Propositions for an Environmental Arts Pedagogy: A/r/tographic Experimentations with Movement and Materiality

Abstract

This chapter works through a series of methodological experimentations with movement and materiality in order to explore the potentials of environmental arts pedagogies. We address the question of what environmental arts pedagogies might come to look like in the ever-changing contexts of children's social and environmental worlds. This leads us to engage with choreographic movement and the heterogeneous materialities of place through differential flows of human and non-human agencies as they come to co-compose pedagogical encounters. In doing so, we draw on new materialist accounts of matter as agentic, fluid and dynamic, movement as a choreographic architecting of experience, and a/r/tographic approaches to pedagogical engagement and embodied practice. We acknowledge that the impetus for movement generation may come from a multitude of sources, however in this project we develop a series of experimentations with movement, materiality, environment, art, and pedagogy through a/r/tographic fieldwork. These propositional encounters generated four artistic processes as they emerged through the concepts of 'corridors', 'flight', 'viscosity' and 'construction'. In teasing out the implications of these concepts for an environmental arts pedagogy, we combine imagery and text to both render and diagram the movement of bodies, materials and environments in passage through each of these four conceptual enactments. This leads us to develop a series of propositions for environmental arts pedagogy based on our creative research process. In doing so, we aim to retain the radical openness and contingency of what environmental arts pedagogies might come to look like in response to the rapidly changing material conditions of our times.

Touching Text: Feeling My Way Through Research-Creation

“…To move beyond art being in service to research methodology, I think with the following provocations: How might arts-based research instantiate theory (Loveless, 2020; Springgay, 2019)? How might researchers explain what a work of art is, the potentials of what art can do, and how art does its work in the study (Rousell, 2017). How might art become “a problem, a provocation, and an irritant for the humanities and social sciences” (Rousell, 2019, p. 888) that is real rather than representational?…”

Gleaner’s Garment: Walking with the Windfall of Olmsted's Mont-Royal

“…11 By applying this contiguity to more-than-humanism, we can consider nature and culture not as separate from our being, but as agentic forces at work with our experiences. 12 In this sense, Olmsted's design is public art in action: in performance with my performance, with nature as artist, myself as artist, Olmsted as artist; learning from one another by way of experimentation. Here, there is contiguous artistry/ research/teaching.…”

Walking with Water: (Re)Making Pedagogical Relations through Walking and Artmaking

“…Eventually, the notion of together-apart became our core idea, a way of utilizing the constraints and conditions of our learning community to empower our curiosities. Living in different countries as an apparent limitation enabled us to come up with a "proposition" (Cutcher & Irwin, 2018;Lee et al, 2019;Rousell et al, 2020;Truman & Springgay, 2016) to walk and pause simultaneously and synchronously in different places together yet apart.…”