At the Heart of Art and Earth
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At the Heart of Art and Earth An Exploration of Practices in Arts-Based Environmental Education Submitted by Jan van Boeckel For the degree of Doctor of Arts Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture 2013 Supervisors: Dr. Juha Varto Dr. Edvin Østergaard At the Heart of Art and Earth An Exploration of Practices in Arts-Based Environmental Education Jan van Boeckel 2013 Aalto University publication series Doctoral Dissertations 73/2013 School of Arts, Design and Architecture Aalto ARTS Books Helsinki books.aalto.fi © Jan van Boeckel Graphic design: Ruparo (Joyce Limburg), Amsterdam Cover design: Karin van der Molen Front cover image: Wongil Jeon Photos: Jan van Boeckel, unless indicated otherwise Typeset in: Minion Pro 10/13,25 ISBN 978-952-60-5145-1 ISBN 978-952-60-5146-8 (pdf) ISSN-L 1799-4934 ISSN 1799-4934 ISSN 1799-4942 (pdf) Printed in Unigrafia Helsinki 2013 Contents Abstract 15 Acknowledgements 17 List of figures 20 Preface 21 PART I 27 1. The last still to have known such things 28 1.1 The sustainability crisis 28 1.2 The disenchantment of the world 32 1.3 Porous self and buffered self 35 1.4 The loss of the aura 38 1.5 “We liked the projection, because it was more real” 46 1.6 Nurturing beautiful actions 51 2. Connecting art, education and the natural environment 54 2.1 The idea of the child and the artist as pure interpreters of nature 55 2.2 The dawning of environmental education 58 2.3 Being both part of nature and standing outside of it 62 2.4 Art as our antennae to the world 67 2.4.1 Creativity and receptivity 69 2.4.2 Loose parts and affordances 71 2.5 Education: part of the problem or of the solution? 75 2.5.1 Sustainable education 78 2.5.2 Peripheral vision 79 2.5.3 Education through art 81 2.6 Artmaking and nature study coming together 83 2.7 The new field of arts-based environmental education (AEE) 89 2.7.1 The roots of AEE in Finland 91 2.7.2 Practices of AEE elsewhere in the world 99 2.8 Connecting to nature: between control and surrender 104 2.8.1 Purposiveness versus open-endedness 107 2.8.2 Receptive undergoing versus active acting upon 109 2.8.3 Static patterns versus dynamic quality 110 3. Five practices of integrating artmaking in environmental education 114 3.1 Earth Education: getting the job done 115 3.2 Botanical excursion: learning about plants and seeds 118 3.3 Flow learning: creating a bridge to get reacquainted with nature 134 3.4 Palaver på grenesiska: utterances in the language of trees 137 3.5 Art-based perceptual ecology: a way of knowing the language of place 143 3.6 Discussion 158 PART II 161 4. Determining my research questions 162 4.1 A personal history: critical anthropology, self-reflexivity and the senses 162 4.2 Environmental philosophy and indigenous peoples’ world views 165 4.3 Expanding art practice into art education 166 4.4 Moving into the field of arts-based environmental education 167 4.5 Aim, objectives and research questions of this study 170 5. Research design 174 5.1 Researching lived experience: allowing the things themselves to speak 177 5.2 Practicing interpretative phenomenological analysis 181 5.3 An anthropology of experience, expression and evocation 184 5.3.1 Including the vulnerable self through autoethnography 187 5.3.2 Storytelling, narrative analysis and the aspect of time 190 5.4 An artistic approach to qualitative research? 193 5.5 A case study focus in researching AEE activities 196 5.5.1 My units of analysis 199 5.5.2 Procedures of collecting data 203 5.5.3 Methods of analysis and interpretation 205 5.5.4 Considerations on the study’s trustworthiness 207 PART III 213 6. Three case studies of facilitated AEE activities 214 6.1 Case I – Wildpainting 216 6.1.1 Seeing color with fresh eyes: the context of wildpainting 217 6.1.2 The unfolding of a wildpainting course 224 6.1.3 Example: wildpainting sessions at Kandal, Norway 231 6.1.4 Narrative account: ripping a painting apart 235 6.2 Case II – Lines of the hand 237 6.2.1 Memory and imagination: the context of lines of the hand 239 6.2.2 The structure of a lines of the hand activity 240 6.2.3 Example: lines of the hand at Schumacher College 246 6.2.4 Narrative account: making poetry for the first time 253 6.3 Case III – Clay little-me’s 255 6.3.1 Mapping the body: the context of little-me making 256 6.3.2 The structure of a little-me making activity 258 Theme: Body and inner world 260 Theme: Facilitating little-me making 268 Theme: Connecting to the environment through art 270 6.3.3 Example: making clay little-me’s on the island of Gotland, Sweden 276 6.3.4 Narrative account: being touched by artistic process 284 PART IV 287 7. Unpacking the process of an AEE activity 288 7.1 The dramatic structure of an AEE activity 289 7.1.1 Before: exposition 290 7.1.2 During: rising action – climax – falling action 292 An open attitude 293 Liminality and initiation 296 Return to normal 299 7.1.3 After: resolution 300 7.2 Discussion 302 8. Facilitating AEE activities 304 8.1 Handling open-endedness in an artmaking process 306 8.2 The tightrope between control and letting go 312 8.3 Withholding judgment, holding the space and bearing witness 314 8.4 Patterns of relationships 320 8.5 Discussion 324 9. Experiencing the natural environment through AEE 328 9.1 Discovering one’s body in a new way 330 9.2 Thinking with our hands 331 9.3 Discussion 335 9.4 Some suggestions for further study 339 PART V 343 10. Sketches of an emerging AEE pedagogy 344 10.1 AEE and sustainable education 345 10.2 Alternating foreground and background 347 10.3 The principle of indirectness 351 10.4 Emergent properties 353 10.5 The ability to inhabit uncertainty 360 10.6 Metaphor as the logic of the biological world 370 10.7 New organs of perception and unexpected outcomes 373 10.8 Thrown into wonder 378 11. Epilogue: The art of looking sideways 382 11.1 The eye of imagination 383 11.2 Science and art: second naiveté 391 11.3 A resurgence of the real? 399 Bibliography 402 The ordinary man, who lives with men, and sees Nature only in as far as she has refer- ence to himself, is seldom aware of this problematic and uncanny relationship. He sees the surface of things, which he and his like have created through the centuries, and likes to believe that the whole earth is concerned with him because a field can be cultivated, a forest thinned, a river made navigable. His eye focused almost entirely on men, sees Nature also, but incidentally, as something obvious and actual that must be exploited as much as possible. Children see Nature differently; solitary children in particular, who grow up amongst adults, foregather with her by a kind of like-mindedness and life within her, like the smaller animals, entirely at one with the happenings of forest and sky and in innocent, obvious harmony with them. But just because of this, there comes later for youth and maiden that lonely period filled with deep, trembling melancholy, when they feel unut- terably forlorn, just at the time of their physical maturing; when they feel that the things and events in Nature have no longer and their fellow men have not yet, any sympathy for them. Spring comes, even when they are sad, the roses bloom, and the nights are full of nightingales, even though they would like to die…. And, on the other hand, they see people, equally strange to them and unconcerned, with their business, their cares, their successes and joys, and they do not understand it. And finally, some of them make up their minds and join these people in order to share their work and their fate, to be use- ful, to be helpful ... whilst the others, unwilling to leave the Nature they have lost, go in pursuit of her and try now, consciously and by the use of their concentrated will, to come as near to her again as they were in their childhood without knowing it. It will be understood that the latter are artists: poets or painters, composers or architects, funda- mentally lonely spirits who, in turning to Nature, put the eternal above the transitory … and who, since they cannot persuade Nature to concern herself with them, see their task to be the understanding of Nature, so that they may take their place somewhere in her great design. And the whole of humanity comes nearer to Nature in these isolated and lonely ones. It is not the least and is, perhaps, the peculiar value of art, that it is the me- dium in which man and landscape, form and world, meet and find one another. Rainer Maria Rilke (1902/1965) Dedicated to Meri-Helga Mantere Abstract In today’s technological world, human intertwinement with the rest of nature has been severely diminished. In our digital culture, many people hardly have any direct experience of and sense of connection with “the real” of the natural world. The author assumes that when we want to find ways to mend this gap, arts-based environmental education (AEE) can play a meaningful role.