5. Exploring Human and More-Than-Human Interconnectedness in Higher Education through the Arts

• In Event: Nature-connectedness and the More-than-human in Environmental Education - Environmental Education SIG Structured Poster Session

Abstract

Climate anxiety is widespread among children and young people (Hickman et al., 2021), yet higher education often lacks strong climate education efforts (Long & Henderson, 2023). To address this issue, an undergraduate course titled Art, Education, and Climate Justice was taught in Spring of 2024 at a public university in the U.S. This study aims to describe and evaluate the course.

We drew resources from three literatures: transformative learning (TL) theory (Hoggan, 2016), which helps us understand the kinds of learning that lead to stance changes; arts-based pedagogy (ABP), shaped by Dewey’s (1984) view of aesthetics as learning and Greene’s (1995) framing of the arts as a way to understand “the other”; and relational ontologies, which offer us a different understanding of reality emphasizing interconnectedness of the human and “more-than’ human” worlds.

Author

• Yisha Zhao, University of Washington