensory, movement-based ways of knowing, the experiment aims at groping towards multispecies and material forest entanglements, provoking thinking-with others, and queering habitual responses and conceptions of subjectivity. Different aspects unfolding in the experiment are introduced through visual-textual stories. The experiment activated considerations concerning the recognising of vulnerabilities, difficulties of disturbing anthropocentrism, and complex responses to the enmeshment of nature and culture. These topics are discussed further with posthumanist theories, and their implications for EAE pedagogies are speculated upon. The research proposes generative potentials in art educational strategies for queering normative human-nature relations, acknowledging more-than-human agencies, and creating new stories of shared worlds beyond human mastery. It encourages focusing on complex material and multispecies entanglements and attending to their ethics and politics in arts and their education, and proposes practices that are critical-creative, experimental, open-ended, transdisciplinary, and engage with multiple ways of knowing. These suggestions pave the way for exploring further the profound implications of posthumanist ontologies for subjectivities, pedagogies, learning, and the arts.