EPIC Responses to the Anthropocene Context

• In Event: On the Ground Responses to the Anthropocene Context: Civic and STEM Engagement as Global Citizenship

Abstract

The purpose of this poster is to explore the ways in which children take up conversations and engagement with their social worlds through arts-based “maker” activities thereby critically responding to Anthropocene concerns, and to showcase the ways in which children talk back to social inequality through creative practices using technology in a university-community partnership.

When children “make” or create, they are doing socio-political work and engaging in conversations about everyday realities in a dynamic way. Children’s work and play in afterschool, identity-oriented community of practice spaces offers opportunities for young people to talk back to their lived environments and social worlds through creative arts-based and technological projects and practices that critically engage Anthropocene concerns.

Data was collected over the course of several years through the EPIC program, an innovative approach to pre-service teacher preparation at the University of Colorado, Boulder. At the EPIC afterschool club, undergraduate (UG) students learn side-by-side with elementary school students as they work on creative projects that enable children to develop their ideas and express their values through critical literacy practices, art, and play. Video recordings of afterschool sessions, fieldnotes, as well as close examination of student artwork has taken place over the years by site coordinators, graduate student instructors, and university faculty. Data was collectively examined through team meetings so that co-constructed analysis has emerged.

Data sources included video transcripts, written classroom transcripts, audio transcripts, and images and creative artifacts.

Through analysis of descriptive data, we have found that both children and UGs that took part in EPIC, engaged critically with Anthropocene themes directly as they created, built, explored, and re-imagined ways of being in the world. At its heart, EPIC takes up problem- solving related to Anthropocene concerns as children and UGs learn that their work (and play) of re-imagining is an intervention unto itself. When youth are given the power to imagine, name, create, and make, this is a political act and their drawings (superheroes), stories (Futurists), creations and inventions (through youth participant action research activities) are political practices that are directly related to changing their everyday environments. We argue that the play and work of re-imagining and creating is a political intervention unto itself that engages Anthropocene concerns in creative and yet accessible ways.

Our critical approach to using technology, play, and the arts at EPIC is a way of imagining more just futures that are firmly grounded in history and in children’s lived experiences of the present. This, as we see it, is a response to the Anthropocene. The approach to design that we take at the club, which Gutierrez et al (2008) and Gutierrez and Jurow (2016) have described as “syncretic,” intentionally integrates cultural-historical practices of communities with new valued practices. Doing this is a way of building from abundance as opposed to a deficit while at the same time as acknowledging the challenges that we all face in the present.

Authors

• Susan Jurow, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Emily Gleason, University of Colorado - Boulder