Professor Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles

Art-making has long been a feature of education and is increasingly being engaged to challenge normative perspectives in environmental education. This collaborative piece reflects on a creative pedagogy of zine-making for climate justice education based on the experiences of a zine/arts-making workshop held on Bundjalung Nation Country (so-called Kingscliff, Australia) for the annual retreat of The Sustainability, Environment, and the Arts in Education Research Centre. Members attended the workshop and collectively created a “zine” on the day. From a myriad of transdisciplinary spaces in education, the workshop was inspired by collective concerns and political commitments to climate justice education. Working in the space of de/anti-colonial and ecofeminist education, facilitators opened a space to understand, collage and create manifestos, stories, poems, and art on climate justice through zine-making. Based on collective reflection and writing together, this article contextualises and describes a pedagogical approach for climate justice education through zine-making. Artfully it exhibits our collectively created zine intermingled with reflective responses regarding the possibilities and challenges of zine-making as pedagogy for climate justice education. We recommend zine-making be put to work as a playful and creative pedagogy of generative rebellion toward climate justice with care.

This critical review explores how child and youth voices have been largely overlooked or " submerged " within existing scholarly literature on floods and education. It considers whether children's experiences might be recuperated or recovered by including intersectional, decolonial, place-based and child-centred approaches to understanding the confluence of education and climate-induced disasters. We engage a political ecology framework to review literature from a diverse range of fields, primarily disaster studies focusing on floods and education, and childhood/youth studies and education/pedagogy research focusing on children's relationships with water. We find that modernist epistemologies operating in disaster studies provide important insights about risk, vulnerability, and disaster prevention but largely overlook children's voices and experiences. Alternatively, in the childhood, youth, and pedagogical literatures, we find richly detailed studies of children and young people's relations with water, but minimal engagement with the severe consequences of climate-intensified floods. In response to these findings, we propose a research agenda calling for scholarship that can adequately theorise children's educational lives as unfolding amidst complex social, economic, cultural and political relations with floods and other catastrophic waters across local and global scales.

This paper explores the agentic artmaking of young children, specifically their photographic making and associated stories, created through a project focused on nature play in early childhood education and care settings. Engaging a participatory, cartographic methodology, the rich and multifaceted data enabled us (the research team, the educators, the children) to expand current theoretical frames through a focus on the posthuman elements of nature play and the attendant concept of childhoodnature. The posthuman elements shift the focus of nature play pedagogies and curriculum design to consider a relational conceptualisation of ‘nature’ where the child is re-origined as childhoodnature. Importantly, in this project, the children are not positioned as objects under study but rather engage as researchers by inquiring, capturing and creating data alongside the educators in their settings and at home. The study enacts agential cuts in its analysis, but also importantly in the presentation and performance of this paper by including the agentic assemblages of children’s voices through stories and images as foregrounded texts of eco-aesthetics, childhoodnature and nature play

Diffractive ethnography is a divergent methodology in educational research that seeks to enact posthuman thinking, in particular, the concept of diffraction as a methodological approach, through the application of ethnographic methods. In this paper, we consider how we can rethink the humanistic tendencies of qualitative methodologies in educational research to more authentically embrace nonhuman other and in doing so, offer new methods in undertaking ethnography diffractively. This methodological approach offers a way to undertake qualitative, educational research by drawing on conventional and rigorous ethnographic methods framed through posthuman theory that enable thinking and knowledge generation beyond the scope of current practices. We present a suite of eight principles of diffractive data entanglements informed by the diffractive ethnographic methodology and explore how these may be put to work in practice in educational research. Through demonstrating diffractive ethnography in practice, we grapple with the humanist focus of ethnographies by troubling the human as central to educational research and instead, include the entanglements of all materiality.

This article explores the potentials of intergenerational collaboration as a long-term research strategy for shifting social and political imaginaries around climate change. It brings together academics and youth researchers who began working together on the Climate Change and Me project in 2014, along with colleagues who joined them for a public panel, book launch and exhibition ten years later. Climate Change and Me was the first large-scale study of climate change education applying a child- and youth-framed methodology, and has led to numerous exhibitions, curriculum resources, digital platforms, and publications co-created with children and young people. This article gives voice to young people's reflections on the impact of their involvement with this project a decade on, drawing on the transcript of a public panel conversation at the Design Hub Gallery in Naarm (Melbourne). It explores how young people's early experiences as child researchers have intersected with political, social and educational change across time, while opening new conversations with intergenerational colleagues working in related areas of climate justice education, activism and research.

This paper explores one element of a multi-faceted project that sought to investigate nature play in early childhood, namely the creation and co-creation of visual diaries by educators, children and academics. The methodology was participatory cartography, which involved the creation of visual and verbal mappings of nature play pedagogies by early childhood educators and academics, as well as visual mappings of nature play experiences by 4-5-year-old children. The visual diary supported, articulated, portrayed and documented the implementation of nature play pedagogies (by the educators), the experiences of nature play (by the children) and the analysis of data (by the academics). This paper explores this methodological slice of the project. It asserts that the visual diary is a useful, arousing and potentially aesthetic inquiry, documentary and resource apparatus for educators, enabling collaborative artmaking moments with children.

The rise in the number of young people disengaged from mainstream schooling is reaching critical proportions. This paper explores a child‐framed participatory inquiry known as The Walking A/r/tography Project, which sought to challenge, empower and engage youth at risk in one Special Assistance Secondary School in Southeast Queensland through a/r/tographic mappings of place and subsequent critical and creative experiences in the classroom studio. The young people were invited to the project as researchers, who collected, generated and analysed data, resulting in agentic activist positionings. Extensive literature supports the benefits of an Arts‐rich environment, which can enable impactful social justice learnings and a deep awareness of social and political activism, particularly when they are experienced through contemporary artworks and artmaking practices. Such experiences and knowings can tie learning in, through and with the Arts directly to educational activism, where student voice and agency are foregrounded for the purposes of empowerment and disruptive, transformational learning. The findings of this study assert that young people at risk can co‐create and reimagine their educational experiences to engage in schooling more positively as Artivists.

This visual essay curates an exhibition of photographic data from a project with children about Landcare, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to managing environmental issues in local communities across Australia. The project sought to empower children to engage with Landcare Reserves through participatory arts-based research to map their awareness of and participation in local Landcare Reserve sites. This visual essay recognizes the images as agentic entities, with the power to activate the gaze beyond the boundaries of this project as embedded yet transcendent from it whilst simultaneously acknowledging the ‘failing’ agency of the sensing body of the camera.