Arts pedagogies for education for sustainable development (ESD)

Abstract

Arts pedagogies play a substantial role in making learning more vibrant as they develop students’ creative potential. Teaching through the arts renders learning experiential, promoting embodied deeper learning and an aesthetic awareness. Though in early years education, an arts pedagogy is promoted and imagination and expressivity are nurtured to varying extents, depending on the school, such artistic expression opportunities seem to diminish, if not disappear, from the curriculum as the arts become more and more marginalised through primary and secondary education. The main reason for this is that schools focus on preparing students for stantardised testing on a narrowed curriculum that often does not include the arts. Yet research shows that, once out of school, the skills required for the workplace are those of communication, critical thinking, collaboration, problem solving, creativity, and the ability to explore issues from multiple perspectives, to be comfortable with ambiguity, to draw connections and to read visual culture; these are precisely the skills that the arts address. This chapter presents ways how arts processes can engage students in collectively exploring key issues around sustainability in an experiential way. Drama, as a multimodal artform, has the capacity to integrate the visual arts, music and movement in pedagogical processes that help unlock students’ creative potential making space for the imagination, improvisation, critical thought, embodied learning, empathy and compassion as students collaborate and work together. Through this collaborative art form, students learn how to effectively open up issues, express their ideas and feelings through verbal and physical language, space, symbol and metaphor. Drama strategies enable participants to ‘see anew, understand (them)selves more fully, expand (their) thinking, and understand how that thinking has been shaped by (their) social positions’ . The chapter offers drama-based structures and pedagogies Art teachers can adopt in embedding sustainability in their teaching of Art to further challenge students to come up with alternative ways of being, possible solutions, better futures, all of which benefit the student, group cohesion, their community and ultimately society at large.