Propositions for an Environmental Arts Pedagogy: A/r/tographic experimentations with movement and materiality

Rousell, DS, Cutcher, Alexandra, Cook, Peter and Irwin, Rita (2019) Propositions for an Environmental Arts Pedagogy: A/r/tographic experimentations with movement and materiality. In: Research Handbook on Childhoodnature: Assemblage of Childhood and Nature Research. Springer International Handbooks of Education . Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-67285-4

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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 the movements and materialities of learning environments 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. Taking up the use of concepts as methods, we develop a series of artistic and pedagogical experimentations with 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 an environmental arts pedagogy based on our creative research process. In doing so, we aim to sketch the contours of an environmental arts pedagogy that combines the speculative imagination with embodied, sensorial, and empirical experiences.