Drawing on drawing for competence in sustainability education

Sustainability is a key aspect of education today. Teaching based on theoretical knowledge is necessary but insufficient to raise awareness and promote competence. In addition, schools and teachers need to use supplementary ways, approaches, and/or methods of teaching. One such approach in science and environmental teaching is combining science and art. In this context, we explore the potential of drawing to facilitate collaborative learning and engagement with scientific and environmental issues within school and the wider community. Arts-based environmental education, that combines artistic practices with learning about the natural world, has the potential to unlock communication and co-creation, generate engagement and bind people together, and thereby reveal itself as central for community interaction and open schooling. The proposed workshop will address the topic in the context of merging art and science in a trans-disciplinary, participatory, and collaborative workshop, according to Trott et al.’s (2020) framework, with the aim of increasing the participants' preparedness for teaching environmental issues for a sustainable future in new ways. Over the last two years, we have gained valuable experiences from organizing professional learning communities in science and drawing, and these constitute the basis for this workshop. These experiences happened in the context of Yard4All, an Erasmus+ project focusing on developing innovative methodologies in order to enable the success of all learners and establish a sense of belonging. Our contribution was to develop ways of working with scientific concepts through drawing in a permaculture garden (Bichão et al., 2022). Viewed as a whole, the experiences have shown how teachers who engaged in experiential drawing workshops were able, by integrating these workshops with their place-based and pedagogical content knowledge, to develop new ways of approaching science and environmental education in their schools, and also attending to issues of inclusion. The workshop focuses on the process of drawing rather than on its products. We consider the more productive question of “what drawing is for?” rather than what “the drawing is of” (Adams, 2022), taking a performative perspective on learning. Performative perspectives highlight that learning and knowledge is created, expressed, and shared through language, gesture and other modes of expression with the help of different materials, in a process that is relational in essence (Østern et al., 2021). Attending to the assemblage of humans, materials, ideas and modes of interacting becomes prominent and sets the stage for collective exploration of new ways of acting. Arts-based environmental education that combines artistic practices with learning about the natural world, and the use of experiential reflexive workshops (Van Boeckel, 2020) constitute an important precedent for our approach. By immersing participants in a personal and interpersonal experience of drawing, we seek to spark discussions about ownership, collaboration, peer interaction and perspective. We also want to engage participants in discussions about how the design of drawing activities can serve pedagogical purposes in science, sustainability and beyond, while centering the significance of art-based approaches in raising awareness, and deepening experience, of embodied emotions. We invite the participants to embark on a drawing experience of slow looking and drawing, followed by interaction, asking the question, “what this leads us to?”. The workshop offers participants opportunities to experience drawing in science in new ways. We use drawing as a starting point to deepen individual observation and to construct knowledge about biological objects. Participants are then encouraged to interact with each other’s drawings to challenge feelings of individual ownership, prestige and prespective.