User:Ngb19txst/final article

These are my recommendations for revising the article: Arts-based environmental education.

• Added two citations explaining the importance of the background of environmental based education and how children react to this type of learning.
• 12/4 Added three citations to early years of development paragraph to support initial statements on where arts-based environmental education went wrong and where they looked to for improvement,

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Early years of development

The historical antecedents of arts-based environmental education as it was developed in Finland go back to 1971, the year that the first European regional InSEA congress was held in that country. Finnish art educators had pooled their efforts to arrange this meeting with the overarching theme “Environmental Protection in Art Education.” Pirkko Pohjakallio is a specialist on multidisciplinary approaches to environmental education in the context of Finnish art education since the 1970s. Quoting Kauppinen (1972), she provides the rationale for the congress at the time: “One reason for making the theme was the wish to emphasize the manifoldness and diversity of our environmental problems – [they] are not purely biological, economic and social ones but also aesthetic ones, and are consequently part of art education, not only as separate subjects of study but also as integrated parts of other subjects dealing with our living environment” (Kauppinen, cited in Pohjakallio, 2007). Nicholas J. Bullot stated that art is a function used to "fulfill mental and social needs" as it is passed down from generations so others can grasp the concept of different environments. Already at that time, as Meri-Helga Mantere, notes, attention was paid to aesthetic and critical observation of the environment, both in the education of art teachers and in the curricula of Finnish schools. In the first decade, the focus of the kind of environmental education, practiced in Finland as part of art education, was on the man-made environment. Subjects were environmental pollution and the exploitation of nature. Problems of the environment were visually approached in teaching by identifying, classifying and listing the types and degrees of damages. As Mantere summarizes, “the emphasis was not so much on the environment as it was on politics”.).

Similarly, also Pirkko Pohjakallio notes that in the early 1970s, the prevailing interest in art teacher education and in visual arts first was in cultural studies and in linguistic and conceptual directions. The emphasis was on interpretations of expressions of visual communication and on investigating if these revealed ideology and relations of power. By applying instrumentalist concepts, teachers believed their approach would make good art while providing an insight to what was going on within the community's environment. It was a progressive move away from integrating art with crafts in the curriculum. Environmental education, at the time, concentrated on problems, and this was reflected in the images that were created in art classes, representing “dying nature, spoilt built environments, factories that polluted, and chaotic traffic jams”. In these times of social activism, practicing and becoming art teachers read the ecological and political pamphlets of the time. However, when they tried to address the themes and questions during art lessons, these proved so wide and difficult, that neither pupils nor teacher could envisage any solutions, leading to feelings of despair rather than empowerment. Ultimately this led to a dead end: “the use of conscious, threatening environmental scenarios and political topicalities as intellectual fuel proved to be a questionable idea”. Environmental-based arts will then make a shift to focus on positive practices and how they can be applied to the classroom, creating a focus on sustainable design.

AEE and environmental art

In his article “From Environmental Art to Environmental Education,” Timo Jokela, professor in art education at the University of Lapland, claims that the visual arts can offer elements to environmental education that are lacking in other fields. To him, “artistic-aesthetic learning” involves observation, experience and increasing awareness. Art sharpens our schemes of observation and activity, and thus facilitates bringing the phenomena to our consciousness. Art continuously creates new ways of observing. Because environmental art comes from different points of views, it is open to more interpretations rather than propaganda. Even more so, visual art can be understood as actually being a history of evolving and varying schemes of observation. Previous learning experiences dominate the way in which we subsequently observe and describe our environment, says Jokela. He underpins this claim by quoting Arnold Berleant, as follows: “environments are not physical places but perceptual ones that we collaborate in making, and it is perceptually that we determine their identity and extent”.

For Jokela, the “environmental world” and the “art world” share an educational task. Environmental art, for him, is first and foremost art that is defined by the place it is made; it is created, as it were, by the environment. Its historical antecedents go back to the 1960s (e.g. the practices of “earth art” and “land art”). The Finnish art educator goes on to list four types of exercises that illustrate how environmental art can be a method of environmental education. On the one hand, these exercises are faithful to the practice of environmental art and as such they are a basic part of art education. On the other hand, they are also methods for increasing one's sensitivity towards the environment. Educators have turned to environmental-based art to help children develop influential attitudes towards the world around them. Through drawings and visual arts, children can process their thoughts and emotions about the environment, which can be easier for them to express physically rather than verbally. In the latter sense, they are essentially environmental education. These are the categories that Jokela provides:

• Exercises on focusing your observations and perceiving them more sensitively;

• Exercises which bring forward the processes happening in nature, and help one in perceiving them more sensitively: growth and decay, the flow of water, the turning of day and night, the changes of light, the wind, etc.;

• Exercises which aim to alter set ways of viewing the environment;

• Exercises which test the scale of the environment and human “limits.” The starting point is a large amount of material and the aim is a clear change in the environment.

A binding factor in Jokela's categories is the implicit driving force: they are exercises that work towards achieving or accomplishing a pre-established goal; they “aim at.” Mantere makes an illuminating distinction between (a) seeing art as a tool of environmental education, (b) seeing art itself as a form of environmental education and (c) seeing environmental education as a form of art. Each alternative, she says, is possible and tones the content and activity in a different way.