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Highlighted Session: Stacking the Deck for Sustainability: Youth “Lessons” to Turn it Around

Tue, April 19, 5:00 to 6:30pm CDT (5:00 to 6:30pm CDT), Hyatt Regency - Minneapolis, Floor: 1, Lakeshore A

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

Humanity is at a turning point. The impacts of the climate crisis have come dangerously close to irreversible tipping points, acting as a wakeup call for humans and highlighting the severe consequences of human actions on the planet’s ecosystems. This turning point signals the end of human exceptionalism and (neo)liberal individualism – the core concepts of Western philosophy and the foundations of modern political economy – as a single vision for surviving on a damaged Earth. To 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 is “a basic survival project in our present context,” (Plumwood, 2009)

Education is directly implicated in the climate crisis and our failure to imagine alternatives. Despite efforts to promote education as key to achieving sustainable lives, schools and universities continue to perpetuate the logic of human exceptionalism and economic growth over environmental sustainability. We know that fossil-fuel dependent profit-driven activities have escalated global warming and are exacerbating the climate crisis. Scientists have warned us that the planet’s systems are dangerously close to irreversible tipping points. Children and youth are well aware that we live in environmentally precarious times and that they face an uncertain future. Yet, schools and universities continue to reproduce the hierarchical “man over nature” relationship.

In this moment of epochal precarity, education must undergo a radical turn and transformation, too. We need to learn different ecologically attuned knowledges, educate for environmentally just and secure futures, cultivate an ecological consciousness about the interdependence of all beings, and challenge the unequal global power relations that drive reckless economic growth. We need to foster the types of learning that nurture non-exploitative relations with the natural environment and that will help us recuperate and sustain life on a damaged Earth. More importantly, we must recognize that human fates are inextricably bound up with those of all other beings, elements, and forces on this living Earth, and we must accept that living and learning is a facet of ecological, not just social being (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2020; Taylor, 2020). We must (re)imagine everything.
This panel focuses on the global climate art initiative, which aimed to engage youth artists and activists in radically (re)envisioning and (re)articulating the role of education in shaping more sustainable and ecologically just futures. The goal was to mobilize their perspectives in order to ‘move’ policymakers into action, as well as promote debate and reflection inside and outside the classroom.
This participatory art project invited youth (< than 30 years of age) from around the world to reimagine the role of education in shaping more sustainable and ecologically just futures. At the center of our initiative was one of the oldest and most basic learning tools – a deck of educational flashcards – bringing together the voices and visions of young artists and activists in a collective effort to radically (re)envision the role of education toward more sustainable and ecologically just futures. Called “Turn It Around!”, the deck features a set of flashcards displaying climate crisis inspired artwork created by youth on one side, and motives, actions, and facts for policy makers to guide their decisions about our climate futures, on the other side. Much like flashcards for literacy and numeracy, the cards featured in the collection introduce learners - policymakers, educators, and community members - to new vocabulary and perspectives generously shared by global youth. They also bring into focus centuries-old knowledge systems and beliefs, which may have been forgotten, ignored, or even erased from the map of modern knowledge production.

With less than a month open for submissions, we received an overwhelming response from youth across the world, spanning different ages, geographies, climate crisis contexts, educational spaces, and emotional places. Of 430 submissions from children as young as six to adults over 70 years old, most contributors are youth under 30 years old (n=372), with more than half (56%) being from school-aged children, including primary school (n=60), middle school (n=40), and secondary school (n=109). Geographically, they come from 44 different countries and five continents, including Asia (180), North America (110), South America (74), Africa (22), and Europe (22). Of 430 submissions, 70 artworks and 70 text responses were included in the printed deck “Turn It Around! Flashcards for Education Futures”, which were selected by an international youth review board. While not all artistic and text responses appeared in the printed deck, all submissions were analyzed for the policy report. For the purposes of the data analysis, we engaged with art and text submissions from the post-qualitative methodological perspective, seeking to upend traditional onto-epistemological notions and practices of qualitative research and aiming to contest the established binaries and provoke new research imagination.

Following the introduction of the initiative and its approach, the panel will feature three papers that describe the ontological, pedagogical and methodological ‘turns’ that were activated through this participatory climate art initiative. The first presentation will focus on the ontological ‘turn’, including a radical rethinking of the modernist assumption of human exceptionalism and redefining our relationship with a more-than-human world. The second paper discusses the methodological “turns” we made in the process of the data analysis, focusing on how visual analysis and poetic inquiry shaped different phases of our research. The third paper will share some of the findings from the data analysis, focusing on the pedagogical ‘turns,’ as envisioned by youth, necessary to help us move off the climate catastrophe trajectory. Finally, three discussants will engage with the ideas presented in this panel from the perspectives of global education futures, participatory art research, and climate education.

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Chair

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Discussants