Creative Approaches to Climate and Peace Education: An Educator's Guide to Using Storytelling and Art
Publisher: Georg Eckert Institute
Author(s): Julia Bentz
Date: 2023
Topics: Programming
Creative Approaches to Climate and Peace Education shows how creative methods involving stories and art can help educators to address the challenging topics of climate change and peace via new channels that inspire their learners and underline the role of each individual, with their specific talents and worldviews, in engaging with the crucial questions of this generation. It aims to provide an inspiring guide for teachers, practitioners and lecturers offering prompts and themes for their workshops and classes.
Where climate change and human conflict meet, there is a particular potential for methods beyond language and traditional classroom methods to offer students new channels of engagement. This is because imagining peace and the more-than-human world both require a space free of the everyday binary – and often hierarchical – categories in which we have traditionally been taught to think (them/us, mine/yours, having/not having, man/nature, and so on). It is also because similar concepts of structural violence are at the heart of how we interact with nature as well as with our fellow humans. Storytelling and art are two approaches that provide a space in which these categories can be transcended.
Until relatively recently in human history, storytelling helped to render wisdom understandable, transmissible and memorable. Storytelling offers a unique channel through which to access a mindset in which climate awareness and peace work share a cognitive and creative space. Similarly, art is a powerful means of engagement because it allows for multiple meanings and interpretations of the topics it depicts, opening up ambiguities, ambivalences, contradictions, and sometimes chaotic dimensions of reality beyond the confines of language.
This book fills a gap in the market in focusing on these methods specifically at the intersection of climate and peace education. While there is an abundance of work on storytelling and art methods in the classroom, the specific link to the philosophical mindset in which imagining peace and imagining the more-than-human overlap has not yet been explored via these approaches. The challenging times in which we live render filling this gap all the more urgent. This book aims to provide readers with a resource that may inspire their teaching and community engagement, to be used in schools and other learning environments such as university courses and community workshops.