Arts-based approaches in environmental education research

Environmental education research has been expanded by studies that use, adapt and practise arts-based methods (Barrett, 2014; Hart, 2014; Nolan, 2014). This scholarly work has

resulted in a transformative shift in research as researchers struggle to develop research that is more in solidarity with experiences in the world and less in solidarity with the conventional academic project. Methodologically, this thesis positions itself as Arts-based Educational Research.

This is not only for researching arts-based pedagogies in environmental education but as a necessary congruence, engaging arts-based modalities in the research inquiry and

representation. The now common experiences of researchers feeling like text based academic representation limits their generative and creative practice flowing through both fieldwork and text work, has resulted in forms of research praxis (including fieldwork, analysis and representation) becoming more congruent with the phenomena they are studying. Nolan noted: “One does not feel compelled to distinguish either field or text but instead is willing to reside in the ambiguous space of both field and text” (2014, p. 519). This relationship

between representation and research is further discussed in section 3.8 where I describe my analytical strategies.

My entrance into this study was characterised by a similar experience and struggle. I had experience in the possibility of arts-based modes for learning, dialogue and in particular working with messy situations. I knew also that these experiences included instances of collaborative knowledge production. Aware of the temptation to embrace them as step-by- step methods, and squash them into a neat solution for complex challenges in the world, it was helpful to read the ways in which these struggles are a shift in educational research that is responsive to the increasing “challenge for social, economic and environmental

sustainability”(Barrett, 2014, p. 569). Nolan (2014, p. 517) observed that this shift “requires one to acknowledge and highlight the intimate connections between research and knowing and representation demands writing through (not merely about) different ways of knowing –

… education and educational research”. Barrett (2014, p. 569) further articulated this shift in her doctoral thesis as a threefold response required in environmental education practice, innovations in qualitative research as well as “discontent with colonial assumptions and practice in research methods and methodology (e.g. Tahiwai-Smith 1999)”. Thus arts-based approaches in environmental education research, as a practice of both research and learning, is an emerging space where the lines are blurred between education that is studied and the processes of research – in the end embracing a nested series of learning processes which explicitly engage the politics and impact of mode in production of knowledge.

2.5.1 Arts-based research in environmental education

There have been a number of studies in Southern African environmental education that have engaged similarly with arts-based approaches in both method, analysis and representation. It is in relation to these that I situated my study.

Burt (1999) studied the use of theatre for development in environmental education. Her study not only considered the use of theatre for learning, as a support to the new curriculum being

implemented in South Africa in the 90s, but the mode of theatre posed an interesting inquiry into the struggle for educators to adopt a genuine process approach to education and avoid the

“performance of process”. Grappling with the shift from practice-based fieldwork into the write up of the masters, Burt’s master’s thesis was written as a play. Through this, her study enacts a challenge to “the role of research in society” by making her research accessible to

“non-academic readers” (Lotz-Sisitka and Burt, 2002, p. 136). In Chapter 6 I share a play crafted by myself and the participants which acts as both a representation of the contexts and concern of the participants, but each scene also presents inquiry departures for understanding urban water.

McGarry (2013), in his study on empathy and pedagogies for ecological citizenship, carefully described how an arts-based practice of social sculpture can be engaged towards facilitating learning in complex socio-ecological contexts. His study moved through an exploration of puppetry to the refining of social-sculpture reflexively and carefully – exemplifying the concern and criticality that is needed for an emergent co-engaged pedagogical process that can be responsive to the socioecological complexities of the contemporary South African environmental education praxis, for all ages. This study shows a slight shift in academic work as the study of an arts-based pedagogical practice, rather than the study of people or ecology.

Kulundu-Bolus (2017), resisting the instrumental assumptions of arts-based methods wrote:

“[I]n my experience it is not the tangible activities that give the work life… At best there is a depth of articulation that we step into as a result of pushing up against or immersing

ourselves into those cartographies that possibly helped us to be more honest about what really matters to us.” Her doctoral study (2020), concerned with the liberatory pedagogies engaged on the ground by change drivers in South Africa, grounded in decolonial practice, required her to problematise arts-based modes in context of the ‘performative requirements’ or constraints imposed by development paradigms. In a reflection piece on methodology she wrote: “I was aware of the baggage that comes with the constructs around creativity and what it means and what it serves in ourselves and in the world. It felt like a huge part of this

methodology was trying to re-claim and re-lease creativity” (Kulundu-Bolus, 2017, p. n.p.).

Thus, critical for emergent and care-filled pedagogies that respond to the “pedagogical underpinnings” of a prohibitive history of “development” and allow young South Africans to flourish is thus also “[a] space where there is enough stillness and quietness for people to drop into the present”. This approach to arts-based praxis as a practice of space making for

attuning to what matters to individual learners is part of how I attempted to engage arts-based methods for this research.

In addition, Kulundu-Bolus (2020) worked with song as a mode of embodied analysis and an important enactment of listening and responding back to the way her ‘co-conspirators’ had expressed themselves in relation to her inquiry. This was both a form of analysis and member checking; she explained that when she shared an academic paper with her participants, there was no response, however sharing a recording of her song with the participants released further conversation about the study. Embedded in a decolonial framing, Kulundu-Bolus research brought to the fore the counter hegemonic and critical potential of creative approaches in educational research.

Murphy (2019) engaged narrative enquiry and through story explored environmental risk

“from other species’ perspectives”. Murphy engaged story as a mode for theorising agency and its relationship to structure and meaning-making from the perspective of a penguin.

Through this imaginative centring of the penguin, Murphy engaged the concern of risk images “taking over from that which they represent” and considered the implications for environmental education in an increasingly risk prone world.

As seen above, there is a strong cohort of arts-based studies emerging in environmental education in the context of Southern Africa. Each study illustrates the ways in which arts- based modes are engaged differently depending on the context, question, theory of the study.

It is this difference that is critical to the emerging field of arts-based environmental education in Southern Africa; no single study looks identical but arts-based modes play a role of

expanding the knowledge project into articulating the unarticulated and the unarticulatable – ambiguousness of education as a social process (Nolan, 2014, p. 519).

I consider the potential for this, as well as the obstacles to emergence and spaciousness in learning processes, as an inquiry into contextually grounded critical education as a returning to learning (see Chapter 3) and their potential to disrupt stubborn framings of environmental education as dualistic or instrumental, enabling us to surface what in the end must be learned about – the messy. Thus, arts-modes are used centrally in my education practice – wearing the educator hat, but the modes within the written thesis are adopted as responsive to how the meaning-making emerged in the study.