Dr Marilyn Ahearn

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 article explores the extent students’ environmental values are informed through a socioecological learning framework when a deep-time universe hi/story is integrated with environmental education and local cultural origins in the primary school curriculum. The research concept grew from teacher observations that students addressed sustainability from a fragmented action approach, rather than incorporating a lifelong learning and wider worldview of past, present and possible future environmental changes. The research was conducted with 8–9-year-old students during a 17-week transdisciplinary pedagogical intervention, adapted for primary-aged students, from an educational evidence-based, online Big History Project , empowering young learners to engage in transformative thinking and to add their voices as co-researchers. Additional data was collected from the same co-researcher and student cohort two years later. The research findings over the two years remain significant, where students continued to discuss the environment and sustainability in the context of a child-framed deep learning pedagogy framework of the changing 13.8-billion-year universe story. If this original research is to remain significant, further research and programming need to be undertaken with students and educators, to ensure that the value of deep-time hi/story is embedded at all levels of the education continuum, including primary-aged students.

Drawing on posthumanist and new materialism theorising, we take the concept of resonance for an a/r/tographic ‘walk’ to know, be and do differently, to challenge human-centric separatist ways that have resulted in our current socioecological crises. Beginning with Ingold’s knotty thinking, we identify the notion of resonance as a node for exploring and thinking about interactions in the world. Guided by Barad’s proposition of entangling ethico-onto-epistemic ways, our a/r/tographic thought experiments find resonances that echo through bodies, through connections as nature, through deep-time and modern spaces to notice and attend to intraactions within the ecological collective. Through art-full, thought-full scholartistic enquiry, we explore diffractive encounters to consider resonance as a conceptual tool for tuning into and harmonising with the entanglements of body–mind–space–time–matter. We pose this exploration of resonance as the start of a knotty theory conversation for shifting into a new ‘common world’ knowing, being and doing.

This article is based on a workshop I presented at the 2018 Big History International Conference in Philadelphia, where I addressed findings from my recently completed PhD thesis: An Tair-seach (threshold): An exploration of connecting the emerging scientific story of the universe to authentic Catholic primary school environmental education. My research investigated the extent to which students’ environmental values could be informed through integrating story, values, environmental education, personal cultural origins, and Big History into the primary school curriculum. The methodology focused on employing Big History as a vehicle to achieve a cohe-sive, wider worldview for young learners, empowering them to engage in transformative think-ing for the future. Semi-structured interviews were conducted along with a 17-week Big History pedagogical program with 8-9 year old students and their teacher. Qualitative analysis of these interviews indicated that primary students1 could successfully access a shared, evidence-based and flexible narrative. Five interdependent themes emerged: ‘shared vocabulary and knowledge of Big History’ were foundational in allowing students to engage in meaningful discussions, alongside their knowledge of their ‘local cultural origin stories,’ ‘local school values,’ ‘transdisciplinary learning’ and ‘environmental values within socioecological learning.’ The find-ings have wider implications for the Big History collective, providing evidence that Big History is accessible and relevant to primary students within a transdisciplinary based and critical in-quiry-learning structure.