In recent years, environmental educators have been struggling with increasing levels of eco-anxiety in their students, and wondering how to counter this with environmental learning that is less focused on ‘doom and gloom’. The work of Canadian scholar Elin Kelsey has influenced my thinking about this – she argues that moving away from a legacy of fear and taking a hopeful approach to teaching and learning about the environment and sustainability is necessary, and more productive, in helping students cope with the threatening realities of the climate crisis. One of the strategies she recommends is giving them the tools to take action on environmental issues, to engage them in the process of positive change and develop their sense of agency. In my experience, the arts are a fantastic way to do this. Art-making is a form of visual story-telling, and as Kelsey writes, “The stories we tell ourselves shape how we live and what we believe to be possible.” Artists around the world have taken this to heart – the explosion in the number of artists focused on environmentally-focused art-making has been extraordinary over the last decade. Each enacts David Orr’s quote “hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up” in unique and creative ways. As educators, we need to share the works of these artists with our students, and invite them to utilize all of the arts to shift the narrative, and our thinking, to imagining and enacting a world that is more just, equitable and sustainable.
Eco-learning to E-learning through Nature Journaling
Like so many things over the past few months, my blog writing has been sidelined since the arrival of the pandemic in Canada in March. I’ve been working on how to take an active PD series focused on environmental and sustainability education and shift it quickly to e-learning. We’ve been using the Zoom platform to bring EcoSchools teachers together with some success, as we’ve had more teachers involved than ever before. But my next challenge – how to do this with environmental art-making? The limitations have been daunting – the weather outside was wet and chilly, teachers were only able to join online, with no guarantees of specific art materials or tools on hand. But spring always brings with it a sense of excitement and anticipation in a cold climate, so turning our attention to nature-journaling seemed like a viable way to re-connect with other living beings in a time when we were mostly staying inside. I had great models to follow – check out the amazing work of Clare Walker Leslie, or that of John Muir Laws and Emily Lygren – artists who have written inspiring books on nature journaling for teachers to follow. I discovered that nature journaling can be framed through the 4Rs – reconnect with nature, record nature, research nature, and reflect on nature – and can be easily integrated with math, literacy, geography, and science. Its flexibility can allow for teachers and students to use any art materials at hand, putting their creativity into play as they learn about ecology, biodiversity, and climate change. Most importantly, the process of nature journaling can remind us that we are part of nature, not separate from it. If you’d like to experience this webinar, you can find it in the TDSB’s archive.
Growing a Garden-Based Approach to Art Education
The gardens around schools, whether found in the schoolyard or a nearby park, can be a great way to inspire and integrate learning across the curriculum. I was happy to have this recognized recently by the international Art Education journal, which published ‘Growing a Garden-Based Approach to Art Education’ in their July 2018 issue, and put on of the photos of the article on the cover! Co-authored with OISE graduate student (now alumni) Jennifer Sharpe, we aimed to explore the joys of taking art education into the school garden as a way to inform, inspire, and celebrate students’ creativity. Drawing on the tenets of place-based education and nature-based learning, we presented a case study of a vibrant school garden in Toronto that has been the site of children’s artistic exploration for over a decade. We know that when art education is conducted in schoolyards and school gardens, using these spaces as sites of discovery, creativity, meaning-making, and experimentation, children are able to deepen their understanding of the natural and built world, and develop strong connections to the environments in which they live. If you’d like to read more, access the article at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00043125.2018.1465318
Eco-ARTS Education is on the Rise
I’m really pleased to see that environmental ideas are infiltrating across the arts these days. When I first started to research into eco-art education, I was hard-pressed to find examples of drama, dance or music educators taking up the challenge of integrating environmental literacy into the work they did. I’m sure it likely was happening in some pockets, like in visual arts education, but it wasn’t being documented or researched perhaps at the same level. This wasn’t due simply to a lack of professional exemplars; here in Canada we’ve had many professional musicians, like R. Murray Schafer, Bruce Cockburn and Sarah Harmer using their music to connect to nature-based learning and environmental advocacy.
This is spreading, as artists from all of the arts disciplines are more frequently contributing their unique skills to raising awareness about environmental issues in plays, dance performances, and music videos. Here in Toronto we have the Broadleaf Theatre company that specializes in plays with environmental themes; their recent show The Chemical Valley Project tracks the deep challenges of environmental racism and colonialism in relation to Canada’s petrochemical industry. And now there’s lots of evidence that arts educators around the world are taking up the challenge of doing this work at all levels of education. I was happy to work with colleagues in the US and Australia on a chapter in a terrific book called Urban Environmental Education Review last year on this topic. And I was honoured this week to address a group of educators on this topic at the NORDPLUS Horizontal Green Actions conference in Finland; they had come together from Greenland, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, and Latvia to discuss, debate, and share promising practices in this area (thanks to David Yoken for the invitation!) Maybe we have reached a tipping point in the arts – imagine what could happen if we all applied our creativity and innovation to the greatest environmental challenges of our times?
Inspired by Burning Ice
What a busy fall! Not as much time to blog as I would have liked following my trip to the Arctic this summer, but the trip has given me lots to think about in relation to climate change and the role that artists can play in addressing it. This was furthered by listening to a talk by Nigel Roulet in October – he is an eminent Canadian environmental scientist from McGill university who shared his belief in the power of the arts to communicate environmental ideas in moving ways, something that science hasn’t typically done well in the past.
Perhaps the best way to magnify the communications about climate change is to take a multi-faceted approach. The Cape Farewell project is one of the best examples of this so far; by bringing environmental scientists together with artists, musicians, writers and filmmakers, aiming to create innovative ways to reach a wider audience about the impacts of climate change. Their interdisciplinary book, called Burning Ice: Art and Climate Change, serves as travelogue, atlas, art catalogue, and scientific documentation all in one. Other groups have experimented with this model, including Greenpeace and 350.org, bringing scientific knowledge together with the affective and intuitive ways of knowing from the arts to create memorable and moving messaging about climate change. The Canada C3 expedition I was on last summer is aiming to do the same. They have a number of legacy projects on the go to share our collective experiences about climate change, reconciliation, and inclusion in the North; I’ll share these as they come available.
Bringing Creativity into Sustainability
I was lucky enough to spend some time learning firsthand from Mitchell Thomashow two summers back, a wonderful scholar, educator, and writer who has been influential on my own development in environmental & sustainability education (ESE). His EcoIdentity book was one of the first books on ESE that I read years ago, and now I’m working through his Bringing the Biosphere home (also an excellent read.) Mitch’s latest work focuses on the Ecological Imagination, recognizing the important role of expression, imagination, and creativity in working towards sustainability (http://www.mitchellthomashow.com/ecological-imagination/ ) As part of the workshop he gave at OISE, he mentioned a book published by the Museum of Modern Art called BioDesign: Nature+Science+Creativity (http://www.biology-design.com/ ). It’s a fascinating look at how we can partner with natural organisms and their ecological design capabilities to create sustainable products, buildings, and communities. It takes the idea of environmental art-making to a whole new level. MOMA has posted a preview of the book on their website to give you a glimpse into a more sustainable future…I just need to find a way to do this, even if small-scale, with students. Ideas anyone?
Creating Eco-Friendly Sculptural Books
While I’ve been busy with collaborative eco-art installations with my students this winter, summer always gives me a little more time to work on my personal artworks. I’ve been experimenting with sculptural book-making in recent years – I love the combination of text and image, and the surprise of taking a traditionally flat object and making it come alive in three dimensions. So how do you make this technique more eco-friendly? Working with paper is a first step as it is easily biodegradable – that’s a natural when it comes to book-making. But I’ve also been drawing inspiration from a variety of sources, looking for ways to incorporate natural or found objects into my bookworks. I love the Spirit Books of Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord (http://www.susangaylord.com/the-spirit-books.html), who uses branches, grapevine and dried berries in this evocative book series. Mary Ellen Campbell’s books also incorporate a range of natural materials, often layering one on top of the other for a beautiful effect (find examples of her work on Pinterest.) Basi Irland takes a very different approach, freezing water and seeds into book forms that become part of a community performance as they float downstream (http://www.basiairland.com). If you’re looking for exemplars of how to re-use found objects and turn them into books, look no further than Terry Taylor’s EcoBooks: Inventive Projects from the Recycling Bin. Once you’ve read this book, you’ll be excited to try this yourself – you’ll be seeing possible books in everything you discard!
Growing Art in Schoolyards
I was spending a lot of time in gardens over the summer, and some in school gardens. I’m always on the lookout for ideas about how art can be incorporated into school yards as I think it’s a great tool to raise environmental awareness and even bring about environmental change. There is lots of experimentation going on in Toronto in this area, and it is exciting to find a new artwork in a schoolyard to support student learning. If you’re looking for ideas in this regard, Pinterest has lots of ideas in visual forms. You can also refer to a great book called Asphalt to Ecosystems: Design Ideas for Schoolyard Transformation by Sharon Gamson Danks (published by newvillagepress). Sharon is a Californian consultant on schoolyard greening, and has travelled around the world photographing amazing schoolyard designs. While any aspect of a greening project could be considered a form of aesthetic design, from the pathways to the plantings to the play equipment, she has included a few chapters dedicated to the diverse and stimulating roles that art can play to enhance children’s ecological literacy. Check out the gallery on my website for more ideas on this topic.
Shades of Green
It’s been a busy time since the holidays – hard to find time to blog! Teaching, writing and leading workshops has been keeping me hopping, but environmental art is never far from my mind. I was thrilled to have a new article published on the subject in the November 2010 issue of Art Education magazine – called “Shades of Green: Growing Environmentalism and Sustainability in Art Education”. This article describes a major study I led two years ago on eco-art education in Toronto and the process of having teachers develop curriculum in this area. It’s exciting to be able to share this work with a wider audience – the teachers I worked with were extraordinary, and demonstrated so well what eco-art ed can look like in their elementary classrooms. These are just two photos of the works their students created in the study – both created for school gardens!