Broad and complex ideas about sustainability can be communicated through the Arts. Australian curriculum documents support the integration of Arts education with education for sustainability. Responding to artworks as a viewer is a key aspect of Arts education in Australian schools. Chris Jordan is a US artist whose online media galleries communicate ideas about environmental and social justice themes. This paper reports interview data from a larger project exploring children’s responses to Chris Jordan’s artworks. Conversations were held with 28 children aged between 4 and 12 as they navigated Jordan’s website to explore the images they encountered. Data relating to SDG14: Life below water were selected for the specific focus of this paper. Thematic analysis of the data revealed five themes: connections to prior experience and knowledge, links with local contexts and places, emotional engagement with the images, solutions and action-taking and ideas related to post-humanism and the human-nature binary. These findings endorse the power of Arts-based experiences for enhancing education for sustainability in primary schools and early childhood contexts.

Cultures that recognise the many forces and memories held in landscape can make important contributions to climate emergency. We argue there is another group which has knowledge to call upon; young people growing up in post-industrial places. In this paper, we draw on over 10 years of research with young people to speculate about the potential of outsider knowledge as the basis for emplaced activism as an original and significantly new approach to environmental education. The first part of the paper presents the argument, concepts and methodology for thinking about environments as lived experience. Next we introduce the place where capitalist and industrial forces are knotted with the distinctive histories of post-industrial communities. Place is explored through stories of the geological and historical legacies of south Wale’s valleys in sections titled: Earth Matters; Industrial Matters; Affective Matters and Matters of Decline. Next, three lines of flight that took off in creative workshops with young people: Troubled Landscapes, Embodied Landscape and Activist Landscapes are presented. Finally, we set out a new approach to environmental education and research by asking what if environmental activism starts from young people’s troubled experiences of living in marginal and forgotten places?

It is generally acknowledged that alternative strategies are required to enable children with disability to access storytelling activities. In this study, we sought to analyse the benefits of one such strategy: an arts-based multisensory story and rhyme program delivered to children with Down syndrome and autism spectrum disorder. In order to determine the engagement and impact of the program on the participants, data were collected through a series of multisensory session observations, focus group interviews with parents of participants, and interviews with performing artists delivering the program. The findings of this study revealed multiple benefits of using sensory stimuli to engage children with disability in storytelling processes, including increased engagement, focus, and interaction with other children and family members. The performing artists used their knowledge and skills to create an engaging environment that was responsive to the children’s needs. It was observed that language development could be further enhanced by integrating written text into the performance and increasing the use of nonverbal communication methods. Further, the engagement of siblings without disability in this program suggested that it could be developed to be inclusive of children with and without disability.

Drawing on posthumanist and new materialism theorising, we take the concept of resonance for an a/r/tographic ‘walk’ to know, be and do differently, to challenge human-centric separatist ways that have resulted in our current socioecological crises. Beginning with Ingold’s knotty thinking, we identify the notion of resonance as a node for exploring and thinking about interactions in the world. Guided by Barad’s proposition of entangling ethico-onto-epistemic ways, our a/r/tographic thought experiments find resonances that echo through bodies, through connections as nature, through deep-time and modern spaces to notice and attend to intraactions within the ecological collective. Through art-full, thought-full scholartistic enquiry, we explore diffractive encounters to consider resonance as a conceptual tool for tuning into and harmonising with the entanglements of body–mind–space–time–matter. We pose this exploration of resonance as the start of a knotty theory conversation for shifting into a new ‘common world’ knowing, being and doing.

Environmental educators remain challenged by how to encourage people to make connections between environmental quality and human development in a way that is socially just and equitable for all living things. This article explores links between performance-based learning and environmental education pedagogy as one way to address this challenge. Sixteen children (8–10 years) from an Auckland primary school worked with a performance artist to present Lookout, an intimate performance by a child for an adult. Its intent was to juxtapose people’s different backgrounds, experiences and ages in a two-way communication of their view of Auckland City through an environmental lens encompassing past, present and future, while surveying the city from a vantage point. Analysis of data from focus groups with the children and interviews with their parents (also participants) showed that the Lookout process led to children developing a deeper understanding of Auckland City’s issues, a stronger sense of connection to their city, an understanding of the future, and feelings of empowerment. However, their parents’ learning was more tenuous. Three key elements to the success of Lookout for learning are identified, and it is proposed that these could be used when developing performance-based environmental education programs.

The co-authors, collaborators in garden-based teacher education, question the hegemony of grids in Western time, space and relationship structures in education, while also delving into our own complicity and entanglement with these grids. We ask: (1) Can we reject the grid in environmental education and in garden-based learning when it is an intimate part of our way of being in the world? (2) Can we be teachers who are at once within and not-within the regime of the Western Enlightenment/Modernist grid? (3) How can we take a ludic approach to the grid? Can we ‘swing’ and ‘parkour’ the strict grid of schooling? Pleasures and failures of the grid and experiences of alternatives to the grid are documented and exemplified through stories from garden-based teacher education. Considering parallels with principles of the alter-global movement and with the performative, embodied practices of swing dance, parkour and clowning, we meditate on becoming ecological teachers together beside the grid — neither within nor without it, but with a deep awareness of its presence and structure. In uncertain, unchanging times, we want to take a playful, artistic approach to the old certainties and structures, swinging and parkouring from them rather than accepting or rejecting binary formulations.

Arts education has been part of the United States K-12 educational system for over a century. However, recent administrative policy decisions addressed the economic bottom line and the 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, and complied with the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 (U.S. Department of Education, 2001). These decisions resulted in standardisation of both core curricula and testing, leaving arts programs to function in a diminished capacity, curtailing both individuality and creative thinking. This study unpacks the role of the arts as change agents with the ability to: address current discourse; question ideologies and culture; convey complex problems in artistic form; engage the viewer in aesthetics; provide a perspective not found in regimented thinking; and empower creative problem solvers. This work also highlights the role of eco-art as a medium for addressing complex environmental challenges. The study also empirically examines, through a self-report survey, K-12 arts educators’ perceptions of integrating eco-arts into curricula. Findings revealed respondents’ desire to integrate eco-arts into the arts curricula and identified the most significantly perceived barriers to integration, as well as the role of policy on practicality. The authors also identify the study's limitations and recommend areas for future research.