Weather watchers: Reconfiguring relationships between children and the earth

• In Event: Pedagogies and the Art(s) of Protest: Mobilizing for Ecological Justice

Proposal

Education has the potential to help humanity imagine new alternatives for achieving sustainable lives. Formal and non-formal education institutions – from schools and universities to museums and playgrounds - have the potential to shift teaching away from the logic of human exceptionalism and economic growth and towards environmental sustainability. This turning point signals a chance to reverse the logic of human exceptionalism and (neo)liberal individualism – the core concepts of Western philosophy and the foundations of modern political economy. To thrive and perhaps just survive, we must make “a shift from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization” - from the “Great Unravelling” to the “Great Turning” (Macy, 2014) - a transition that entails redefining what it means to be human and reconfiguring our relationship with the earth.

This presentation explores emerging relationships between children and nature in a summer camp called "Weather Watchers,” which took place at a Children's Museum in the Southwest United States during 2023. In this study, camper’s relationships with the living world around them and their connections with nature were explored through arts based research practices. Over a three day period, 45 children (ages 5 - 8) explored their connections to nature by sharing stories about rain, designing mandalas of the sun and relaying the memories that rocks carry. Through these creative explorations, campers co-created knowledge through embodied, visual, artistic and sensorial experiences of humans and more-than-humans using visual, audio, and artistic data sources.

The post-qualitative arts-based methodologies (Leavy, 2015) used in this study created opportunities for understanding the emerging entanglements between humans and non-humans as ways of understanding being and knowing of both non-human beings as active players in the research assemblage (Merewether, 2018; Pretti, 2022). This more-than-human world included animate beings such as plants and animals and inanimate objects such as paper, pencils, soil, and rocks, etc.

Children’s perceptions and connections to nature reflected complicated relationships and difference in the ways they “weather the world” (Neimanas & Walker, 2014, p. 564). Campers living in the climate conditions of the southwest United States had limited connections to rain, often bringing lightning and fires into their conversations about rain. In this way, many campers viewed rain as a message from nature that was alerting humans and animals to pending danger and hazardous living conditions. Alternatively, their engagement in the activities related to the sun was much more lively and positive, despite the record breaking heat that was occurring during the camp. Campers were very creative, actively engaged and did not want to stop when making mandalas out of their bodies and with elements from nature. Finally campers’ engagement with rocks involved working individually with their rocks to “wake them up” to learn of the rock’s memories. Campers were excited to engage with this activity and shared that many of their rocks came from rainbows, entangling the engagement with other learning they had in camp. This presentation will expand upon the perspectives of the youth campers as we look at their insights into how to begin The Great Turning (Macy, 2014).

Authors

• Ann Nielsen, National Institute for Excellence in Teaching

• Iveta Silova, Arizona State University

• Carrie Karsgaard, Cape Breton University

• Marina Basu, Arizona State University

• Keti Tsotniashvili, Arizona State University

• Andrea Weinberg, Arizona State University