Art, Education, and Climate Change: Musings on a Poetic Pedagogy
Alexandra Olsvik, PhD Student
University of Alberta
Failure to engage.
While teaching during the pandemic at an inner-city school, I asked a group of students in my secondary English class how they felt about climate change and whether it was a topic that generally came up in conversation with friends or family. As possible prompts, I shared a few images of art installations, poems, headlines, and photographs. Some of these prompts were my own experiments, either created alongside my students or peers in graduate classes, including the image above. Though the collage exemplifies a mode of expression I was not particularly confident using, if I was asking my students to explore various methods and sit with their discomfort, exposing my own discomfort while talking through my process might offer possible points of entry.
Overwhelming, students’ responses revolved around the notion that climate change was an unimaginable and abstract phenomenon, which they felt did not affect their lives directly. Instead, they tended to point to more immediate concerns — such as unemployed parents, geographically distant family members, hunger, and navigating adolescent friendships. Side-by-side, the personal and the global appeared ever more disjointed, though the casual vulnerability layered between their words gave me pause.
In pursuit of other answers, I asked them whether they remembered a day in late spring, a few years ago, when the smoke from forest fires migrated with winds from the south, north, and west until it became so thick it hid the sun. Driving to work, I remember listening to the radio announcers in disbelief, as if this were nothing, as if this were completely commonplace. We are instructed to keep all the windows shut despite the heat; students were not allowed outside for recess or lunch. Though alarmingly strange less than a decade ago, these events, I know, are becoming increasingly commonplace.
As the students shrugged, I gathered that this event, significant in my memory, was a half-remembered, blurry day in elementary school during which nothing particularly significant occurred. Though I noticed their attention shifting elsewhere, I awkwardly pursued the conversation. I wanted them to remember–to tell me their fears, to confide in me, to share this memory — and confect some meaning from our collective scraps. But why, afterall, should they? As I questioned, eyes glanced toward the door, window, and friends wandering by. They didn’t seem to want to talk more about this anymore, if at all, and perhaps only formulating responses because I was their teacher and had put them on the spot. Frustrated and annoyed, I wondered about their reticence. Why didn’t they care?
Preparing supper, I complained to my partner, detailing the events of the day, but an uneasiness began circling through my chest and limbs, interrupting dreams, and lingering into the morning as I brushed my teeth. I had failed to engage them. Why didn’t it work?
A performance in which we all partake.
Despite increasing pressures to adhere to standardized assessment forms, when bringing difficult texts and subject matter into the classroom, I find myself ever more attracted to using texts and activities that diverge from linear forms of writing. I think of these acts as poetic, inviting speculation and imagination while acknowledging the limitations of language that we come up against when we grapple with the affective rather than analytical dimension of texts (Zwicky, 2008).
Transforming the space of the classroom into a gallery installation, where students share and respond to one another’s poetic creations, centers their voices both as creators and critics and generates rich dialogue. It is a performance in which we all partake. Rather than a spectator, positioned remotely outside of the frame, I shrug off the mantle of “the teacher” to become an active participant, offering up my creations, displaying my own skill-less-ness for student critique. A litany of anxious voices — certain mentors, teachers more seasoned than me, runs through my head: “you can’t show them your weaknesses,” “nice, that’s your first mistake,” “don’t give them your authority.” But then I think of the teachers who most influenced me, both as a student and professionally as colleagues, whose compassion, intelligence, and care were integral to the sense of community and relationships they were able to build — even in spaces hostile to such.
What at first seems uncomfortable begins to generate a different kind of relation between myself and the students, as I see past, present, and future interweave. In my notebook, I collect disparate thoughts, pulled together by threads of memory, not as linear but associatively.
Toward non-linear pedagogy.
- Curating classroom space as collective art-making unsettles traditional educational dynamics. Shifting from teacher to participant opens the possibility to engage in creative play, exploring my own skill-less-ness as I feel — at least temporarily — released from expectations of expertise and mastery.
- Alongside students, teachers might challenge disjunctions between lived experience and abstract or difficult topics such as climate change through non-linear, poetic modes of expression, emphasizing the “juxtaposition of resonant particulars” (Zwicky, 2013) as a method that draws together personal experience with global issues.
- A pedagogical shift toward poetic expression and caring, responsive classroom environments diverges from conceptualizations of “the good life” as rooted in consumerist ideals, rather, underscoring relationality and care (Berlant, 2011).
- Challenging teachers and students to reconsider “business as usual” ways of thinking and engaging with each other and the world involves risk–such as displaying and confronting skill-less-ness and learning to tolerate continuous uncertainties.
- Inviting personal engagement with emotional and affective dimensions of difficult topics through poetic texts may foster a classroom space that challenges us to reconsider the roles in ongoing narratives of and beyond environmental degradation.
References
Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press.
Zwicky, J. (2008). Lyric realism: Nature poetry, silence, and ontology. The Malahat Review (165). 85–91.
Zwicky, J. (2013). What is lyric philosophy: An introduction. Common Knowledge, 20(1). 14–27.
