Keywords

Introduction

A culture populated by a people whose imagination is impoverished has a static future. In such a culture, there will be little change because there will be little sense of possibility.

Eisner (2002)

While the Competence Turn (Chap. 2) in sustainability education arrived to bridge knowledge with action in the context of ‘wicked’ sustainability challenges, it is also acknowledged that to transform individual capacities into real sustainability actions, more than knowledge and skills is needed: values, motivations and opportunities also lie at the core of transformational action (Rieckmann 2018). In this regard, the Competence Turn also involves a rethinking of pedagogies guiding sustainability education, emphasising learner-centred and action-oriented approaches (ibid). In these approaches, underpinned by constructivist theories of learning, learners take an active role in knowledge development through situated and reflexive learning processes that move “from transmissive towards transformative learning” (Sterling 2003, p. 11). Sterling considers transformative learning to be “a quality of learning that is deeply engaging, and touches and changes deep levels of values and belief through a process of realisation and recognition” that “inevitably gives rise to a heightened relational sensibility and a sense of ethical responsibility” (Sterling 2010, p. 514). Understood this way, the notion of transformative learning goes beyond cognitive, individual dimensions to include as well relational, normative and affective domains of learning. In this approach, the educator becomes a facilitator who empowers and challenges critically reflective learners to change their worldviews (Rieckmann 2018; Sterling 2010).

Table 18.1 Analysis categories used to link learning potentials of arts-based sustainability education approaches with sustainability competencies. Compendium of key sustainability competencies proposed by Rieckmann (2018), p. 43–45
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Transformative pedagogies emphasise the relevance of experiential learning when approaching complex and highly dynamic systems and the need to combine different ways of learning, knowing and valuing reality when educating for sustainability (Dieleman and Huisingh 2006; Sipos et al. 2008). Feeling and sensing, and not only understanding sustainability as an abstract and distant concept, become crucial in meaning-making and in engaging learners in sustainability transformations (Jickling 2017). Obviously, implementing these pedagogical approaches requires teaching methods and educational experiences aligned with their principles.

In this chapter, I explore the potentials of the arts and ‘aesthetic learning’ in sustainability education and specifically in reinforcing educators’ work on sustainability competences with learners. For that purpose, I review a diversity of arts-based educational experiences and explore the potentials and tensions of these emerging aesthetic and critical pedagogies in the work of different sustainability competence frameworks. Specifically, the following explorative questions guide my inquiry: How are the arts applied in these experiences and with which motivations? What kinds of insights are reported and how can they critically inform competence frameworks in sustainability education?

Before that, the following section briefly contextualises the application of the arts within sustainability and environmental education and introduces the notion of aesthetical learning.

Slow, Embodied, Aesthetic Pedagogies: The Artistic Turn in Sustainability Education

The arts, understood as accessible cultural practices and expressions, can help educators and learners in sustainability explorations by offering different lenses to understand and sense our world. Art experiences open up intuitive and non-verbal forms of engagement, drawing on tacit knowledge and emotions as a key source of insight into the dynamics of complex systems (Eisner 2002; Greenwood 2011). Arts’ combination of cognitive, embodied, intuitive and emotional awareness and its appeal to open our senses are especially relevant in sustainability education, as they can illuminate the qualitative complexity of sustainability issues (Lehtonen et al. 2020) as well as foster different approaches to learning in highly explorative and motivating ways (Heras et al. 2016). The aesthetic experience resulting from the creation of art or the interaction with artistic practices and artworks, is mediated by the qualities of the arts—emergent, evocative, provocative, expressive, and thus, potentially conducive to new meanings and perceptions (Mantere 2004). At their best, the arts can provoke, unsettle norms and challenge assumptions, while they can also inspire and open up new perspectives through imagination, new connections and reflective thought (Saratsi et al. 2019). Furthermore, the arts can help strengthen emotional bonds between places and people, which lie at the base of personal motives for caring and acting (Inwood 2008).

The blending of the arts with sustainability has not only been encouraged by sustainability practitioners. In the 1960s, the environmental/ecological art movement sought new perspectives and spaces for creative innovation in the face of pressing environmental and political concerns (Saratsi et al. 2019; Gabrys and Yusoff 2012), which also inspired art educators to stress methods specific to art in environmental education. Streaming from such a movement, the term arts-based environmental education was coined in the 1990s to refer to “a form of learning that aims to develop environmental understanding and caring by encouraging participants to become more receptive to sense perceptions and observations through artistic practice” (Van Boeckel 2013, p. 215). Such an approach does not only confirm the interdisciplinary nature of sustainability education but also its processual condition, “instead of framing it as a static content or a goal to be achieved” (Schröder 2018, p. 131).

Whether coming from one side or the other, these approaches share the unfolding of sensuous, embodied, critical pedagogies that emphasise sensory experience as a way of relating self to environments and others (Finley 2011) and promote disturbance and disruptiveness. In this way, rather than certainty, they aim at raising critical questions and experiences that help revisit the world in new directions (Eisner 2002). The learning that unfolds from these experiences can be conceptualised as ‘aesthetic learning’: a kind of experiential learning that is visceral, emotional and intuitive, it “permits ambiguity, incompleteness, contradiction and complexity and provides a means to express them without reducing them” (Greenwood 2011, p. 51). By appealing to our senses and to a refinement of our organs of perception (Van Boeckel 2013), these pedagogical approaches call for the slowing down of the educational process “in order to perceive the unknown, the sometimes wild and unexpected” (Mantere 2004, p. 2).

Methodological Approach

For the purposes of my exploration, I reviewed 13 educational interventions worldwide, strategically and systematically selected from a review in the academic search engine Scopus using relevant keywords, to cover the crossing of sustainability and environmental education with art-based approaches.Footnote 1 The resulting sample was screened according to several inclusion criteria and the educational experiences selected to include a diversity of sustainability themes (e.g. climate change, connectedness to nature, biodiversity conservation, sustainability challenges), artistic practices (audio-visual, plastic, literary and performing arts), learning contexts (informal and formal), educational phases (from primary to higher education) and target groups (children, youth, adults) (see Table 18.2 in the next section). Rather than expecting to be representative of the universe of current and recent implementations, this exploration aims at illustrating the breadth and depth of aesthetic learning approaches and their different education potentials and challenges in the work of sustainability competencies in education. Further, only educational experiences that included—and were transparent about—evaluation methods were reviewed in order to ensure a reflexive analysis and properly supported insights.

Table 18.2 Summary of the 13 experiences reviewed
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Data from the 13 selected experiences were collected and organised according to: (1) information characterising the educational intervention (e.g. goals, context, number of participants, topics approached or artistic practices engaged with, Table 18.2); (2) information about the evaluation methodology (e.g. data collection methods and analysis strategies); (3) reported outcomes and/or insights of the experiences (Table 18.3). I then conducted a qualitative content analysis to: (1) identify motivations underlying the reviewed educational experiences; (2) link learning and educational potentials of these experiences with competencies for sustainability. The latter analysis was informed by a set of eight predefined themes corresponding to key sustainability competences previously identified in the literature by Rieckmann (2018); see Table 18.1. This framework was selected as it represents a compendium of six competency frameworks developed by researchers and experts in the fields of sustainability science and education, gathering key sustainability competencies broadly acknowledged in the field as being of particular importance. Here, competencies are understood as individual dispositions to self-organisation which include an interplay of knowledge, capacities and skills, motives and affective elements in interaction (Rieckmann 2012, p. 129).

Table 18.3 Reported outcomes of the reviewed experiences. Blue letters indicate outcomes reported from educational experiences with teachers or pre-service teachers, while (*) refer to outcomes with both types of participants
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Results and Discussion

In order to explore the purposes and potentials behind these educational experiences, I first inquired about the motivations to implement them and their specific developments. In a second set, I analysed what outcomes and challenges were reported and how they might connect to sustainability competencies. The next subsections present these two analytical streams and then discuss how these insights can critically inform sustainability competence frameworks.

How Are the Arts Applied in These Experiences and with Which Motivations?

Most of the reviewed experiences apply forms of participatory art, in which participants are actively involved in the creation process. Only one experience (textile installations in Ghana) does not involve this hands-on approach and is based on participants’ interaction with an artwork already created. Even though many experiences include an exhibition of their resulting artistic outcomes, in most of them the focus is on the art creation process itself (and the possibilities it opens for discovery, perception and expression), rather than in creating a final product of certain aesthetic characteristics. Borrowing the words from Raatikainen et al. (2020), these approaches emphasise art as a dialogic process, being the experiences generated at the core of the artistic-educational results.

Among the different motivations expressed to apply the arts or artistic processes within the experiences reviewed, there are three main themes that can be distinguished (although often interconnected): (1) increasing knowledge or awareness of sustainability challenges and socioecological dynamics, with an emphasis on stimulating learners’ system’s thinking and awareness of interconnectedness ; (2) amplifying personal and affective connections with the environment, aiming at enhancing learners’ perception and sensitivity; and (3) promoting a sense of agency and collective action through empowering learning experiences, involving, many times, group articulation.

The relational dimension is therefore key in these approaches, both understood in analytical and practical terms (i.e. integrated both in contents and pedagogical approaches) and approached cognitively, affectively and sensuously. The arts-based learning experiences reviewed commonly involve inquiry-based pedagogies, opening-up processes of exploration and inquiry, including in some cases participatory action-research, as well as place-based pedagogies, with an emphasis on the spaces where the learning takes place. In this regard, outdoors learning is a recurrent element (8 out of 13 experiences).

What Kinds of Insights Are Reported and How Are They Linked to Competencies?

Table 18.3 shows reported outcomes of these experiences. If we look at these outcomes and insights through the lenses of sustainability competence frameworks, self-awareness stands out as the most approached competency, being present in all the reviewed experiences. Learners’ self-awareness is approached twofold. First it refers to the awareness of one’s own body and its feelings and sensations, through the refinement of sensory perception and attentiveness to interdependencies with/within the environment/s and others. Second, awareness is seen as a connection with one’s own motivations to act and care, awareness of being part of (a community, a society, a common earth), through sense of belonging and responsibility, through affect. That is, awareness of individual and group agency and their role to play in sustainability transformations. These dimensions are closely related to interpersonal or collaborative competencies (n = 9). While most of the experiences reviewed involved group work or interpersonal dialogues, these exchanges were mostly based on the recognition of different perspectives, resonance with other’s experiences and empathy. As connectedness and embedment are important elements in many of the approaches, so are the competencies of systems’ thinking (n = 6), critical thinking (n = 7) and normative competency (n = 6). Further, in those experiences based on project development, strategic and anticipatory competences (n = 4) were approached through the creation of conditions needed to work together (e.g. trust), the recognition of values behind action, the unveiling of tensions and contradictions of different paradigms (development, knowledge, etc.) and ways of being in the world and the assessment of consequences and impacts of different actions.

Finally, five experiences addressed teachers and/or pre-service teachers. Outcomes reported mostly relate to the enhancement of teachers’ sensitivity to and personal relationships with the environment and an intensified embodied sense of place. One experience also focused on stimulating teachers’ agency, helping them reflect on the roles they can play in sustainability transformations.

As shown in Table 18.3 and discussed in the next section, many of these outcomes become meaningful for the training of sustainability competences when linked with sustainability learning and educational motivations and purposes.

How Can Reported Insights Critically Inform Current Frameworks of Sustainability Competencies?

First, the reviewed experiences reflect the potential of the arts to refine our sensuous awareness and world engagement. While sustainability education has placed much focus on sustainability problems (Lehtonen et al. 2020), sensing and connecting can be a first step to love and care, which are seen as preconditions for earth stewardship (Gray and Birrell 2015). In this sense, there is a precious opportunity in arts-based learning experiences to slow down and pay attention to ways of being that are often neglected in educational approaches: perception through our senses, awareness of our inner world and deeper engagement with the environments around us. Sensing the world emerges, thus, as a competency that can be developed through the arts, for instance, by reinforcing skills of attentive listening (Østergaard 2019), sensorial imagination (Van Boeckel 2013) or a ‘sensibility to patterns that connect at multiple levels’ (Kagan 2011). These are skills that are not just intuitive and they can be unfolded and refined through artistic experiences. Further, there is promising potential in the integration of arts-based approaches within outdoors learning, aimed at establishing personal connections between learners and environments. Although an aesthetic experience can emerge from interactions with the environment without the presence of the arts, arts-based approaches can boost this potential, while placing emphasis in this dimension and offering possibilities to experience and perceive sites differently.

Engaging with the world through the lenses of connectedness and embedment might afford as well to bring a fresh regard to systems’ and critical thinking competencies . While bringing together cognitive and affective aspects and connecting them to broader socioecological contexts (Raatikainen et al. 2020), arts-based practices can approach complexity and interactions not only as analytical objects of study ‘out there’ but also as webs of relationships in which we are all involved personally, politically and practically. The questioning of frames and values, perspective taking and creative imagination are some artistic features approaching and confronting systems’ complexity, by opening the door to new perspectives and relationships. Indeed, art’s capacity to provoke a sense of estrangement or moments of de-familiarisation (Van Boeckel 2013) can bring a unique spark to critical and creative thinking in participants, opening-up their learning experiences to emerging meanings, questions and understandings, instead of acting on ‘auto-pilot’ (ibid).

In approaching sustainability challenges holistically, these experiences also illustrate the potential to work on learners’ skills and positive attitudes related to their agency , both individually and collectively. Several of the experiences reviewed reported learners’ increased awareness of sustainability challenges while also a feeling of empowerment to address them and look at the future with hope. Expressing and processing feelings and emotions can help learners cope with feelings of anxiety or hopelessness, while connecting with nature’s beauty and love can connect them with motivations to act and care (instead of being driven by fear).

Further, as observed in the experiences, group work through the arts can help build trust among learners, a sense of group and cohesion and empathic listening skills that are key in any process of collective articulation. In this regard, arts-based experiences in sustainability education can help educators work on learners’ strategic competencies by opening-up unconventional, fertile spaces for training transversal skills, capacities and attitudes relevant for engaging in collecting action (e.g. communication, listening, respect for others). In such processes, the arts can help educators bring criticality and voices of dissent (Finley 2011) that are relevant in the development of normative, strategic and collaborative competencies, through the recognition of diversity and power relations involved both in sustainability challenges and transformations. Power is a crucial dimension in sustainability commonly neglected in educational approaches, and the arts can contribute to unveil, analyse and disentangle power relationships, both conceptually (while approaching sustainability issues) and practically (within the group that is engaged in the learning process).

Challenges and Needs: What Do Educators Need in Order to Engage with Arts-Based Sustainability Education?

While listing potentials of arts-based practices, there is a latent risk of instrumentalism. Are we tempted to fall precisely into the same prescriptive approach we want to avoid? In designing arts-based educational interventions, are we compromising the inherent value of the arts, which lays on its open, disruptive and emergent nature? As Østergaard (2019) points out, there can be a missed potential in framing arts ‘as a tool’ instead of a form of knowledge in itself. While pragmatic and certainly efficient to achieve certain goals, an instrumental use of the arts will inevitably miss some of its very intrinsic potentials. Therefore, it is first important to acknowledge that different understandings of the arts and specific implementations and contexts (including who participates) will lead to different experiences, potentials and limitations. The arts are generally recognised as facilitating access and being inclusive but this is not inherent to a designed arts-based activity, and ignoring learners’ socio-cultural contexts and power relations can also lead to elitist, manipulative or even alienating learning experiences. In this regard, the potential lays out not only in the integration of the arts, but in the extent to which these practices are contextualised within a transformative learning approach, that is, questioning our beliefs and values, paradigm shifts, connecting practical, political and personal dimensions (Bentz 2020).

Second, arts-based learning experiences require skilled educators able to sustain them. Depending on the personal and professional background of the educator, some artistic practices will be more accessible than others. Many of the experiences reviewed involved drama or arts teachers interested in incorporating sustainability issues in their class. However, there were also experiences involving nursery, primary or secondary school teachers teaching other subjects but with an inclination and a sensibility to be involved in arts-based sustainability education. Obviously, it will be difficult to facilitate a process of deep sensory engagement if the educator has not experienced or developed such sensibility herself. Educators should nurture their own self- and sensuous awareness, listening skills and systemic thinking, as well as bearing an open attitude and curiosity. In this regard, as suggested by the examples in this review, arts-based practices could help educators work on their ‘learning to be’ competencies, according to the UNECE (2012) framework, such as sense of belonging, attentiveness and emotions management. These competencies have received less attention in the development of pedagogical strategies to promote them (Corres et al. 2020). Further, educators “should be able to bear witness to and hold the space for whatever enfolds in this encounter with artistic process’ and ‘walk the tightrope between control and non-interfering” (Van Boeckel 2013, p. 8). As a facilitator of learning, the educator engages through arts-based approaches in the dialectic tension of ‘active non-activeness’ , ensuring that the process can be developed in optimal conditions for learners to fully engage with it, but stepping back once learners are on track (ibid). Although sometimes not easy, this is in line with sustainability education approaches that claim a non-utilitarian or non-prescriptive view of competence-based learning (Sterling 2010). In this way, what might be seen as a challenge, might represent an opportunity as well for educators to refine their own sensorial perception and sensitivity to environments and relationships, and be able to engage in open-ended, emergent educational processes with learners.

Final Thoughts

We live in a world made of relationships (Bateson 1972). At the root of current unsustainability challenges we find unbalanced relationships between different elements of socio-ecosystems and the neglect of the diverse relations and interdependencies that connect us, humans, with all living and nonliving beings in the Earth. Even the disconnection with our bodies—as the first and closest environment we live in, is an example of such neglect. Arts-based sustainability education might offer a chance to reconnect with, re-assess and sense all of these webs of relationships. Through the experiences reviewed, relational and dialogic aesthetics emerge as catalysts of highly engaging experiences where educators and learners can sense their ways of being in the world and promote an awareness of interconnectedness, while exploring their capacity to be, to change, to care. Although not prescriptive, these experiences suggest a transformative learning potential that can be untapped by sustainability educators willing to engage in the mystery and open-ended nature of aesthetic experience.