Art-Based Methodologies for Environmental Education in the Dinner Plate Project

• In Event: Spatial and Geographic Analysis in Environmental Education Research

Abstract

Introduction & Objectives

This presentation introduces art-based methodologies for food education that are currently being explored in an environmental art exhibition called the Dinner Plate Project. The Dinner Plate Project was started by Canadian artist Heather Rigby, who explains that the idea for the project arose in response to issues of food security, local food systems and loss of agricultural lands due to urban sprawl in Southern Ontario (Dinner Plate Project, 2011). Artwork has been exhibited at the Everyday Heroes Festival. The food education component of this project uses digital storytelling. Digital stories are short, personal narratives grounded in life history and expressed through first-person narration, music and digital photography. The digital storytelling (DST) process can be understood as “the specific modes of production, technological apparatus and textual characteristics of the community media movement that is known explicitly as digital storytelling” (Burgess, 2006, p. 207).

Theoretical Framework(s)

This inquiry responds to the need for more thorough research on mobilities of learning (Leander et al., 2010). More significantly, it responds to McKenzie’s expansive re-framing of environmental education more broadly between the lived and the articulated, which “enables us to grapple with what it means to engage in socio-ecological learning, for example, via friendship, art, literature, irony, poetry, film, new media, cultural difference, local and global spaces, and communities” (2008, p. 369). Within this context, I address the role of DST in fostering socio-ecological learning about foodways. Foodways is a critical lens for understanding the mobility and local embeddedness of foodstuffs (De La Pena & Lawrence, 2011, p. 1).

Modes of Inquiry & Data Sources

The Walking Story Circle methodology is being utilized in the DST process. This method brings together wayfinding, as a way of moving alongside rather than across socio-ecological places (Ingold, 2007), with the story circle method of connecting personal stories to collective social issues in the digital storytelling process (Lambert, 2002). It involves conversing about food while walking alongside diverse food geographies, pausing to listen and taste our surroundings, reflecting upon our wayfinding experiences and, finally, creating digital food stories.

Results

The Dinner Plate DST process is part of a broader research project called the FoodShed Project, which is using DST in research on communities of food practice across Southern Ontario. This project is in the initial stages of research, with preliminary findings present by the spring of 2012.

Scholarly Significance

Community arts, oral storytelling and children’s literature have all been analyzed as significant sites for the development of youth environmental agency (Coutts and Jokela, 2008; Payne, 2010; Bigger & Webb, 2010). Drawing upon Bromley’s research on the role of digital storytelling as a community arts process that cultivates sense of place and regional identity (2010), this research contributes to our understanding of the role of art and digital media in processes of decolonizing and re-inhabiting socio-ecological places (Greenwood, 2008).

Author

• Andrew Bieler, York University