The provocation of Gaïa: learning to pay attention in Rotary Park

How do we learn with the environments we inhabit to promote mutual flourishing? This paper argues that environmental arts practice is a key component in the pedagogical process of getting to know where we live and, through a more-than-human intersubjective exchange, enriching our response-ability to the environment. To think through and work towards this pedagogy we explore a small patch of Gaïa – the Rotary Park Rainforest Reserve in Lismore, New South Wales – via a photography and video project that contemplates didactic and interpretive signs along a short walking circuit. Crucial to our contemplation of this environmental arts project are concepts for action that we develop by putting into conversation ideas from the environmental humanities and early childhood education: progettazione, time to learn, provocation and attention. Through aesthetic immersion in, and in dialogue with the forest, these concepts help us conceptualise a regenerative curriculum and relational pedagogy that energise, amongst other things, environmental arts in-the-making.